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Culture & Methods

Adaptable or Predictable? Strive for Both – Be Predictably Adaptable!

Our efforts to improve software development face the question of what to focus on. Should we govern for predictability without concern of value, maximizing cost-efficiency without concern for end-to-end responsiveness? Or maybe do the opposite and govern for value over predictability, focus on responsiveness over cost efficiency? What we really need is to be predictably adaptable.

Dimitar Bakardzhiev
on Sep 06, 2016
Culture & Methods

Stop Measuring Turn Around Time

Are you patting yourself on the back for remarkable turn around times while simultaneously neglecting your customers? It's tempting to think that timeliness matters when in fact it rarely does. Stop measuring turn around time and start learning what matters to customers.

Wes Higbee
on Aug 04, 2016
Culture & Methods

Don't Break Your Silos - Push Out the Silo Mentality

Organizational silos are a serious hurdle for many companies out there. They may cause a wide variety of problems if not dealt with accordingly. Silos may not need to be broken if you manage to push out the mentality that comes with them by creating ventilators. The first step towards dealing with the silos is to learn more about them and familiarize yourself with the best practices against them.

Alexander Novkov
on Jul 13, 2016
Culture & Methods

A Letter to the Manager: Release the Power of Your Agile Teams

Agile is both simple and hard – and success depends on managers creating a suitable environment for their teams. Here a coach’s experiences from several agile transformations are made into concrete recommendations for strengthening agile teams. To create and sustain high-performing agile teams, these points are fundamental.

Johan Dahlbäck
on Jun 27, 2016
Culture & Methods

Q&A with Shawn Callahan on Putting Stories to Work

The book Putting Stories to Work by Shawn Callahan provides a process with a practical approach to master business storytelling; a leadership skill that helps to achieve results. It contains many stories that can help you to use storytelling for business communication and culture change.

Ben Linders
on May 10, 2016
Culture & Methods

Test Management Revisited

The concept of test management sits awkwardly in agile, mostly because it’s a construct derived from the time when testing was a post-development phase, performed by independent testing teams. Agile, with its focus on cross functional teams, has sounded the death knell for many test managers. While test management is largely irrelevant in agile, there is still a desperate need for test leadership.

Anne-Marie Charrett
on Apr 03, 2016
Culture & Methods

Voys Learns to Play the Holacracy Game

Holacracy removes power from a management hierarchy and distributes it across teams that have a clear set of roles, responsibilities, and expectations. This new organizational system with no managers or titles is often misunderstood. Learn about holacracy from the Dutch telecom company Voys who implemented this new way of running organizations.

Yanto Hesseling
on Mar 27, 2016
Culture & Methods

Connect Agile Teams to Organizational Hierarchy: A Sociocratic Solution

Many agile teams suffer from the mismatch of agile and organizational leadership with the latter being reflected by the organizational hierarchy. This article suggests using sociocracy as a solution that leaves the hierarchies in place yet still allows teams to act in an agile way.

Pieter van der Meché Jutta Eckstein
on Dec 27, 2015
Culture & Methods

The CTO’s New Innovation Playbook

In a time of rapid business and technological change, CTOs and other technology leaders are increasingly looking to new methods to drive their digital technology agendas. Creating a new innovation playbook for innovation requires an understanding of the widening disjuncture that disconnects corporate R&D spending from innovation - while also harnessing the rise of new “innovation enablers.”

Charles Green
on Oct 28, 2015
Culture & Methods

Q&A on Kanban Change Leadership

In the book Kanban Change Leadership Klaus Leopold and Sigi Kaltenecker explore how Kanban can be deployed to get change done in organizations and to build a culture of continuous improvement. An interview on doing change in small steps, solving problems, using WIP limits, priorities and classes of service in Kanban, using the Theory of Constraints with Kanban, and getting results with Kanban.

Ben Linders
on Aug 27, 2015
The Pitfalls that You Should Always Avoid when Implementing Agile

Moving from traditional project management to agile is a paradigm shift. From push to pull systems from a control-and-command culture to a trust culture where authority is delegated. A good structure with some control mechanisms will most likely help you get the wanted results quicker. This article discusses the role that management plays in organizations that have decided to adopt agile.

Annette Vendelbo
on Jun 27, 2015
Dealing with Politics in Agile or Lean Teams

InfoQ interviewed Katharine Kirk about how agile or lean can increase politics and how she combines ideas from agile and lean with eastern and tribal philosophy to deal with people issues that arise. InfoQ also asked her to give a different perspective and practical advice for addressing and navigating politics in organizations.

Ben Linders
on May 25, 2015