InfoQ Homepage Stories & Case Studies Content on InfoQ
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Experiments with Blockchain at Dutch Railways
Testers will sooner or later be asked to test IT-solutions that incorporate blockchain technology. Software development is different for blockchain-based applications; blockchain impacts the way we are used to working, said Sanne Visser, a software tester at Dutch Railways. She spoke about how professionals can deal with blockchain-based software at European Women in Tech.
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Adding Agile to Lean at Toyota Connected
Adding agility to Lean Product Development enabled Toyota Connected to deliver faster, with higher quality, and reduced costs. Nigel Thurlow presented “Lean is NOT enough” at Lean Digital Summit 2018 where he showed how they embraced agile for colocated teams and outsourcing, and how portfolio planning evolved to an executive prioritization model to increase business agility.
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Lean and Agile Transformation at Banco BPI
After adopting Scrum, Banco BPI came to lean in an iterative way, by doing things that made sense to them in their context. Their goal is to bring parties closer together to optimise the whole system and avoid micro-optimisations. Your own context and needs must guide you, don't wait to have the perfect answer, but iterate relentlessly and take small steps is what they learned.
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Enterprise Agility in the Norwegian Government
The Norwegian Labor and Welfare Directorate wanted to transform their IT department to be able to deliver value continuously and deliver faster, in line with users' ever-increasing expectations. Torill Iversen, director, and Kjell Tore Guttormsen, team lead, spoke about how they went from bureaucracy to enterprise agility at the Atlassian Summit Europe 2018.
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What Can We Learn from the Digital Natives Using Lean
Fabrice Bernhard, co-founder and CEO of Theodo UK, presented "what lean can learn from digital natives" at Lean Digital Summit 2018. Digital natives are familiar with the lean startup and agile practices. They go further by combining Agile with the Toyota Production System which enables them to experiment with ideas, spread innovations, and scale fast.
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Doubling Delivery Without Multiplying Staff, Using Lean Principles
Lean tools can help to improve productivity and fulfil customer commitments. At Keepeek, techniques like pull flow, PDCA, and Red Bin are used to analyse discrepancies. Improvements are prioritised on customer impact. As a result, their throughput increased significantly, customer satisfaction went up, and their NPS improved.
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Think of Software as a Force for Good, Using Teal and Agile
A teal organisation set its horizon by defining its higher purpose and describing why it exists. Individuals join the company because of the value it creates for the world, and work freely towards a specific purpose. A teal and agile company has a culture of complete openness, transparency and mutual trust; everyone should feel safe and encouraged to share ideas, and make mistakes, without fear.
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Enabling Individual Growth for Business Value at Tangible
When a company starts to grow, working together is not enough for new people to learn the culture. For competence growth and for developing their culture, Tangible organizes workshops, internal days of knowledge exchange, hosted events and training, and evening activities, and assigns mentors for new people. This helps them to align individual values and intentions with the corporate vision.
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Organizational Refactoring at Mango
To increase agility, companies can descale themselves into value centers in charge of a business strategic initiative, with end-to-end responsibility and with full access to the information regarding customer needs. You need to create spaces where people can cross-collaborate and learn, using for instance self-organized improvement circles, Communities of Practice or an internal Open Source model.
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Building the Roadmap for Portfolio for Jira
When your product backlog is a prioritized list of problems instead of a list of features, it becomes easier to respond to change; you don’t have to commit early to delivering features and can use new technology when it becomes available. Visualizing your roadmap and regularly taking in new information and using it to reassess your roadmap helps to keep you agile.
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Getting More Work Done in Fewer Working Hours
When Jason Lengstorf’s body was actively falling apart due of the way he was working, he decided to limit his computer usage and create pockets of high-focus effort. Working fewer hours prevents you from becoming overtired or unfocused. We need to treat downtime with the same level of care as we treat our uptime, using breaks to make creative connections, recharge, and to remember why we work.
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Sustainable Software with Agile
Sustainable software enables you to deliver changes to the customer more quickly with a lower likelihood of bugs, decrease of the total cost of ownership of applications, and increase business agility. It’s possible to verify the sustainability of software using a combination of automated analysis of source code, expert review of technical artifacts, and comparison with benchmark data.
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Becoming an Agile Company
Organizations have to give up much of their hierarchy and micro-management to become an agile company: totally changing the management model instead of doing small incremental changes which drown in the traditional bureaucratic structure. They need to stop doing things that inhibit agility, and focus on customer orientation, intrinsic motivation; leadership based on trust and less formal planning.
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Agile and the Use of Paradoxes
Paradoxes support agile transformations; they make you stop, think, and discuss by using a shared language. They also help to show empathy and provide a way forward. VIVAT, a Dutch insurance company, uses paradoxes in training and everyday work to drive their agile transformation.
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Supporting Digital Leadership with Agile
Digitization can no longer be stopped; with customers who increasingly act digitally and mobile it is important to show digital leadership. IT is taking over traditional services and is leading the way for new digital connected products. An organization applied agile to change the way teams are funded and to establish teams of owners who take responsibility to put good products in the market.