InfoQ Homepage Teamwork Content on InfoQ
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Finding Talented People and Building Sustainable Teams
Meetups, hackathons and conferences are fantastic opportunities to promote your company's work and ethos and meet talented people. You can learn a lot more about a person if you let them drive the conversation initially in a job interview. Having room to grow professionally and psychological safety are key to building sustainable teams, and establish a collaborative, cohesive engineering culture.
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Cultivating Psychological Safety
When we’re feeling stressed, threatened, or unsafe, it becomes harder to think creatively, work collaboratively, and solve problems. You can cultivate a culture of safety by letting folks know that it’s safe to make mistakes, by listening for real understanding, and by practicing mindfulness.
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Jeff Patton on Fixing Agile Product Ownership
At the recent Agile India conference, Jeff Patton gave a keynote talk in which he challenged the way agile development approaches Product Ownership. He holds that product management is a discipline which was around before the Scrum term Product Owner was coined, and the way it has been applied in most agile organisations is, at best, a watered-down approach and real product management is needed.
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Dealing with the Broken Human Machine: How to Create High-Performing Teams
To really progress in developing software and build anything at a scale, you have to examine your blind spots and learn to deal with people. The culture we build is important: the difference between a high performing engineering team and a low performing one is orders of magnitude in terms of productivity and quality. Focusing on how we do things is as important as what we’re doing.
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Data-Driven Thinking for Continuous Improvement
Organizations need an objective way to measure performance and tie actions back to business outcomes to improve continuously. Avvo uses a data-driven decision framework with an autonomous team model and a practice of retrospectives to help people make better decisions and proposals for continuous improvement.
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Should Teams Decouple Cadences?
Recently a Twitter discussion took place about allowing teams to have multiple cadences, for instance by using a different rhythm for planning the work and for learning and improving. Decoupling cadences gives teams room to explore and learn what works best for them; it can lead to more adaptability and autonomy and better outcomes.
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Game Changers for Organizations
We want to approach strategy using choices, direction, and iterative experiments, establish a growth mindset in organizations, and work towards a common purpose or goal with leaders and teams sharing the same values, principles, and mindset; these are some of the game changers for organizations to become more innovative, deliver faster and better, and have happier and more engaged employees.
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The Toyota Way at Codeweavers
Codeweavers combines the Toyota way with extreme programming and continuous delivery in development and support to do small, frequent releases. The advice to apply the Toyota way is to start with the books, understand the philosophy, and begin teaching it to others.
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Experimenting with Self-Organisation
Self-organising teams are much more effective, engaged and happier. Not everyone is comfortable with self-organising; people are conditioned to do what they are told and mainly to work on their own. You need modern leadership approaches like intent-based leadership, sociocracy, and holacracy, to enable self-organising teams.
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How Blogging Empowers Agile Teams
Moving the thinking and decisions a team makes from people’s inboxes onto a blog can make it accessible to all, findable in the future, and referenceable by everyone. Instead of writing documentation, you can use blogumentation to transfer knowledge and document the history of projects that provide context to the code.
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How Personality Matters in Software Development
Leaders have to orchestrate diverse contributions from individuals with different personalities to build great teams. Team members might decide to act out of character and engage in behaviour outside their comfort zone to advance the team goal. To reduce the risk of burning out or compromising physical health, there should be restorative niches in which they can be their natural selves again.
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Agile 2017 Keynote: Creating Leadership and Engagement at Every Level
At the recent Agile 2017 conference in Orlando, David Marquet, retired Navy captain and author of best selling book “Turn The Ship Around!” gave an entertaining keynote on intent-based leadership.
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What a High Performing Team Looks Like and How to Create One
High performing is a team property, a temporary state which needs attention if teams want to keep on performing well. Things you can do to build a high performing team include creating safety, investing in developing collaboration skills, and giving peer-to-peer feedback.
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First Annual Retrospective Report Published
The First Annual Retrospective Report provides a deeper understanding of how retrospectives are used in the real world. The results indicate that retrospectives lead to improved team communication and productivity and help to create an environment of trust. Major challenges are that topics discussed cannot be solved by the team and people do not feel comfortable speaking up.
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QCon New York Day 1 – High Velocity Development Teams Track Summary
QCon New York was heeled this week. This is a summary of the key messages from the opening keynote and from the High Velocity Development Teams track.