This post was adapted from episode 123 of the Troubleshooting Agile podcast with Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel. We’re continuing with our tour through Agile Conversations and we’re up to the fear conversation. That’s when I remember enjoying writing some of the stories. And fear is really important because it’s so foundational. I consider this the original sin of unproductive conversations, in a sense. It’s kind of the root of why our conversations so often go astray. In the … [Read more...]
The Five Ideals of DevOps
In The Phoenix Project, we introduced the Three Ways underpinning DevOps. In my follow-up book, The Unicorn Project, I revisit Parts Unlimited and describe my learnings through the Five Ideals. The First Ideal: Locality and Simplicity The Second Ideal: Focus, Flow, and Joy The Third Ideal: Improvement of Daily Work The Fourth Ideal: Psychological Safety The Fifth Ideal: Customer Focus These are five topics that I’ve constantly gravitated toward over the last decade, and I continually seek to … [Read more...]
Trust and Test Driven-Development for People
This post was adapted from Episode 122 of the Troubleshooting Agile Podcast. This is number three in our series as we go through our new book, Agile Conversations. We’re up to Chapter Three and this chapter’s all about trust. One of the things we were having a challenge with was finding something new to say about trust, because we’ve said so much about it. You can listen and read to some of our past thoughts on trust here: The First Thing to Build is Trust Be Predictable to Build … [Read more...]
Unlock Your Enterprise’s Digital Transformation by Changing Your Relationship with Technologists
Adapted from War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age by Mark Schwartz. Leaders of digital transformations often look around their organizations and see heads nodding. Everyone seems to agree that change is needed to survive in the digital age. Everyone understands that it’s urgent and that there is a risk of being disrupted if the company doesn’t transform quickly enough. Capital markets are demanding growth and innovation, while the board … [Read more...]
Conversations: How to Improve and Why You Won’t
This post was adapted from Episode 121 of the Troubleshooting Agile Podcast. Continuing our tour of our new book Agile Conversations, we come to our chapter on the foundational method for conversational analysis, the Four Rs. We briefly explain the value of conversational analysis, and share our observation that even highly motivated people who know how much it can help their agile teams find it hard to actually pull out a piece of paper and do an analysis. The reasons for this are very … [Read more...]
Software Factory to Feature Factory
This post was adapted from Episode 120 of the Troubleshooting Agile Podcast. The Taylorist Mindset and its Outcomes In the Taylorist mindset, management is there to debug the machine of the company. The workers are interchangeable parts. And the job of management is to fine tune the machine and monitor all of the parts to make sure they’re compliant and doing what they’re told. There is a role for motivation here. But the only motivation is negative. Just make sure that people know … [Read more...]
Managing an Evolving Transformation—A Scorecard Approach
Mirco Hering is the author of DevOps for the Modern Enterprise. This blog post was originally published on NotAFactoryAnymore.com. I have been speaking over the last couple of years about the nature of DevOps and Agile transformations. It is in my view not possible to manage them with a simple As-Is To-Be approach as your knowledge of your As-Is situation is usually incomplete and the possible To-Be state keeps evolving. You will need to be flexible in your approach and need to use agile … [Read more...]
Undoing IT Silos: How the “Walled Garden” Anti-Pattern Gets Started
Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick are the authors of Agile Conversations. This is an excerpt from their recent article in MIT Sloan Management Review, Solving the Problem of Siloed IT in Organizations. Learn more at ConversationalTransformation.com. In the past decade, the growing understanding of the importance of technology to business has led to a surge in business transformations—whether the flavor is digital, DevOps, Lean, or Agile, the aim is to speed up software development by … [Read more...]
Shaping Your Multispeed Future: Two Key Exercises from Mirco Hering
Adapted from DevOps for the Modern Enterprise by Mirco Hering To support you in adopting a multispeed future, here are two exercises for you to run in your organization. Both of them are highly related: the first is an analysis of your application portfolio and the second is the identification of a minimum viable cluster of application for which a capability uplift will provide real value. Application Portfolio Analysis If you are like most of my clients, you will have hundreds or … [Read more...]
The Three Epiphanies of Mik Kersten
Adapted from Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework by Mik Kersten. My career has been dedicated to understanding and improving how large-scale software is built. I spent nearly two decades working on new programming languages and software development tools, and have had a chance to work with some of the best technologists in the world. But I have come to realize that, due to where we are in the Turning Point, technology … [Read more...]
