What prevents you from getting work done? One of the top answers is too many meetings! Too many interruptions, meetings, and tools overburdens workers and can lead to burn out. In this post, we visit Dominica DeGrandis's advice for creating a balanced calendar to optimize your time. Too Many Meetings A calendar full of meetings leads to little time to complete actual work. We double book, triple book, and even quadruple book our time. Dominica DeGrandis describes three common types of … [Read more...]
8 Recommended Talks from DevOps Enterprise Summit (and Why)
Recently, I was speaking with a friend in a large bank, and I ended up writing him a letter recommending some talks that I thought would be useful. Below I list each of them, along with why I think they'd be of interest. 1) Credit Suisse from London - Virtual 2020 Andrea Hausmann, Head of Program Strategy & Engagement, Credit SuisseDuncan Lawie, Director, DevOps and Development Practices, Credit Suisse I think this is a super interesting talk, because they’re a centralized group that owns … [Read more...]
Radical Prioritization of Work
This post is adapted from the Bold Moves You Can Make white paper that appears in the Fall 2020 DevOps Enterprise Journal. Written by Amy Walters, Dominica DeGrandis, Jon Moore, Jeffrey Shupack, Michael Nygard, Ross Clanton, Ben Grinnell, and Paula Thrasher Many large enterprises are experiencing a crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic impacts. Remaining relevant and alive requires bold moves that accelerate digital, Agile, and DevOps transformation efforts that may … [Read more...]
IT: The Biggest, Baddest Bureaucrats
This post is an excerpt of Mark Schwartz's The (Delicate) Art of Bureaucracy: Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler. IT Bureaucracy: Not Fooling Anyone Among the biggest, baddest, bullyingest bureaucrats in a large enterprise are the IT folks. Yes, us, the very IT folks who so hate bureaucracy when we find it imposed on us. Your password, we say, must be in a format that guarantees you’ll never remember it, and you must change it every few … [Read more...]
The 3 Real Risks Every Project Manager Should Focus On
Adapted from War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age by Mark Schwartz. It turns out that people are pretty terrible at assessing probabilities and risk. In my last book, A Seat at the Table, I cited several examples to make this point—examples that I love because even knowing the right answer I still can’t convince myself it is right. The first example had to do with the TV game show Let’s Make a Deal, in which the contestant is asked … [Read more...]
24 Key Capabilities to Drive Improvement in Software Delivery
This post is adapted from an excerpt of Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim. Our research, based on four years of the State of DevOps Report, has uncovered 24 key capabilities that drive improvements in software delivery performance in a statistically significant way. The book Accelerate details these findings. This post provides you with a handy list of these capabilities. We have classified these capabilities into five categories. Within each category, the … [Read more...]
Commitment: Engagement Is Not Enough
This post is adapted from episode 125 of the Troubleshooting Agile podcast with Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel. Introduction Moving on to Chapter 6 of Agile Conversations, it’s time to talk about commitment. Not engagement, which we argue is insufficient to produce effective results, only enthusiasm that is far too often misdirected out of confusion about what important words mean and how to measure progress. We offer specific tools for effective commitments and hear a story … [Read more...]
The Turning Point
This post was adapted from Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework by Mik Kersten. For the majority of our careers, those of us involved with enterprise IT have been dealing with change at a frenzied pace. Technology platforms, software development methodologies, and the vendor landscape have been shifting at a rate that few organizations have been able to match. Those that manage to keep up, such as Amazon, and Alibaba, are … [Read more...]
Why: Finding the Balance for Joint Design
This post was adapted from episode 124 of the Troubleshooting Agile podcast with Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel. As we get to chapter 4 in our tour through Agile Conversations, it’s time to talk about joint design. In this post we focus on a common error that we didn’t cover in depth in the book: how trying to “convince” someone through advocacy fails. Using the Four Rs, we role play an ineffective advocacy-heavy conversation about tech team execution, and then revise it … [Read more...]
The Battle of Borodino: Business as a Complex Adaptive System
Adapted from War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age by Mark Schwartz. In War and Peace, Tolstoy writes of the battle of Borodino, in which Napoleon (sort of) defeats Russia and wins the opportunity to watch Moscow burn, though not much more. The day before the battle, he walks the battlefield and gives his commanders orders for the disposition of the troops—orders which are, for the most part, ignored. During the battle, he stands in … [Read more...]
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