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 to … [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...]
Fear: The Original Sin of Unproductive Conversations
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...]
Retail DevOps Case Study: Rebuilding an Engineering Culture
Excerpted from the guidance paper DevOps Case Studies. Download the full paper here. Written by: Jim Stoneham, Paula Thrasher, Terri Potts, Heather Mickman, Carmen DeArdo, Thomas A. Limoncelli, and Kate Sage Technology Practices Journey This study focuses on the different phases of driving DevOps and rebuilding the engineering culture at a retailer. The retailer required a lot of technology and thousands of applications to support its business, and it had begun changing from a large … [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...]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- …
- 32
- Next Page »
