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Navigating the New Reality

By Dominica Degrandis, Chris Gallivan, Elisabeth Hendrickson, Charles Lafferty, Matt Ring

Practical Strategies for Optimizing Flow, Teamwork and Visibility in a Changing Landscape

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This paper, published in the Fall 2024 Enterprise Technology Leadership Journal, addresses the challenges faced by technology organizations in a competitive and fast-moving market. The authors present six actionable takeaways inspired by two books: Making Work Visible and Team Topologies. These takeaways aim to help organizations optimize flow, teamwork, and visibility in a changing landscape where businesses are under increased budget pressure and rapid technological changes.

  • Format PDF
  • Pages 29
  • Publication Date

Features

  • Visibility

    Exposing invisible work and making team APIs visible are crucial for understanding the true scope of work and improving communication between teams.

  • Work Management

    Reducing WIP and implementing effective work sequencing can significantly improve focus, productivity, and time-to-market.

  • Dependencies

    Identifying and remediating blocking dependencies is essential for improving flow and reducing delays in project delivery.

  • Prioritization

    Understanding trade-offs from conflicting priorities and implementing better prioritization methods can help organizations balance multiple demands and improve overall efficiency.

About the Resource

This paper, published in the Fall 2024 Enterprise Technology Leadership Journal, addresses the challenges faced by technology organizations in a competitive and fast-moving market. The authors present six actionable takeaways inspired by two books: Making Work Visible and Team Topologies. These takeaways aim to help organizations optimize flow, teamwork, and visibility in a changing landscape where businesses are under increased budget pressure and rapid technological changes.

The paper uses a fictional narrative about Pat, a director of engineering, to illustrate common problems faced by technology leaders. It then provides practical solutions and strategies for exposing invisible work, reducing work-in-progress (WIP), making team APIs visible, recognizing trade-offs from conflicting priorities, remediating blocking dependencies, and creating effective work sequencing. Each solution is accompanied by reflections on the problem and specific actions that leaders can take to implement improvements in their organizations.

Dominica Degrandis
Chris Gallivan
Elisabeth Hendrickson
Charles Lafferty
Matt Ring
Dominica Degrandis

Dominica Degrandis

Dominica DeGrandis is the foremost expert in Kanban Flow within the IT industry today. Her work has shown working IT teams how effectively improve workflow and optimize throughput to produce the best result throughout the value stream. Her passion involves the use of visual cues and transparency across teams and organizations to reveal mutually critical information. As Director of Training & Coaching at LeanKit, Dominica combines experience, practice and theory to help teams level up their capability. She blogs at ddegrandis.com and tweets at @dominicad.

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Chris Gallivan

Chris Gallivan

Chris Gallivan is a principal flow advisor at Planview. Gallivan advises organizations on making work visible and improving the flow of value to customers. Prior to joining Planview, Gallivan had two decades of experience improving flow in the automotive industry at Chrysler. His experience ranges from DevOps dojos to platform engineering, from traditional software to embedded systems. In his life outside of work, Chris is the proud father of a two-pizza team and a lifelong musician.

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Elisabeth Hendrickson

Elisabeth Hendrickson

Experienced technology leader building what I have learned into simulations so others can learn in minutes what it took me years to figure out.

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Charles Lafferty

Charles Lafferty

Charles (Chuck) Lafferty, is vice president and software architect at ADP. Lafferty joined ADP in 2010 as a senior application developer. He founded the ADP Developer Community in 2013, which helped foster new relationships and open communication channels at ADP. Lafferty hosts an internal technology podcast listened to by ADP employees around the world. His passions include technology, programming, and leadership. By using DevOps principles, Lafferty has fostered a culture of excellence and continuous improvement in a high-performing software development organization.

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Matt Ring

Matt Ring

Matt Ring is a Sr. Product & Engineering Coach with John Deere’s IT Strategy and Transformation organization. Matt works with leaders, practitioners and teams on helping them elevate their own product, lean-agile and DevOps ways of working, and in cultivating an organizational culture of continuous learning and experimentation.

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