InfoQ Homepage Communication Content on InfoQ
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Group Coaching - Extending Growth Opportunity beyond Individual Coaching
This article provides an introduction to group coaching and explains how it is different from individual coaching. It sheds light on the benefits of using group coaching, skills that coaches would need and the challenges they would face, with an example scenario using one of the group coaching techniques, and describes the context in which such a technique can be used.
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Bridging the Understanding Gap between Business and IT
The understanding gap between business and IT is one of the largest challenges to effective digital transformation. Drawing on research and their own experience, the author presents 10 practical tips to break stereotypes, build relationships, and bridge the gaps.
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Smashing Silos: Scaling up an Energy Tech Disrupter Remotely
Being a small EnTech disruptor in a rapidly evolving market can feel a bit daunting; add in an acquisition, a rebrand and twice the team members that you had a year ago and you have a recipe for growing pains. Here is how we leaned on our strengths and pulled experience from all directions to allow for team member fulfilment during a breakneck growth spurt.
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How to Optimize for Fast Flow Using Alignment and Autonomy: the Journey of a Large Bureaucracy
This article describes how NAV (Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration), Norway's largest bureaucracy, has achieved alignment in over 100 autonomous teams. It shows the techniques it uses to align teams with respect to technology: two descriptive techniques - the technology radar and the weekly deep dive, and two normative techniques - the technical direction and internal platforms.
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How to Accelerate Your Staff+ Career through Open Source Engagement
It takes many factors for an engineer to land a Staff+ position. In this article, you’ll find how contributing and engaging to open-source can help you sharpen critical Staff+ skills like writing communication, while helping increase your visibility and the odds of landing in such a position.
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How Psychological Safety at Work Creates Effective Software Tech Teams That Learn and Grow
This article provides the foundations of psychological safety and shows how it has been applied for team effectiveness. It explores how psychological safety supports learning and improvement and how we can foster a psychologically safe culture in tech teams.
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Talking Like a Suit - Communicating the Importance of Engineering Work in Business Terms
This article explores how to construct engineering work as a story, including clearly presenting a problem, offering a solution, and showing the business a path to success that solves their problem and avoids failure. By presenting your case in this way, you significantly increase your chances of getting these engineering problems addressed, while also becoming a better partner for the business.
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Creating Psychological Safety in Your Teams
Psychological safety is a work climate where employees feel free to express their questions, concerns, ideas and mistakes. We cannot have high-performing teams without psychological safety. In this article, you will learn practical ideas, interesting stories, and powerful approaches to boost psychological safety in your team.
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How Space Shapes Collaboration: Using Anthropology to Break Silos
Software companies strive to keep innovating and changing the rules of the market. These companies are made of people who, unlike smartphones, personal computers or smart watches, have not evolved as much in recent years. This article proposes an analysis of workspaces from anthropology to solve one of the most common problems: the appearance of silos instead of a culture of collaboration.
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Avoiding Technical Bankruptcy: a Whole-Organization Perspective on Technical Debt
Technical debt is not primarily caused by clumsy programming, and hence we cannot hope to fix it by more skilled programming alone. Rather, technical debt is a third-order effect of poor communication. What we observe and label “technical debt” is the by-product of a dysfunctional process. To fix the problem of accumulating technical debt, we need to fix this broken process.
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How to Decide in Self-Managed Projects - a Lean Approach to Governance
Whether self-managed or self-governed as a project, the power still needs to be distributed internally. If the project is open to decide how things are done, how do we decide? A solid but flexible set of tools and practices like sociocracy is a great starting point for projects to have clear but lean processes that can grow as we grow.
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Improving Testability: Removing Anti-Patterns through Joint Conversations
Code is always testable, but the cost may be high, and the effort exhausting. We can change code to be highly testable by identifying anti-patterns and fixing them. And developers can make the code fit the test requirements, by having discussions with the testers who actually test it.