InfoQ Homepage Culture Content on InfoQ
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Perpetual Guardian Experiments with a Four Day Work Week
Earlier this year, Perpetual Guardian, a New Zealand company that manages trust, wills and estates, invited its two hundred and forty employees to join an eight-week experiment during which they would work four days a week and enjoy an extra leisure day, although getting the same amount of money.
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13th Annual State of Agile Survey is Open
The 13th annual State of Agile survey has been announced by CollabNet VersionOne. This yearly survey explores the worldwide adoption of agile.
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Keeping Distributed Teams in Sync
The biggest challenge of distributed teams is communication, which is essential for establishing ground rules on collaboration. Shifting working hours to accommodate each other and team liaisons help to communicate and synchronize work. Teams based on trust, respect, and openness will encourage themselves to help people throughout the organization and foster a culture that keeps teams in sync.
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Focusing on Business Outcomes at Barclays: Overcoming the "Urgency Paradox"
Jonathan Smart, head of working ways, and Morag McCall, PMO at Barclays, spoke last month at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in London about re-thinking the entire flow of work, from initial idea triage until releasing to production. This means introducing agility into how the application and services portfolio is managed, as well as changing the role of the PMO and finance departments.
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Spark the Change: Building Tomorrow’s Company
Tomorrow’s company has to invest in well being, should move away from individual silos to team delivery, needs to have psychological space and safety, and must be able to deal with uncertainty. To build such companies we can use gamification, pretotyping, IoT, artificial intelligence, robots, chatbots and other conversational interfaces. We should focus on teams and question how we work together.
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Ben Gracewood on Learning from an Organisational Train Wreck
At the recent JAFAC conference, Ben Gracewood told the story of how POS developer Vend transformed their development organisation following catastrophic disruption and losses. He explored what happened after they reduced headcount by over 30%, what they had in place that enabled them to survive, and what they did differently as a result of the changes.
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Driving Innovation at Switzerland's Largest Bank
Jelena Laketic, head of asset management SWAT (SoftWare Action Team) at UBS, spoke at the DevOps Enterprise Summit London about some of the lessons she has learned driving innovation at the largest bank in Switzerland. InfoQ reached out to Laketic in order to get her view on the particular challenges and successes around her SWAT journey and what innovation means at UBS.
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The Power of Serendipity and Networking
Meeting new people gets you out of your own head. It’s a good way to get outside perspective on your projects and look at them in new ways. A conversation with someone who works in a completely different field could spark the idea that changes your company. Focus on meeting people who share your values and interests, and make networking part of your daily habits.
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Too Many Scripts Can Kill Your Continuous Delivery
Avantika Mathur spoke at Continuous Lifecycle London last month on the costs associated with an ever increasing number of scripts in a Continuous Delivery pipeline. Besides the cost of maintaining the scripts, the lack of visibility and auditability on exactly what activities are being carried out before deploying a change to production is another major cost not many organizations are aware of.
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Enabling Continuous Delivery with a Dedicated Team
Robin Weston describes how an external enablement team was able to introduce continuous delivery practices in an organization with high resistance to change and siloed teams. Rather than just bringing in new technology and tools, the team focused on sharing and educating teams. Practices ranged from continuous integration, to following the test pyramid, or reducing cycle time by identifying waste.
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Happy Cultures and How They Grow High Performers
ITV's Tom Clark spoke at DOXLON in February, proposing the hypothesis that high performance is a side-effect of creating happy teams. Andy Flemming, contributor to Deliberately Developmental Organization, also recently spoke about how to reap business and strategic benefits by creating a culture with an intentional focus on transparency, and the learning, growth and happiness of individuals.
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Culture, Psychological Safety, and Emotional Intelligence for High Performance Teams
Humanity is the heart of the creative intellectual work that many of us are engaged in. The foundation of high-performance teams is people who have freedom and autonomy and feel safer. Games can be used to support self-awareness and connection and build team emotional intelligence onto safety.
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Finding Talented People and Building Sustainable Teams
Meetups, hackathons and conferences are fantastic opportunities to promote your company's work and ethos and meet talented people. You can learn a lot more about a person if you let them drive the conversation initially in a job interview. Having room to grow professionally and psychological safety are key to building sustainable teams, and establish a collaborative, cohesive engineering culture.
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What Resiliency Means at Sportradar
Pablo Jensen, CTO at Sportradar, talked about practices and procedures in place at Sportradar to ensure their systems meet expected resiliency levels, at this year's QCon London conference. Jensen mentioned how reliability is influenced not only by technical concerns but also organizational structure and governance, client support, and requires on-going effort to continuously improve.
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Leaders Discuss How to Build Great Engineering Cultures
QConLondon’s Building Great Engineering Cultures track brought together a panel of leaders to take questions from an audience. Leaders from Google, Sky Betting and Gaming, ITV, Deliveroo and GlobalSign shared how they support and build great cultures for engineers, accounting for individual growth, organisation need, a social conscience and a balanced life.