InfoQ Homepage Distributed Team Content on InfoQ
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Maintaining Psychological Safety under Pressure
When leaders are under pressure they can fall into dark side behaviours that can cause deep and lasting harm to organisation culture and psychological safety. Leaders need to be very conscious about deliberately managing their reactions and responses to pressure situations in order to avoid allowing what are often character strengths to be overused and potentially become toxic.
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Becoming Personally Agile for Mental Health
Feeling the need to be constantly producing high-quality deliverables with a high sense of perfection can lead to stress and can cause burnout. You have to first accept that you have a problem to find your way out of burnout. Applying agile on a personal level can help you to achieve high goals while reducing stress and lowering the chance of getting burnout.
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QCon Plus: Summary of the Remote Working Track
The QCon Plus conference ran over three weeks in November, 2020. Travis McPeak hosted the Best Practices for Remote Work track, aimed at sharing the learnings from world class remote companies about how to leverage remote working for the benefit of employees, customers and the organisation as a whole.
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QCon Plus: Summary of the Non-Technical Skills for Technical Folks Track
Qcon Plus ran in November 2020. Once of the tracks focused on Non-Technical Skills for Technical Folks. Hosted by Randy Shoup of eBay, the track concentrated on some of the important people skills needed for effective communication and collaboration in and outside teams.
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QCon Plus: Summary of the Inclusion & Diversity in Tech Track
QCon Plus is running over three weeks in November. One of the tracks on the first day focused on Inclusion and Diversity in Tech. The track was designed to to change perceptions about DEI and advance the conversation. Three talks provided the audience with concrete tools, difficult questions and invited them to deep self exploration.
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Creating and Nurturing an Intentional Remote Culture
Company culture isn’t built in the short term, nor can it be imposed. It’s deeply rooted in the founders’ ideologies and behaviours around work. From there, it grows and evolves organically as the company hires individuals who embrace these values, and who also bring their own identity into the mix.
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Articulating Leadership through Nemawashi and Collaborative Boards
High performance teams don’t need to be managed, but led. Collaborative boards is where leadership and teams meet to align direction and initiatives. Nemawashi can be used to separate conversations from meetings. Fernando Guigou spoke about articulating leadership using an approach that he calls ZenSum at Agile Tour London 2020.
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Applying a Zero-Bug Policy at Redgate
A zero-bug policy is a simple yet effective bug management system that can help you avoid being buried deep in months or sometimes even years-old bugs. Any bugs you agree are serious enough for you to fix, you fix right away, and any other bug will not be fixed and closed. Tom Walsh spoke about how Redgate Software applied the zero-bug policy at Lean Agile Exchange 2020.
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Remote Working for Tech Workers is Here to Stay
Remote working is here to stay for tech workers, irrespective of what happens with COVID-19. Many tech companies are changing their long term planning and hiring practices to allow for remote working in the future, and benefits packages are being reworked to provide support for parents with child care and home schooling pressures.
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Chaos Conf Q&A: Adrian Cockcroft & Yury Niño Roa
In preparation for ChaosConf 2020, InfoQ sat down with Adrian Cockcroft and Yury Niño Roa to explore topics of interest in the chaos engineering community. Key takeaways included: there are clear benefits to running “game days” to develop psychological safety, and the future of chaos engineering points toward incorporating security and scaling up experiments to test larger failure modes.
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Growing Personal and Organisational Courage
Courage is vital for organisations if they want to thrive in today’s complex world as it will create the right conditions for the highest possible levels of creativity, adaptability and productivity. We all have the power to lead with courage, no matter what our role is.
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Microsoft Launches a New Communication Platform with Azure Communication Services
During its annual Ignite Conference, Microsoft announced Azure Communication Services (ACS), a fully-managed communication platform. The offering is currently in public preview.
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Deliver Faster by Killing the Test Column
Columns like "In test" often lead to teams having more work in progress and less work actually being finished. Removing such columns can increase collaboration between testers and developers and enable teams to deliver faster.
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Learnings from a Project That Went from Heaven to Hell
Maja Selmer Megard, project leader and department manager at Kantega, shares her experience from a project that at first sight seemed to be a perfect fit in all regards, but ended up as the most exhausting, conflict-ridden project she has been in.
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Using Measurement to Optimise Remote Work
Dave Longman of HeadForwards wrote about using data to demonstrate the effectiveness of remote work during lockdown. Michael Schrage of MIT’s School of Management also wrote about the importance of using data-driven insights to improve performance in the current climate. Laura Giurge of London Business School talked about how isolation is teaching individuals and firms to be remotely effective.