InfoQ Homepage Business/IT Alignment Content on InfoQ
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Using Patterns to Drive a Transformation towards Agility - Practical Insights from Large Companies
In the DACH region, a community of transformation leaders from about 30 companies started “DACH30” sessions where they share experiences and insights from their efforts to help their companies become more agile. This article highlights successful patterns to foster change, how to apply flow-oriented design to optimise your delivery capabilities, and the danger of the illusion of control.
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How to Best Use MTT* Metrics to Optimize Your Incident Response
Selecting the correct MTT* metric to improve your incident response is important. If the wrong metric is chosen, the improvements may get lost in the noise of a multivariable equation. This article reviews the various MTT* metrics available and discusses the best scenarios for selecting each one.
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Continuous Portfolio Management as a Contributor for Achieving Highly-Aligned, Loosely-Coupled Teams
There is a business need for fast software delivery in order to frequently test business hypotheses and drive development based on the resulting feedback. Organizations need to rapidly decide on what to build next, using a short feedback loop that greatly reduces the risk of running on untested assumptions for too long. This article explores a journey towards continuous portfolio management.
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Using the Problem Reframing Method to Build Innovative Solutions
Building products that customers love relies heavily on the problem space: how well you know your audience and how clear are the pain points and main problems your users are facing. This means that the solution to a problem depends on how we frame the problem. This article provides different practices and tools on how to apply problem reframing underpinned by a real case study.
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Going Digital in the Middle of a Pandemic
IBM achieved an enterprise-wide digital transformation program despite the challenges posed by 100% remote work and the pandemic. The article explores various transformation levers such as team set-up, process, architecture, engineering practices & tooling, metrics & governance, and culture, and shows how they were applied to achieve sustainable outcomes.
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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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How the Financial Times Approaches Engineering Enablement
Companies need teams working on infrastructure, tooling and platforms; the way they work has to change so that they do not become a bottleneck. These teams need to be about enabling product teams to deliver business value. Investment in this area pays off as it speeds up many other teams and allows product-team engineers to focus on solving business problems that provide value to the organisation.
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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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Reducing Cloud Infrastructure Complexity
Cloud computing adoption has taken the world by storm, and is accelerating unabated. According to Flexera’s annual State of the Cloud Report for 2020, 93% of respondents used multi or hybrid cloud strategies. This article examines different aspects of cloud infrastructure complexity, and approaches to mitigate it.
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Gamification: a Strategy for Enterprises to Enable Digital Product Practices
To embrace the changing needs of consumers, organizations are exploring new ways to ideate, collaborate and create products, some of them being embracing co-creation models, investment in long-term value, and fostering collective wisdom through gamification. This article shows how gamification helps to create perspective around product practices and bring us closer to next-generation products.
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Building Reliable Software Systems with Chaos Engineering
Advances in large-scale, distributed software systems are changing the game for software engineering. As an industry, we are quick to adopt practices that improve flexibility and improve feature velocity. If we can move quickly, can we do so without breaking things? Chaos Engineering practices can be used to navigate complexity and build more reliable systems.
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Culture & Methods Trends Report March 2021
The most significant impact on culture and methods in 2021 is the disruption caused by COVID-19. We look at what's needed for good remote and the impact of bad remote, how management practices are evolving, and the importance of people skills for technologists. Paying attention to ethical issues, diversity and inclusion, tech for good, employee experience and psychological safety are important.