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Culture & Methods

Predictable Agile Delivery: The Executive Challenge

As agile grows-out of its years of self-obsession and teenage petulance into a post-agile state, ‘Predictable Agile Delivery’ feels like a realistic goal that advantages both the business sponsor and their development stakeholders. This article shares some ‘good, bad and ugly’ examples of practices that often work and some that always fail at improving large organizations.

Russ Lewis
on Mar 27, 2017
Culture & Methods

Ultimate Kanban: Scaling Agile without Frameworks at Ultimate Software

Ultimate Software settled on Kanban as its scaled methodology which went hand-in-hand with the company’s culture of autonomy. Teams define their own process and apply policies specific to their own context. Through the innovative use of flow practices and principles, Ultimate has been able to achieve many of the benefits of a Lean-Agile implementation without the use of a heavyweight framework.

Prateek Singh Steve Reid Daniel S. Vacanti
on Nov 27, 2016
Architecture & Design

CQRS for Enterprise Web Development: What's in it for Business?

With a focus on the business case for a CQRS architecture, this article covers the core concepts of Command Query Responsibility Segregation, and contrasts them with a common, n-tier architecture. Benefits including scalability and maintainability are highlighted, which can reduce the total cost of ownership, and lead to an improved return on investment when choosing a CQRS architecture.

Andrei Kaminski
on Sep 22, 2016
Culture & Methods

Q&A and Book Review on Liftoff, Second Edition

The book Liftoff, Second Edition by Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies, provides practices and insights for chartering teams by understanding their needs, building trust, and defining how they will interact in the team and align with other parts of the organization. It's a book for Agile coaches, Scrum masters or agile product and project managers to help teams to understand the why behind the work.

Ben Linders
on Sep 10, 2016
Culture & Methods

Q&A with Jason Fox on How to Lead a Quest

In the book How to Lead a Quest Jason Fox explores what can be done to develop insights for strategic decisions and innovation, and for driving progress and delivering value. The book provides approaches and rituals for asking deeper, bigger questions and slow, thorough thinking, creating options and designing experiments for dealing with complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty.

Ben Linders
on Jul 29, 2016
Culture & Methods

Growing Agile… Not Scaling!

What makes an agile team successful is not the “process” nor the “tools” but rather the way people develop an effective level of interaction with each other. Growing agile means both focusing on culture, and on co-evolution of practices and tools.

Andrea Tomasini Dhaval Panchal
on Jul 27, 2016
Cloud

Article Series: Cloud and "Lock-in"

With the fast-pace of cloud changes (new services, providers entering and exiting), cloud lock-in remains a popular refrain. But what does it mean, and how can you ensure you're maximizing your cloud investment while keeping portability in mind?

Richard Seroter
on Jul 01, 2016
Culture & Methods

Q&A with Johanna Rothman and Jutta Eckstein on Cost of Delay

The book Diving For Hidden Treasures - Uncovering the Cost of Delay in Your Project Portfolio by Johanna Rothman and Jutta Eckstein explores how projects become delayed and provides tools and methods to analyze and limit the costs of delay in projects.

Ben Linders
on Jun 16, 2016
Cloud

Everything Is “Lock-In”: Focus on Switching Costs

Coding in Java, buying SAP, deploying OpenStack, and using Amazon Web Services: each one introduces a type of lock-in. However, it makes no difference how hard you try- some form of lock-in is unavoidable. What matters most is understanding the layers of lock-in, and how to assess and reduce your switching costs.

Richard Seroter
on Jun 08, 2016
Culture & Methods

Q&A on Achieving Impact through Engagement

The book achieving impact through engagement by Si Alhir and and Peter L. Simon explores two models on employee and customer engagement: The Ownership Pyramid (TOP) and Artful Agility or Actions-Intentions-Results (AIR). Together these models can be used to achieve impact in organizations based on increasing engagement.

Ben Linders
on Apr 25, 2016
Culture & Methods

The Agility Challenge

To be successful, a company needs to become an agile enterprise. In this article Dragan Jojic explores “the agility challenge”: A company where employees are able to sense and respond to external inputs without managers having to tell them what to do, know what they are trying to achieve, understand why, be able to decide by themselves how to best do it and genuinely care that it gets done.

Dragan Jojic
on Feb 04, 2016
Culture & Methods

Building Flat Organizations with Cross-functional Teams and Fewer Managers

Hierarchical organizations can't react to new market opportunities and changes fast enough, this impedes the company’s survival in the long run. An interview with Michael Dubakov on how agile transformations impact the role of managers, how to change the culture to increase agility, how to flatten an organization using cross-functional teams, and benefits from increasing agility.

Ben Linders
on Nov 30, 2015