Articles

The 4 Reasons Why Your Big Company’s CEO Will Fail

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I have worked for 14 years in service and consulting companies, for various and varied clients.

I’ve had to work for nearly twenty clients, most of the time for large companies well known to everyone. I have been a developer, project manager, architect, and I have been able to work in contact with operationals, ops and some of the managers of these companies. It is following various recent exchanges that I wanted to share my personal observation, on some fundamental differences between startups and a number of large companies.

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The Keys to Making Important Technical Decisions.

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When a Technical Decision (TD) become Important (ITD)

I like Mike Whitaker’s metaphor saying that "decisions are forks in the road." Choosing the right "road" is hard, and it’s even harder to know if the choice was good or bad until we walk on this "road" for a while. Sometimes we know that the decision is important, other times we barely realize it based on its effects at the end of the "road."

Whether we are talking about a multi-billion software company or a small one with 3 best friends, Technical Decisions are invariable in daily work. Some of them are important while others are less important (not unimportant, there is no such thing).

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What Do Agile Leaders Do?

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I’ve had this ongoing discussion with a few of my colleagues who say that the term “Agile leader” is an oxymoron — that the ideal organization is a bunch of Scrum Teams and not much else. Even in an ideal world, I disagree, and here’s why in a nutshell: I’ve never seen, and have not even heard of, an organization that was successful in their pursuit of agility who did not have a strong leader guiding the vision for what the organization can become, motivating people to achieve that vision, nurturing the pursuit of that vision, and protecting, when necessary, the people who want that vision from the people who don’t. 

The reason for this is simple and is as old as civilization. As Nicolo Machiavelli observed, 

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Solving Impediments as a Team

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Solving Impediments as a Team

The main message of the retrospective was clear: there are too many interruptions by stakeholders and the senior management. The interruptions impeded the flow of work through the team. Consequently, achieving the sprint goal had been at risk several times in the past. Moreover, the team missed the sprint goal twice recently. Solving impediments as a team has become a necessity.

Learn more on how to tackle impediments as a team by running experiments and iterating on the solution.

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Phases of Self-Organized Team

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A self-organized team is a utopian state where every Agile Coach or Scrum Masters strives to bring their Agile team. This transformation will not happen in a day or two, but it will require months to years, depending on the organization’s alignment and priority in adopting Agile. It requires constant coaching from the Scrum Masters/Agile Coaches with periodic inspection and adaption into the team. This article is mainly about understanding the changes happening in a team while transforming into a self-organized team. The identification of these phases will enable the Scrum Masters/Agile Coaches to shift their focus areas accordingly.

The transformation happens on a phase-by-phase basis. And below are the identified phases as part of the real-time experience.

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Women in DevOps: Tanu McCabe

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Tanu McCabe’s expertise as a solutions architecture director at Capital One has enabled her to lend invaluable insights about her exciting adventure within the company’s digital journey. Since 2015, Capital One, one of the country’s largest banks, has championed a large-scale tech transformation. During an interview, Tanu reflected on her decision to join Capital One, her hopes for the future direction of the company, and how burnout brought her to a dream job in DevOps.McCabe’s job as a solution architect allows her to provide leadership and guidance that leverages the latest technological developments. As part of her job, Tanu positions the company on the best solution designs, projects, and company-wide initiatives.

How did you decide to come to Capital One?

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Why Disruption Still Matters and 5 Ways to Deal With It (Part 2)

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As I mentioned in my last post, disruption has fallen off many organizations’ radars because it’s “so 2017.” But I don’t believe disruption is behind us. Some industries have yet to be disrupted; others are poised for round two, which will likely be faster and more painful than the last one.

Last week, I covered three of the five ways to stave off disruption. Here are the remaining two for you to consider.

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Effort vs. Productivity on Software Development

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I am sure you have heard that software developers are lazy. They don’t do much most of the time and only actually work a couple of hours over the day.

When you are in an assembly plant, for example, assembling televisions, it’s an issue in that type of work if someone stops doing his task for just a couple of minutes. Those couple of minutes will mean that fewer televisions will be produced and when we convert that to money, it will raise the cost of the product.

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The 8 Qualities of the Emotional Scrum Master

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The Scrum Master profession spans a wide variety of skills, knowledge, and experience. Scrum Masters try to create high performing teams and drive organizational change. Although our primary focus and responsibility is the process, it’s people we work with all the time. Surprisingly, our profession focuses predominantly on developing cognitive intelligence (IQ). We need to learn to appreciate the value of emotional intelligence (EQ) in becoming great Scrum Masters.

What Is Emotional Intelligence?

The term emotional intelligence was first created by researchers Peter Salavoy and John Mayer, and popularized by author Daniel Goleman. Emotional intelligence has been defined as, "the ability to recognize, understand, and manage our own emotions, and recognize, understand, and influence the emotions of others."

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Scaling Business Agility: Three Essential Pillars for Being Vs. Doing Agile

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The concepts of Agile, Scaling Agile, and Business Agility have become buzzwords. The crux of being Agile for the customer and people who are building products and services is buried under a focus on conducting ceremonies.

Prior to scaling Agile, let us not forget the manifesto for Agile software development. It’s all about uncovering better ways of developing software that provides value both to the customer and for people who are part of the delivery stream.

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