Xebia Articles

Today’s digital age is buzzing with “transformations” and “accelerations” that are driving organizations to new levels of competition and increasing their reliance on IT. Information technology is no longer a secondary, supporting resource; IT has become a primary business USP. In turn, the increasing demand for capable, seasoned engineers has sparked a virtual “war for talent.” The only way to attract and retain the best of the best is to cultivate a culture specifically designed for engineers. Agile can help you do that.

This article is published in . Agile NXT is a new magazine full of inspiration for professionals on the emerging Agile journey. It challenges you to think differently and improve yourself, your team, and company a little more each day. 


Digital Drivers 
There are four critical ramifications of today’s digital age fueling the war for talent and the increasing demand for engineers: 

Picture this: You’ve defined the product vision with the product owner and determined scope for the upcoming sprints. Your team is all ready to leap onto their backlog and start delivering value. Now imagine all assumptions and ideas have already been verified with real customers. All this, in the first week of your sprint.

Pull coaching

Traditional Agile Coaching goes like this: we take a look at what you are doing and we advise you what we think is a good next step in your growth and Agile Maturity. These next steps are supported by exercises, simulations, insights and experience that come from our own personal Agile Backpack. At my last assignment, we wanted to learn the teams how to become more self-organizing and self-learning, to take initiative in their own growth path so that they really become owners of it. We decided to support the teams by pull coaching instead of push coaching. The Agile Toolkit was created to support this aid.

Organizations that transform into Agile ones need their cultures to reflect their new values. Agile cultures promote flexibility and autonomy. They’re purpose-driven, idealistic, tolerant, open, inventive, explorative, warm, engaged and sincere. But how does an organization transition towards such a culture? Is it possible to create or engineer one? And, if so, what potential side effects should you consider?

After embracing Agile processes and continuous delivery for application development, many IT departments are now adopting DevOps as a service delivery approach. DevOps is imperative for creating and operating a productive information platform that’s essential for digital business. As the name suggests, IT operations are part of these initiatives.

The age of assistance is here! Voice based conversational technology has become readily available and the tools offered by Google’s Dialogflow allow for easy modelling and creation of such interfaces. This lowers the bar for entry and allows you to provide a personalized experience on a digital assistant platform.

This blog answers the most common questions about (voice) assistants based on our investigations with Google’s DialogFlow technology.

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: Accelerate Your Transformation With Visualization

What is the most popular data technology? As part of their international research into the use of data and AI, the team behind Data Survey 2018 - 2019 collected the insights of no less than 1,345 professionals from all over the world. They were surveyed about the solutions they use when it comes to data technology, cloud platforms, and data visualization tools. This research is the result of a collaboration between Big Data Expo, GoDataDriven, and Computable.

There are several models on the market that describe how to apply Scrum and Agile in organizations with dozens, even hundreds, of teams. These including the well-known SAFe and LeSS frameworks. This article introduces CoCreate, a model based on Spotify’s “organizational blueprint” that has been applied to two Dutch companies, ING and KPN, that now serve as inspiring examples.

How Product Owners Should Be Aligned and Work Together.

Shared leadership is what you want in organizations that sometimes have dozens of product owners. But how do you get those product owners to work together in line with what the others are doing? Find a big, empty wall for part 2 of a blog series by Xebia Product Management.