Xebia Articles

This article is published in Agile NXT. As an Agile coach with a passion for Scrum (and mother of three!), I’m always on the lookout for innovative ways to boost and develop personal and professional mastery. I recently attended a powerful training, “Training From the Back of the Room Back of the Room,” devised by Sharon L. Bowman. It teaches you how the human brain works in a learning setting like a training or workshop. I discovered some interesting differences between traditional and brain-based learning that also apply in the workplace. This article describes some of the concepts I learned and how you can apply “brain science” to make your Scrum events more effective. 

While the term “business agility” has come into vogue, many leaders still don’t comprehend what it exactly entails. This article explores a definition of business agility from the leader’s perspective, and shares some patterns based on real-world stories of dozens of companies who have attempted to become Agile from end to end.

State of Product Management Conference – November 16, 2018

Set better priorities, manage your personal growth, and increase your personal effectiveness across all levels of your career. At State of Product Management, you can expect three tracks with fast-paced, interactive sessions about the latest, progressive, topics in product management.

It's Thursday, 09:00AM. You arrive at work and see a huddle of people in the meeting room near your desk. Monitors are spread out across the room and engineers from the web team, Java team, .NET team and database team are staring intently at their screens. You forego your morning coffee for now and enter the room to see if you can help.

Root-causing and troubleshooting issues across the IT environment is a hard task as today’s infrastructure and applications span on-premise and cloud environments, and are more elastic, dynamic and distributed in nature. 

Think about the following questions before reading this article: (1) did you ever encounter an outage in a business chain where someone depending on the chain could not perform their job for hours? (2) Is there anyone who has insight in all dependencies between systems? (3) Is the status of each system available to everyone? (4) Do departments report a scheduled release to the depending departments? 

More and more organizations plan “to do something” with blockchain technology, but often struggle to identify use cases. Before you can see its potential applications, you must understand both blockchain technology and your organization’s transactions in depth. This three-part series explores ways to find blockchain use cases, beginning with the problems it can solve.

1. Don’t Know The Possible Impact of Deployments

Fast, short release cycles make it hard to keep track of your application and infrastructure landscape. A small change deep down in the infrastructure may seem innocuous, but can have a large impact over time. Today’s monitoring solutions should be able to provide insight which systems could be impacted before you deploy new software.

The transformation of an organization into an agile one requires a carefully planned strategic approach. The success or failure of a transition towards greater speed, agility, and flexibility depends on organizational structure, collaboration style, and communication. Another requirement for success is support from the highest level. In the end, the goals of the transformation should be clearly communicated to the entire organization.