Xebia Articles

In the current digital era, change is accelerating at an exponential rate. Businesses must “adapt or die” if they want to survive. To do this, they are looking for new ways to disrupt and innovate their market or industry, in most cases in a digital way. However, to increase their chances of success, organizations should take into account three key guiding principles for digital innovation.

For the last twenty-five years, I’ve enjoyed working with teams to improve them.
I've worked with all kinds of teams, from those that barely make progress to those that turn everything they touch into a success. What sets these teams at opposite ends of the spectrum? What makes a team a winning one?

Organizational agility requires a cultural transition. Too often, transformations get stuck in the blueprints of pre-planned waves of change. In large, top-down transition projects, change implementation is mandated across the organization. This method is rarely effective and often merely establishes a limited, temporary effect. The new way of change consists of many micro-interventions from leadership that bring about a mega-change. The micro-interventions are small, powerful, and applicable at any time. These bring about a more effective organization with a culture to match.

This article is published in . Agile NXT is the magazine full of inspiration for professionals on the emerging Agile journey. Theme of #2: New Insights for Agile Performance Management.

Have you ever gone to the gym in January? If so, you’ve seen just how difficult it is to change behavior. Everyone has a New Year’s resolution to get into better shape or lose those extra holiday season pounds, so at first, the gym is very crowded. But within a few weeks, everyone gives up on trying to change, stops going, and the gym turns quiet again. Why? What does it take to actually change behavior in the long term, and why is it so important in business?

When leading change in an organization, what guides and influences new behavior? What makes it stick? Judo offers a gentle way of approaching change. Based on principles like seiryoku zenyo, which means “maximum efficient use of energy,” it poses questions such as, “What if everyone did just this one thing? Would the rest fall into place?” Change doesn’t happen overnight, but by conducting mini-experiments, and adjusting along the way, great, and lasting change can occur. Here are six levers of influence from the path to the Judo black belt that could make you a better leader in business.

Scrum drives us toward enacting the first principle of the Agile Manifesto,“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” We are invited to look for ways to actually deliver “value.” Although “value” in itself is hard to quantify, we can absolutely measure to improve how we effectively deliver it.

Today, more than a third of all companies have embarked on some form of Agile transformation. Some are further along than others because their industries require agility to survive. Leaders of these companies face the arduous task of transforming their legacy organizations while still delivering sustainable financial performance to the stakeholders. These leaders need to conduct this transformation correctly — to get it right.

This article is published in . Agile NXT is the magazine full of inspiration for professionals on the emerging Agile journey. Theme of #2: New Insights for Agile Performance Management.

If you’ve ever wondered if Agile coaching is effective or worth the money spent, you’re not alone. Your customers probably do, too. Let’s look at how one manager who grappled with these same questions came to measure the value of coaching and using methods of Data Science to discover which interventions work and
which don’t.

With 95% of all business processes impacted by human activity, intervention at the right moment can elicit lasting behavioral change—and with it, organizational change.