Engineering Culture By Infoq

In this podcast recorded at Agile 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Steve Crago about how leaders need to be coaches, being a good mentor and facilitating effective meetings Why listen to this podcast • There is an expectation that leaders are able to be effective coaches for their teams today • There are tools such as the Leadership Circle Profile that can help you understand your own strengths and weaknesses • You don’t necessarily need to work on weaknesses – often enhancing areas of strength can give better results than focusing on improving areas of weakness • To effectively mentor someone in an area you need to have deep knowledge and experience working in that domain • Facilitation is a skillset that is about helping others achieve their goals in a collaborative session More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2Yk1g5s You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional softwar

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Derek Weeks of Sonatype about the results of the 2020 DevSecOps Community Survey and the All Day DevOps conference. Why listen to this podcast: • If you’re doing DevOps correctly then DevSecOps is already a part of it • Organisations with mature DevOps practices have more security tools and security is more tightly integrated into the overall environment • Organisations with mature teams have a higher percentage of happier developers within their organizations than the immature ones • Happy developers are 3.6 times more likely to pay attention to security • In organisations with unhappy developers the primary cause of friction in the development process is management, in happy environments it is other developers More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/379gYEf You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/2

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods spoke to Dr Michelle O’Sullivan and Douglas Talbot about how managers and team leads can support the mental wellness of their teams through turbulent times Why listen to this podcast: • Good work is one of the best things for our mental health. It gives us a sense of purpose and it provides us with a community • Mental wellness is about how to speak with people, having open conversations, giving people practical support when they need it, and also just creating a safe space and a good culture within your team. Most of it is just about good line management in general. • Checking in in about how people are sleeping can be a safe conversation and can be good indicator of potential deeper issues • So if somebody is quite stressed by the pandemic or what's happening with their loved ones, or someone's sick, these are very real fears, and we don't want to pathologize what is a very normal reaction to an abnormal situation • As a manager it is import

In this podcast recorded at Agile 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, first spoke to Steve Holyer about facilitating open space events, then he spoke to Tim Meyers about the competencies and attitudes needed for good coaching Why listen to this podcast: (Open Space) • Open Space Technology is a powerful tool for engaging participation • Designing a good Open Space event take careful preparation and support • Open Space gives the benefit of the hallway conversations that are so valuable in most in-person events • Open Space events can be facilitated remotely, provided the facilitators are experienced and put care into the design of the event (Coaching) • There is a well defined set of competencies for agile coaching • These competencies include professional coaching, mentoring, facilitation and teaching • Agile coaching has a bias towards using an agile approach to address problems and opportunities • Being a coach means you're prepared to partner with people as they improve, as they go

In this podcast recorded at Agile 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to with Victor Germano, Deepti Jain and Angie Doyle about the ways the Agile Alliance supports community initiatives. Why listen to this podcast: • The Agile Alliance supports many initiatives which are the way that community members get involved with the work of the Alliance around the world • Initiatives are mainly member created ideas which support the value dials of the organisaiton: increase the depth and breadth of agile, create an inclusive and global community, bringing value to members • There are a wide range of initiatives already underway, and the Alliance is always looking for more opportunities to expand the way they reach and serve members around the globe • There is a process to follow and people who want to help get new initiatives established • Before proposing a new initiative examine the ones which are already underway to see if what is needed can be met through one of them More on this: Quic

In this podcast recorded at Agile 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Antoinette Coetzee and Jason Knight about Collective Sensemaking and Deliberately Developmental Conversations Tags: Agile, Agile 2019, Agile conferences, productivity, teamwork, psychological safety Key takeaways: • We are generally unaware of our own developmental stage in building relationships • Raising awareness and exploring our own perceptions is possible and a powerful tool for building relationships with others • Psychological safety is a precondition for developmental conversations, and it needs to be paired with psychological challenge • You can't have psychological challenge without psychological safety and you won't have any growth unless there is psychological challenge as well • The participants have to be mutually committed to each other's development and to their own development in order to help each other grow in areas that they need More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ h

In this podcast recorded at Agile 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Chris Bailey about his book Hyperfocus and techniques for productivity hacking. Why listen to this podcast: • For many of us, having available time is not the problem – it’s having available attention • We all have a chronotype which shows the time of day when we are most productive • Productivity is about more than just managing time – it’s about managing time, energy and attention • Research shows that we tend to focus on one thing for only 35-40 seconds before being distracted • Tasks that lead to procrastination have seven things in common: Those are whether a task is boring, whether it’s frustrating, whether it's difficult, whether it's ambiguous, whether it is unstructured, whether it's lacking in personal meaning, and whether it's lacking in intrinsic rewards. More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2XPhZyF You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekl

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Jono Bacon about building communities, the value of community when suddenly working remotely and remote collaboration. Why listen to this podcast: • In the suddenly remote environment caused by COVID-19, community becomes even more important than when teams were mainly collocated • Every business has got an internal community to a degree, often somewhat accidental in nature, but when you become remote you need to lean on that sense of connectedness with your colleagues a lot more • One of the things that unifies communities more than anything else is a sense of purpose • There are three types of communities in the world - consumer, champion and collaborator • When working remotely it’s very important to be intentional about maintaining the relationships with your colleagues More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/3cee02z You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Helen Bartimote and Jamie Dobson from Container Solutions about maintaining mental health and wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Why listen to this podcast: • Mental health and wellness is not a new challenge for the technology industry, and it is more openly discussed today that is has been previously • The COVID-19 pandemic has put many people into a collective state of shock. • Acknowledging the emotional reactions and their impact is an important part of being able to cope with what is happening. It's really important to give them time and know that they will pass, come back again and pass, and that’s OK. • It’s important to identify what you can control and acknowledge what you cannot control, accept that the feelings of being out of control are real and they are stressful, and that you always have control over how we respond to a situation, even if you can’t control the circumstances • Empathic responding, finding ways

In this podcast recorded at Agile 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Johanna Rothman & Mark Kilby about their book From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams Why listen to this podcast: • There are important mindset shifts that are needed to help enable distributed teams to be effective • You can’t take practices and approaches that are designed for co-located teams and apply them to distributed teams without adapting them to the new context • Distributed teams need to identify and align on their hours of overlap • Transparency and experimentation are important for a distributed team to build their culture • Communication needs to include personal context, not just focusing on the work but get to know the people • Let the teams identify and evolve their own ways of working, do not impose it from above More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ bit.ly/2Jwg9u5 You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from p

In this special edition of the podcast, made in conjunction with Retrium and the Agile Alliance, we brought together a panel of remote working experts to explore and share experiences around what teams and individuals can do to cope and be effective in the environment where so many people are suddenly forced to work from home and collaborate remotely. The panel consisted of: • David Horowitz • Mark Kilby • Lisette Sutherland • Judy Rees • Steve McCann • Charles Humble • Shane Hastie The full video recording of the webinar can be found here: https://bit.ly/2wniFjL. • Huge numbers of people around the globe are suddenly having to work remotely and figure out how to cope in these turbulent times • Part of what makes this environment so stressful for many of us is the fact that life feels out of our control • One way to gain back some semblance of control is to come up with 15% solutions, small actions that you can take immediately • Remote work can be effective and efficient provided people are supported pr

In this podcast recorded at Agile 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Andrea Tomasini on organisational change, sense-making, leadership and organic agility Why listen to this podcast: • Organic Agility is a way to help make organisations more resilient by making culture explicit and visible • You can’t design culture, you can only influence it • Interviews and questionnaires give a limited a biased view of culture – you need other tools to make sense and truly understand organisation culture • Organisations need to be seen as complex systems and analysed from that perspective, not through mechanistic view • You influence culture by making the stories visible and letting people move in the direction that makes the stories more positive More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2QsqMCf You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq Subscribe: www.y

This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences. In this podcast recorded at Agile 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Howard Sublett about the current and future state of the Scrum Alliance. Why listen to this podcast: • When organisations and teams adopt Scrum effectively the difference in atmosphere and attitude to work is palpable • There is still a lot of faux-agile/scrum where practices are adopted without the mindset shift • The Scrum Alliance have appointed Howard as the Chief Product Owner, responsible for defining the what and the why of the organisation, and Melissa Bloggs as the Chief Scrum Master responsible for the how of implementation • The Scrum Alliance has moved to a self-selected, cross-functional team model based around customer segments • With7 billion people working in the world today, even with 1.2 million people certified in Scrum, there’s still a huge amount of work to be done to improve the world o

In this podcast recorded at Agile 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Diana Larsen about the origins of what became agile development, where business agility is header and the agile fluency project . Why listen to this podcast: • There is a deep history of business improvement initiatives that predates the agile manifesto • It was a part of a cultural movement that was moving more toward more humane workplaces that could deliver more value • When you give people a good environment and good support to do their work, you get better work and better products • The ideas of business agility predate the work in agile development – engaging support structures in organisations to enable change • You can't change one part of a system without it having effects on other parts of the system • The Agile Fluency Model is a tool to help teams diagnose themselves and to expose the system to leadership More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/3acIJwf You can also

In this podcast recorded at Agile 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Steve Milligan about his work in Agile Finance and bringing the back-office along on the agile transformation journey. Why listen to this podcast: • The funding of agile initiatives has been largely left outside of the scope of transformation efforts, which results in dysfunction and cross purpose • Agile finance introduces structure so that financial aspects (target setting, budgeting, expenditure and reporting) become synergistic and add to the positive impact of transformation • Attitude changes need to start with the agile coaching and transformation change agents – they self-constrain and are biased against working with finance groups • The need to move from static budgets to activity-based budgets and investigate ideas like Beyond Budgeting • The authoritative bodies (SEC, AICPA) have issued guidance for the accounting profession regarding investigating and determining the applicability of concepts lik

In this podcast recorded at Agile 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dave West, CEO of scrum.org about agile beyond software, the need for organisational alignment and how product ownership is a major inhibitor for many organisations because it is not done well. Why listen to this podcast: • Agile ideas are taking root beyond software development, in business areas and in complex engineering environments • The scope of agility is more than just delivering great product – it is delivering great product, getting great feedback, experimentation and learning • The large consulting firms have the relationships at the most senior levels to enable top-down change in organisations • Most software teams today are delivering relatively well, however there is misalignment between the delivery teams and the wider organisation’s ability to accept and release product to the market effectively • Good product ownership is incredibly hard and most organisations do product ownership very badly

This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences. In this podcast recorded at Agile 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Caitlin Walker about clean language, anti-fragility and inclusiveness. Why listen to this podcast: • Clean Language is a way of communicating that helps reduce bias and influence in order to help bring clarity to a situation • Clean language questions can be used anywhere where gathering high quality information without biasing the answer will be useful • The questions expose diversity in thinking and attitudes and enable greater connections and empathy between people • An antifragile system is one that when you apply stress to it, it grows stronger • Clean language applied to teams helps them create the conditions for antifragility More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2OiMjwb You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics fro

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Steve Persch of Panthion about supporting open source communities and leading technical teams Why listen to this podcast: • Communities need to be nurtured and supported • The open source community is based around the idea that you can build on the knowledge of others • Leadership technical teams can be challenging and there are some simple (but not easy) things that can be dome to be better at it • The goal should never be to follow a brand or methodology slavishly – it should always be about solving customer problems and delivering business value • Successful projects happen as a result of the people who work together, not the technology used More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/30Xi6rq You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to David McAllister about building technical communities. Why listen to this podcast: • A community comes together around a common shared interest of some sort • Communities need to be actively nurtured in a similar way to open source projects • Communities require constant tuning, and this means you need to figure out ways to measure them • Different types of content work for different members of the community and in different contexts – ensure your content matches the intent • “Collecting data is only the first step towards wisdom, sharing data is the first step towards community” More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/3asqUtV You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8 Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ Follow on LinkedI

This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences. In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Kevin Callahan about positive organisational design and organisations as complex systems Why listen to this podcast: • Positive organisation development starts with areas where you are strong and builds on those, rather than focusing on weaknesses and negative areas • Involving people to open up “what could be” which starts a change effort that makes it possible to achieve • Start by trusting that people want to do amazing work • Organisations are complex systems and need to be treated as such • In complex systems the balance of pressures is necessary, and in many organisations one or other area becomes predominant (eg revenue or cost saving pressure) and this causes the system to become brittle More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/36Qj5fk You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive w