2014 January

In my previous post on building robust teams, I mentioned the need to have some people in a team with an appetite for risk and some who are risk-averse. Some people take risks because they are too inexperienced to know better but some experienced people know that it’s important to take risks. NetFlix continuous delivery […]

The failure of “predict and control” When it comes to managing projects and teams, the natural inclination for many people is to try to predict and control everything while taking comfort in tools and technology and processes and practices. This happens frequently in software development despite the fact that other, far more mature, domains learned […]

It’s not uncommon for teams at IBM to be distributed across countries and timezones. I joined my current team last January, and we have team members in the United States, Canada, and even Switzerland. I work from home, met my team lead in person for the first time in November, and have not yet met […]

Friction In a previous post about retrospectives and continuous improvement I described how we track “pain points” which are issues that block or hinder our ability to develop a specific development capability. Another way to think of pain points is that they are sources of friction. In physics, friction is a force that impedes movement. […]

This is the fifth installment in our blog series describing the transformation of our internal ALM development organization toward a Continuous Delivery model. The previous post was Planning & Execution from Prototype to Practice. In this series, we describe the motivations behind adoption of a Continuous Delivery model and the many challenges we faced as we […]

In a previous post Sreerupa Sen wrote about run teams and feature teams and how they are helping to make our continuous delivery successful. I want to expand on that in this post and talk a bit about the culture that enables such fluid organizational constructs to work successfully. In the Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) project […]

The ability of any team to execute with agility is predicated on a shared awareness of important team elements such as the team’s strategy, plans, and current status. A measure of shared awareness is easily gained when team members work alongside one another. You can’t help but notice what your teammate is doing when she […]