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Do Your Change Agents Match Your Team Members' Personalities? Configuration management focuses on software process improvement in an organization in many important ways, impacting the application build, package, and deployment. However, some organizations are more open to change than others. If you want to be successful at bringing about positive change, then you need to be able to assess and understand the personality of your organization and identify the key change agents who can help you get the job done.
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Uncertainty about Uncertainty Uncertainty doesn't have to be a bad thing, but many say they'd rather know there were definitely problems coming, rather than be uncertain about whether there were or not. What do you prefer? Do you spend valuable time trying to prevent uncertainty?
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Goal, Goal, Who's Got the Goal? Don Gray explains why software development teams need three common goals: long term, mid term, and short term. These goals focus a team and provide the glue that holds the team together.
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Heard and Valued: Three Short and Useful Bits of Advice for Improving Your Leadership Skills Yogi Berra famously said, “You can observe a lot just by watching.” In this article, Payson shares some of what he’s learned about leadership just by listening. Learn how transparency and iterative improvement can maximize the results of great leadership.
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On Beauty, Quality, and Relativity The saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” rings true whether you’re staring at a centuries-old painting, listening to a busker’s music reflect off the tiles in a subway station, or testing software. It’s one thing to evaluate quality, but how do we evaluate how we evaluate quality?
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We're Not "Special" Often, when I comment on someone's blog post or respond to a tweet with a story about how my team succeeded with some practice, someone replies, "Yeah, but your team is special." I interpret this as meaning, "You're a presenter and book author. You must be an expert, so of course your team can do anything." This frustrates the heck out of me.
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Empowering Agile Teams Teams, when truly empowered, will always make better decisions than any one individual. Where can you empower teams as you adopt agile?
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Agile Leadership for Mid-Managers Len Whitmore explores how the growth of agile changes the roles, responsibilities, and titles of mid-managers more so than any other management group, because agile practices require more leadership and less of what is considered traditional management techniques.
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Specification by Example: Collaborating on a Scope without High-Level Control Understanding what the business users are trying to achieve can significantly help you focus the project on things that really matter. In this excerpt from Gojko Adzic's book Specification by Example, the author offers some tips for effectively collaborating on the project scope when you don’t have high-level control of the project.
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Behavior Unbecoming of a Leader One of the most important roles of a leader is to serve as a role model for others in the organization. In this article, Naomi Karten describes a situation in which a CIO forgot this responsibility, almost taking action that would have undermined his efforts to reverse the IT organization’s plunging morale.
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