personal improvement

Articles

Communication and Culture Communication and Culture

Communication styles vary significantly from one person to another, due to personal tendencies and cultural influences. Keeping this in mind is especially important these days, with so much global connectivity. The DevOps transformation compels us to revisit the way we manage communication and culture and be mindful of our interactions with coworkers.

Leslie  Sachs's picture Leslie Sachs
Learning from Mistakes Positive Psychology and Learning from Mistakes

Mistakes happen. But team members can engage in very dysfunctional behavior after they have made mistakes—often because their organizations punish mistakes and cause damage trying to cover them up. Here’s what we learn from positive psychology about creating an environment where employees can be empowered to address their mistakes in an open, honest manner.

Leslie  Sachs's picture Leslie Sachs
Making Difficult Choices Myth 31: I Don’t Have to Make the Difficult Choices

"Don't bring me problems; bring me solutions." Sound familiar? Sounds like a management cop out to Johanna Rothman. A primary purpose of managers is to help their teams perform to the best of their abilities, and that includes stepping up and making tough decisions to help solve problems.

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman
DevOps Psychology Using Positive Psychology in DevOps

Bringing different technology groups together can result in some interesting challenges. We often feel like we are doing group therapy for a very dysfunctional family, and many of the challenges encountered highlight the biases people often bring into the workplace. Leslie Sachs describes how to identify these behavioral issues and utilize positive psychology to help develop high-performance teams.

Leslie  Sachs's picture Leslie Sachs
Planning During a Health Care Crisis Save Your Sanity: Planning During a Health Care Crisis

A health care crisis can hit without warning, leaving you both nursing the patient and mired in seemingly endless bureaucracy. In this article, Kathy Iberle shares with us her experience dealing with an elderly uncle who suffered a stroke and how agile methods, like using a visual planning board, can help one prepare and be ready when disaster strikes.

Kathy Iberle's picture Kathy Iberle
The Three Pillars of Positive Psychology The Three Pillars of Positive Psychology

Positive psychology encourages positive and effective behaviors that help to bring out desired traits, and it applies well to many business and technical situations. Leslie Sachs explains the third pillar of positive psychology, which is related to organizational psychology and is of great interest to anyone who wants to be part of an effective institution.

Leslie  Sachs's picture Leslie Sachs
How to Deal With Overly Agreeable People How to Deal With Overly Agreeable People

Dealing with overly agreeable people can be fraught with obstacles quite different than those usually associated with the stereotypical stubborn geek who seems unable to bend or compromise. This article will help you understand and deal with the unexpectedly challenging aspects that you may experience interacting with some agreeable people.

Leslie  Sachs's picture Leslie Sachs
Throughput or Productivity?

I’m tech-editing an article for the Agile Journal. I’m having a discussion with the author about the words “productivity” and “throughput.”

I believe that what we measure in agile teams is throughput, the number of features through the team over time. I don’t think we measure productivity, the number of features per person or per team over time.

In kanban, it’s quite clear. We measure throughput. To me, it’s clear in iterations, too. We measure throughput.

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman
Software Development : How Good It Can Be

This article is dedicated to telling you how good developing software can be. Austin Hastings describes many software development practices working together, some of which you don't have. If you like an idea you see here, implement it. After your first implementation steps, you can return here to find yet another idea to implement.

Austin Hastings
Six sigma distribution Is the Grass Greener on the Other Side of the Fence?

We may be creatures of habit—adhering to and promoting processes we know well—but we also habitually look to other work environments that appear capable of nurturing our ideas once an old environment becomes depleted. Ed Weller believes that searching for greener pastures is unnecessary. You just need to learn how to cultivate your managers in order to create an environment that will harbor your ideas. Ed explains why you'll end up grazing fruitlessly if you can't plant your ideas with management.

Ed Weller's picture Ed Weller

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