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Don’t Ask for Permission or Forgiveness—Use an Agile Alternative Some teams get around bottlenecks by taking a “better to ask forgiveness than permission” approach. This may be expedient, but it doesn’t provide a path to changing the organizational dynamic, and it can lead to wrong decisions when wider input is advisable. A more agile way is to take an “I intend to” approach. |
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When Customers Attack: Dealing with Rude Clients It seems like the only way some customers know how to communicate is to accuse, complain, and verbally attack. This only gets worse if there are delays. But when you do your best to build trust with customers early on, they are more likely to accept explanations about setbacks, even if they don’t fully understand them. |
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If Santa Can Be Agile, So Can You To improve his toy development lifecycle, Santa Claus had the North Pole move to an agile and DevOps approach. Santa knows it's important to accept requirements late in the process, work incrementally, deploy on time, and—above all—focus on the customer. Here’s what he found to be more effective with agile and DevOps. |
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4 Tips to Refocus Stale Standups The daily standup is supposed to get everyone on the same page and make teams more productive and efficient. But it’s easy for this short meeting to become stale and stop providing any real benefit. Here are four ways to get out of the slump of merely delivering status updates and re-energize your daily standups. |
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Is Your Culture about Responsibility or Blame? When things go wrong, it can be helpful to understand what happened and who was involved. However, all too often organizations (and the managers within) confuse responsibility with assigning blame. The former is essential for improvement. The latter works against an effective, collaborative, productive culture. |
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Beware of Success Stories The tendency to look back and think you know what contributed to a success is called survivorship bias. It occurs when you make a decision or take some action based on past successes while ignoring past failures. That's why it's important to approach reports of successful projects with a healthy dose of skepticism. |
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Lessons Learned from Product Failures Being agile is all about learning from failures and building on experiences. This applies to not just individuals, but even to large organizations. The key is being transparent and objective in accepting and understanding failures, and taking away lessons for future actions and decisions. Just keep innovating. |
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Superior Leaders Ask the Tough Questions Inspiring quotes can be motivating, but there's more to good leadership. New leaders may feel compelled to find clever and memorable things to say, when in reality, they should probably focus less on what they’re saying and more on what they’re hearing. The best leaders ask good questions and listen to the answers. |