Your path to business agility
This weekend, I was watching the movie Elf and it got me thinking – how does Santa’s Workshop keep up with the demands of a booming population? I saw the manager keeping track of production quotas on a clipboard. There’s a single magical book that contains what everyone wants for Christmas, but it’s unclear how...
For some, October is leaves changing color, pumpkins being carved and bidding farewell to daylight in the afternoon. For us, it’s all about participating in one of our favorite events of the year — DevOps Enterprise Summit 2019. And we could not be more excited to get lost in the neon lights once more. With...
It was exactly one day after my vacation. Starting to get back into the groove, I had a quick chat with my fellow engineer Holger (Staudacher). He casually mentioned that he found a really confusing test failure the other day that we should pair up on. Ready to start digging into some code again, he...
Digital transformations typically demand major shifts in thinking, processes and behavior across the organization. It’s rarely, if ever, easy – especially when it comes to scaling and sustaining the transformation. Inevitably there will be a cultural shift, especially when you consider all the moving parts: the software delivery teams, the product owners, the multiple business...
The Bifurcation of Security In recent years, we’re seeing a clear split within the security community. There’s the “traditional” enterprise security focused on auditable controls, segregation of duties, approvals, change management, etc. These traditional controls are well-aligned with the waterfall model, but when applied to Agile software delivery organizations, a disaster inevitably occurs. And then...
Please note: In this post, I will refer to all design practices, User Experience Design, Interface Design, Visual Design, and Design Research as design. Much has been written about Lean UX and the role of design in Agile development. Design’s primary role is reducing the risk that the team is building the wrong thing or...
Tasktop Integration Hub suffers from an interesting, almost paradoxical problem: the users who benefit most from our product often have no idea that it exists. They’ve never seen its user interface (UI), never done any configuration, and probably couldn’t even name our product if asked. When our product functions as it should, there’s no reason...
In the latest release of Tasktop Integration Hub (19.3), the Product Development team tried out an experiment to deliver even more business value out of our flagship product. In my last blog, I described how Tasktop has made few cultural and process-oriented changes to be more customer-obsessed and ship features faster. Galvanized by the new...
At Tasktop our Product, Engineering and UX teams operate under a single umbrella called ‘Product Development’ to make all our value streams “customer-obsessed”. Our teams do not work in silos or a single project, rather they are focused on optimizing the value stream for a single product – such as Tasktop Integration Hub – to...
When you come in to work, do your teammates greet you? Are jokes told on your team? Especially bad ones? Do you chat about anything besides work? Trust is essential to teams. Literature like The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and The Phoenix Project remind us of this, as well as how important it is...
