Business
Preparing Your Business for a Post-Pandemic World (via Harvard Business Review)
- What position can you attain during and after the pandemic?
- What is your plan for bouncing back?
- How will your culture and identity change?
- What new projects do you need to launch, run, and coordinate?
- How prepared are you to execute your plans and projects?
Becoming a Better Corporate Citizen (via Harvard Business Review)
This longer article, written by former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, shares how she led the company through a transformation to a more socially responsible company with “Performance with Purpose.” The four pillars were financial returns, healthier offerings, reducing environmental impact, and offering more support to women and families.
Your Company is Too Risk Averse (via Harvard Business Review)
Risky ideas can often pay off handsomely. However, corporate incentives and control processes actively discourage managers from taking risks. CEOs are evaluated on the long-term, but managers at lower levels bet their careers on every decision. The article lists out some approaches to dealing with loss aversion.
Career
How to Tell Your Story on LinkedIn (via Harvard Business Review)
Most people either have too much or too little information on LinkedIn, which can hinder how people connect with you. This is marketing; you need to craft the story other people should see. There’s no one style/template, so find appealing examples and borrow their approach.
What Will Work-Life Balance Look Like After the Pandemic? (via Harvard Business Review)
Where some jobs have temporarily vanished, some have transitioned to remote work with the possibility of being available at any time (not leaving work at work). The system needed after the pandemic is behind us will need to be on that works for workers, not just employers.
Communication
Finding the Right Words In a Crisis (via Harvard Business Review)
- Replace long words with short ones
- Find analogies to help connect the known to the novel
- Personalize by using stories
- Observe the rule of three; any more than this and people likely won’t recall
Culture
Creating a Trans-inclusive Workplace (via Harvard Business Review)
Discrimination is still the case for LGBTQ+ people, and there are many downsides to having to be “someone else” at work. Businesses would do well to 1) adopt basic trans-inclusive policies around bathroom access, dress codes, and pronoun usage, 2) support people during gender transitions, 3) develop trans-specific diversity training, and 4) utilize interventions to build resiliency.
Managing Remotely (via Software Lead Weekly)
Another potpourri article with tips on interacting, video meetings, WFH gear, activity levels, and focus.
Leadership
Build Your Team’s Resilience — From Home (via Harvard Business Review)
- Know your team’s resilience factors, specifically a high level of confidence in their abilities, disciplined routines for their work, and social and family support.
- Foster resilience-oriented conversations via 1:1s
- Ask questions (e.g., “who on your team can help you if you get stuck?”)
- Find learning opportunities in times of change (e.g., improvising)
Our book club discussed decision-making groups, presenting to senior leadership, time management, and communities of learning.
Perfectionism Will Slow You Down in a Crisis (via Harvard Business Review)
“If you need to be right before you move, you will lose.” Humans are wired for distraction (to survive), for empathy (to gather in groups), and ego (self-preservation). To adopt an agile mindset in times of unprecedented change, we will need to practice the opposite: focus and awareness, compassion (empathy turned outward), and selflessness.
Process
The Spotify “Model”: Don’t Just Copy-Paste (via Agile Amped)
There’s much to admire about the Spotify Engineering Culture/Model, but to blindly copy it is an example of cargo-culting. The linked post gives the summary points, as there were too many good ones to list in an executive summary.
Gain Control by Breaking Dependencies — An Introduction
Dependencies are a way of life in software development. The author poses two solutions: manage them, or break them. Managing dependencies, which is our usual approach, violates every Agile Manifesto line item and many of the Lean practices as well. To break them, a) do it their way, b) do it your way, c) don’t start until the dependent item is completely ready.
Gain Control By Breaking Dependencies: Task Level Part 1
- Anti-pattern 1: single-phase team (analysis -> design -> dev -> testing); this is waterfall
- Anti-pattern 2: layer team (front end, business layer, back end); no feature is complete until all layers are done, integration costs are high, end-to-end testing can’t be done until everything is integrated, a coordination layer is required now that work is being done in parallel
- Solution: cross-functional feature team that has all the skills needed to complete the work; people are T-shaped (can do a little bit of every task, can do really well at one particular task). Don’t have a skill on your team? Pair up with someone who does to give you that skill rather than getting the team too large.
Gain Control By Breaking Dependencies: Task Level Part 2a
- Anti-pattern 1: lack of discipline of getting to “done”; things have to be hardened last-minute to get into some shippable version
- Anti-pattern 2: Scrum-fall; having each of the single phases (analysis, design, development, testing) on your team, but you have waterfall within the team where one person can’t start until the previous one finishes
- Anti-pattern 3: horizontal story slicing; one person does the front end, one person does the business logic, one person does the backend. This is a layer team, where the only difference is each layer isn’t its own team.
Gain Control By Breaking Dependencies: Task Level Pt. 2b
- Corrective pattern 1: split each story as a vertical slice (front, middle, back), such that when completed it is shippable; prioritize which stories should be done first
- Corrective pattern 2: everyone swarms (mobs) on a story until it’s done (WIP limit = 1 for the team)
Gain Control By Breaking Dependencies: Feature Level
- Anti-pattern: one team owns part of a use case, another team owns the other part. This leads to specialization and handoffs.
- Corrective pattern: one team owns the entire use case from start to finish.
Gain Control By Breaking Dependencies: Between Organizational Entities
- Anti-pattern: Coordinate and plan better. You have big room planning and contracts are drawn up between teams only to find that the plan is out of date in a few weeks. Each team has priorities, but likely not the priorities of other teams they depend on. The less control teams have over their work, the more coordination is required (i.e., waste).
- Corrective pattern 1: do it their way (most powerful), do it your way, wait for it to be done before you start your part. Have the other team coach yours how to do it their way.
- Corrective pattern 2: management builds a bridge. Don’t manage the team, manage what they can’t control
- Corrective pattern 3: remove dependencies due to over-processing. Are you following rigid governance that doesn’t serve the org (i.e., ticking boxes because that’s how it’s done)?
How to Shift Gears and Become and Agile Leader
- Issue: We are dependent on another team. Do it their way, work around them, wait for them to be completely done.
- Issue: We have to provide an end date. Avoid if possible as it rarely helps motivate the team. If one must be given, ask your team to forecast a completion timeline without compromising quality.
- Issue: We have to get approval. See if there’s unnecessary process; see if your team can take ownership of the risk through additional work.
- Issue: We can’t directly engage with our user. Establish a partnership between the UX group and your team.
- Issue: We don’t have a stable delivery environment. Work with infrastructure to get training on how your team can own this.
Psychology
Why smart people believe coronavirus myths (via Jamie Phillips)
- Informations sound just plausible enough, use images to increase trust
- The more times we see a statement, the more likely we are to consider it truth
- Content is shared before its accuracy is considered
- Social media incentivizes engagement, not accuracy
- Some people are prone to reflexively respond instead of employing deliberative and analytical thinking
Don’t Let Uncertainty Paralyze You (via Harvard Business Review)
When we’re threatened, we shift into a binary decision mindset which prevents us from seeing the bigger picture and other options that may be available to us.
Technology
A Radical Solution to Scale AI Technology (via Harvard Business Review)
Proof-of-concepts are often unfit for risks, data bias, data privacy, or ethical considerations. They prove a point (answer a question) but they don’t solve a problem at scale. Instead, plan for your effort to scale and use pilots instead of proofs of concept.