In this podcast, Mike Kavis and guests, Chris Young and Mattia Battiston, discuss teams, workflow, and value delivery. Their advice: IT and business must work collaboratively to manage change, identify and clear bottlenecks, and understand where value lies to optimize workflow.

By working across tech and business, I think you build that shared understanding, you create that empathy, and that helps you kind of work better.

Join Matthew Skelton and Victoria Morgan Smith, co-authors of the book Internal Tech Conferences: Accelerate Multi-team Learning, for a Container Solutions webinar: “WTF are Internal Tech Conferences“, hosted by Jamie Dobson.

Internal tech conferences can make a significant impact on an organisation's level of sharing, learning, and communication by accelerating multi-team learning across technology departments. The pace of change in IT means that cross-department learning is essential, and many organisations have found that an internal tech conference is an excellent way to achieve this.

Internal tech conferences can make a significant impact on an organisation's level of sharing, learning, and communication by accelerating multi-team learning across technology departments. The pace of change in IT means that cross-department learning is essential, and many organisations have found that an internal tech conference is an excellent way to achieve this.

A talk at the Agile In The City Bristol conference - November 06-08:

Agile metrics for predicting the future by Mattia Battiston (author of Team Guide to Metrics for Business Decisions)

Most teams need to answer questions like “When will it be done? What can I get by date X?”. However, common estimation approaches often fail to give us the predictability we want, and tend to introduce bad behaviours like hard deadlines and hiding uncertainty.

A workshop at Lean Agile Scotland 2019 - October 9-11th:

Love the brain you're in by Chris Young (Linius Technologies) & Kate Gray (Number Forty-One)

From different backgrounds, Kate, a post-graduate student in cognitive psychology and computational modelling, and Chris, an engineer, have reached a common commitment to understand that what makes us human affects whether we thrive or flounder at work.

Understanding the brain benefits both you and your work. Using familiar lean concepts (Theory of Constraints, limiting WIP, small batch sizes etc), we'll share the science and experiences we are aware of, adding to our understanding of why we do what we do.

This workshop will help you recognise toxic communication habits that emerge during stress or conflict, including your own. What impact do they have on those around you? And, most importantly, what can you do about it?

Victoria Morgan-Smith is co-author of the book Internal Tech Conferences published by Conflux Books.

DevOperability – Putting the Ops back into DevOps

We do “DevDev” really well, but are Ops people sufficiently engaged in ‘DevOps’ efforts and do we know what Operability means? We seem to have moved the wall between Dev and Ops a little bit further to the right, instead of destroying it!

Many larger organisations are guilty of this and we see the same issues at TransUnion. One of our greatest challenges is to encourage product teams to look not just at deploy-and-run-ability but also at long term operability of solutions. I’ll talk a bit about what operability means and how we can embed the right concepts early – with particular emphasis on understanding, testing and deployment.

A talk at CultureCon - September 18-19th:

TOXINS
The 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Victoria Morgan-Smith (Financial Times)

John Gottman (clinical psychologist and relationship expert) highlighted 4 behaviours that he deemed to be not just unhealthy, but actually toxic.  The debilitating effect they have on the people they are directed towards has the potential to destroy working relationships. He called these behaviours the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse because of how destructive they could be.

These behaviours most commonly emerge during times of stress or conflict - and we know we can’t simply avoid conflict because after all, ‘smooth seas do not make skillful sailors’, [African proverb]. It’s essential that we learn techniques to help us navigate stress if we’re to achieve effective decision-making, psychological safety and the high-performing teams that will result.