Articles about agile teamwork, DevOps and collaboration

Articles & Publications

Articles about agile teamwork, DevOps and collaboration

We have long since entered the era of VUCA, where it feels like time is fly­ing by. And we have the impres­sion that time is the lim­it­ed resource we need to man­age. Long-known time man­age­ment meth­ods expe­ri­ence a revival and become more and more pop­u­lar. But is it enough or even pos­si­ble to con­trol the time?

A Leader’s Role in Setting and Meeting Team Goals

Sabine Wojcieszak — Status Hero

Team goals can be moti­va­tion­al, pro­vide insight into how your process­es are per­form­ing, fos­ter col­lab­o­ra­tion and inno­va­tion, and ensure that everyone’s work mat­ters in the big picture.

How and Why a Co-Located Team Can Work

Sabine Wojcieszak — Status Hero

Co-loca­tion is opti­mal for agile work­ing, mak­ing it easy to be cre­ative, think togeth­er, and use visu­al­iza­tions to align on the same goal. With almost no bar­ri­ers to com­mu­ni­ca­tion, agili­ty can flour­ish. How­ev­er, co-loca­tion doesn’t auto­mat­i­cal­ly cre­ate agili­ty, nor a high-per­form­ing team.

The Complete Guide to Effective Virtual Meetings

Sabine Wojcieszak — Status Hero
Good com­mu­ni­ca­tion is vital to an organization’s suc­cess, and vir­tu­al meet­ings play an essen­tial role in achiev­ing that. But you can’t sim­ply trans­fer in-per­son meet­ing meth­ods to the vir­tu­al world. By using the prop­er equip­ment, skills, prepa­ra­tion, and cul­ture, you can make sure your vir­tu­al meet­ings are effective. 

The Five Agile Meetings Explained

Sabine Wojcieszak — Status Hero

The Agile approach is espe­cial­ly impor­tant in com­plex project and prod­uct envi­ron­ments that deal with a high lev­el of uncer­tain­ty, and sev­er­al types of Agile meet­ings (or cer­e­monies) are key to its success.

In this arti­cle, you will learn more about these types of meet­ings, as well as how to imple­ment them.

Signs You Might Be a Bad Manager

Sabine Wojcieszak — Status Hero

“Peo­ple leave man­agers, not com­pa­nies,” is a well-known say­ing, but when an employ­ee leaves, the dam­age has already been done. That’s why it’s impor­tant to look for signs that you might be a bad man­ag­er before key parts of your team leave. Only then can you make a con­scious effort to change your man­age­ment style.

How to conduct effective team meetings

Sabine Wojcieszak — Poppulo.com

An ordi­nary work­ing day after lunch. A group of four enters the ele­va­tor. “So what´s on this after­noon, folks?” She looks around to her col­leagues. “I am meet­ing one of my cus­tomers to talk about their next projects!”, the young guy next to her answers. The oth­er two look at each oth­er: “Oh dear, we have a meet­ing. I don’t know why I should go there, but I have to although I have a lot to do. It will be the next time-con­sum­ing, bor­ing one.”

A Short Manual to Bring Change Successfully into Your Team

Sabine Wojcieszak — InfoQ

Imple­ment­ing the DevOps phi­los­o­phy in a team means a lot more than just chang­ing the gen­er­al set-up of the actu­al work­ing con­di­tions. Bring­ing a num­ber of tools into the team’s work­flow won’t solve the indi­vid­ual issues, because a team exists and works thanks to the inter­ac­tion between human beings, not tools. For bet­ter or for worse.

Social Skills for DevOps: Whose responsibility?

Sabine Wojcieszak — DevOps.com

In his post “DevOps devel­op­ers; don´t be a Dev­Goof” on devops.com Park­er Yates point­ed out, that devel­op­ers have to become more social. Devs should bet­ter real­ize that they need to become a nor­mal part of the busi­ness social struc­ture. That is real­ly true and extreme­ly nec­es­sary to make DevOps more efficient.

The complexity of communication: Are we all Masters of Disaster?

Sabine Wojcieszak — DevOps.com

To bet­ter the com­mu­ni­ca­tion between peo­ple in tech teams is one impor­tant issue in dai­ly work. Although we all grew up with com­mu­ni­ca­tion from our ear­ly child­hood on, we know, that com­mu­ni­ca­tion often fails. But what do we all do about this dis­crep­an­cy? Why do we accept eyes wide open these fre­quent­ly painful fail­ures? Why don´t we real­ly care about mis­un­der­stand­ings and their con­se­quences? Are we all Mas­ters of Disaster?

Well-being in tech – Who really cares?

Sabine Wojcieszak — DevOps.com

As a free­lance con­sul­tant for more than 15 years I skip from com­pa­ny to com­pa­ny of dif­fer­ent sizes in dif­fer­ent indus­tries. For the last two years I have been very close to the IT-tech indus­try. I love to work with the “Nerds” and “Geeks” and I like the atmos­phere on the devops­days I have attend­ed. But I am real­ly con­fused about one impor­tant prob­lem, which nev­er ever occurred to me in this big mass before than it does in the tech indus­try: prob­lems with health, psy­cho­so­mat­ic dis­or­ders and men­tal illnesses.

Communication: Who is to blame for misunderstandings?

Sabine Wojcieszak — DevOps.com

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion is every­where and it is far more than only the spo­ken word and its ori­gin mean­ing. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion is one of the most com­plex and also com­pli­cat­ed top­ics in human rela­tion­ships: most of the time very thrilling, some­times fright­en­ing but always important!

Being “productively lost” — an experiment in Teaching Open Source (TOS)

Sabine Wojcieszak — LinkedIn

Dur­ing the win­ter semes­ter 2017/2018 I offered a course “Work­ing in and with Free Open Source Soft­ware (FOSS) for our inter­na­tion­al Mas­ter Stu­dents at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Applied Sci­ence in Kiel. 40 stu­dents sub­scribed for this course, but for orga­ni­za­tion­al rea­sons I could only take 27 of them. I have nev­er done a course about this top­ic before but I have always been fas­ci­nat­ed by open source com­mu­ni­ties and the moti­va­tion behind it. But as every jour­ney has a start­ing point, mine was this post on twit­ter by Tom Call­away, Open Source tech­nol­o­gist at Red Hat and sup­port­ing the foss2serve community.

Listen. — THINK. — Do. — RESTART!

Sabine Wojcieszak — NDC Blog

This blog post is an invi­ta­tion to pay more atten­tion on our com­mu­ni­ca­tion, which hap­pens day by day, hour by hour, sec­ond by sec­ond to improve our­selves and make the work place a bet­ter and more suc­cess­ful one. It is an anal­o­gy to well­known things, but it is not intend­ed to be some­thing like a sci­en­tif­ic paper!