Tech Insights

Developers have a lot on their plate when they start at a new company. Whether it be the development environment, project information, or the organizational culture of their employer or clients, they need to learn a lot – and quickly. Adopting a strong onboarding process is vital if you want new full-time developers or contractors to succeed. Here is an 8-step developer onboarding checklist that will help you seamlessly integrate new hires onto your agile team and keep them around for the long run.

Though a consistent definition of DevOps can be hard to come by, one thing we can all agree on is that the goal is to improve software delivery performance. While the desired outcome is clear, the path to achieving it is a bit hazy. As a practitioner of EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System developed by Gino Wickman, Author of Traction, Get a Grip on Your Business, we’ve realized the value that a scorecard adds towards identifying and measuring the key actions that will make our vision reality.

In this article, we provide an overview of the scorecard tool and outline some ways it helps us deliver 99.99 software.

Whether you are an entrepreneur starting a new business, an intrapreneur developing a new department, or you simply have a vested interest in your organization’s success, I have the blueprint for becoming a healthy Agile organization. When embarking on something new, mistakes and setbacks are bound to happen. But if someone developed a toolset that would help you achieve traction towards your vision sooner, wouldn’t you use it? Gino Wickman’s book, Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business (2011) and his corresponding Entrepreneurial Operating System, has become our go-to playbook for becoming a high functioning Agile organization. In this article, I’ve included the top 5 reasons I love the EOS system.

Part of creating 99.99 software is building high-functioning software development teams. We’ve all been in situations where we’re enamored with a candidate or vendor that looks great on paper: they check all the technology boxes, have the desired years of experience, and a history of working with organizations or clients you admire. But once you get them in the door or sign the contract, you realize you are working with an order taker, they lack follow-through, or they don’t have the level of respect, initiative, enthusiasm, creativity, or whatever other unique attributes your team values. What gives?

High performing teams regularly accomplish the impossible. They are the engines of innovation. Unfortunately, they are far too rare. A study in the Harvard Business Review estimated that three out of four cross-functional teams are actually dysfunctional. The study found that these teams most often fail to meet organizational expectations due to: