Harvard Business Review

MAY 13, 2011

And by integrating Skype with its free cloud offerings — such as its free version of Office software — Microsoft multiplies the linkages and the revenue potential. Leave the Skype unit to promote product development and user growth. The challenge is not an easy one, as Microsoft's own experience makes clear.

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How To Development Team Review Software Review Software 16

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 17, 2015

In this article we look at three very different organizations – IBM, Rich Products, and Intuit – and the three different paths they have taken in reconfiguring their operations for more customer intimacy, by changing methods, reengineering processes, and transforming culture. The rise of cloud computing changed all this.

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Software Review Design Thinking Software Design 15

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 19, 2017

If software has eaten the world, then agile has eaten the software world. For example, a Google search for “agile software development” returns over 14 million results. The bulk of this agile canon will teach your individual teams to deliver higher-quality code, faster.

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Agile Software Review Technical Review Development Team Review 8

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 7, 2016

In our recent HBR article , we explain the fundamentals of transforming products into platforms. Both familiar players like Google, Apple, and Microsoft and lesser-known companies like Minecraft, Valve, and Id Software have gone through similar stages on the user side to get their platforms off the ground.

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Harvard Business Review

JULY 2, 2015

Many software development teams hold mini-debriefs every morning to review yesterday’s progress and today’s goals—and longer debriefs every month or two to understand larger project wins and challenges. Review four key questions. Review your results, and ensure the group is aligned.

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Underperforming Technical Team Tools eBook Development Team Review 15

Harvard Business Review

JULY 22, 2015

In addition to receiving traditional training, each participant designs and carries out a 100-day project that targets an important business challenge, such as increasing the firm’s footprint in the health care segment or developing new software to enhance mobile phones (these are real examples).

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Project Design Learning Underperforming Technical Team 15

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 30, 2015

We see this sensibility articulated by Google’s software development teams and pair programming efforts. Does enterprise culture and process recognize and reward teams and teamwork with the same energy, enthusiasm, and investment as for individuals? Assess/Analyze.

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Development Team Review Collaboration Culture Software Developers 15

Harvard Business Review

MAY 10, 2017

See More Videos > See More Videos > The downside of this approach is that when projects increase in complexity and team size, the central individual can become a communication and coordination bottleneck for the team. Another approach is to let teams self-manage. But is this really the best way to work?

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Underperforming Technical Team How To Software Developers Software Development 13

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 23, 2016

To this day, Microsoft Office remains the dominant office software suite, a position it has held since the 1990s. Both companies, while under a corporate umbrella, operate as independent brands with largely independent development teams. In each case Facebook paid handsomely — but did little else. How did it do this?

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Disruption Software Competition Technology 15

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 24, 2018

A few miles away, at its Silicon Valley campus, is AppHaus , one of five such campsites worldwide, where SAP engineers work with local customers and startups to explore consumer software. But what are the goals of these corporate coworking spaces? Who uses them? And what do they look like? Here’s what we’ve learned.

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Company Survey Design Report 14

Harvard Business Review

JULY 4, 2016

” Makers, also known as individual contributors, are the software developers, engineers, architects, writers, and researchers who produce knowledge. This is particularly true in organizations where employees are both, what Paul Graham calls, “makers” and “managers.”

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Meeting Management Software Developers Software Development 14

Harvard Business Review

MAY 22, 2018

I wasn’t a software engineer, and I was tempted to leave agile methods to the geeks. I began reading articles and books, including many that criticized agile methods. The best learning experiences, however, came from sitting with strong agile teams. I was ready to start testing agile approaches with my teams.

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Agile Software Engineering Course Learning 15

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 8, 2018

In our recent HBR article , we argued that financial statements fail to capture the value created by modern digital companies. Digital companies, however, consider scientists’ and software workers’ and product development teams’ time to be the company’s most valuable resource.

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Report Development Team Review Project Resources 8

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 28, 2016

Online security often focuses on technical details — software, hardware, vulnerabilities, and the like. Because we had design and communication experts already working on the development team, we were able to create a security tool with a utilitarian tone to avoid making people feel unnecessarily concerned.

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Data Tools Design Collaboration 12

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 27, 2016

In China, however, talking with customers was seen as in imposition on both the developers and the customers, who were considered uninterested and unreliable in articulating product requirements. With these groups, we noticed that management practices that worked well in Germany and the U.S. didn’t fare as well in India.

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Culture Collaboration Software Developers Software Development 14

Harvard Business Review

JULY 19, 2017

Based on our experience working with these teams, we recommend senior teams do the following if they want to become more agile: Treat your enterprise priorities as a managed backlog. See your leadership team as an agile Scrum that prioritizes the backlog based on importance, then tackles them in sequence until completed.

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Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 23, 2018

In addition, this model improves the future work of innovation teams by helping them build an awareness of what downstream teams need most. This model is most common in software development teams, where UX designers may be involved in both early user research and long-term management of the product.

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