Harvard Business Review

JUNE 17, 2015

Consider the battle waged by IBM’s software development teams between competing methods for getting closer to customers. The issue arose as a result of changes to IBM’s business model for software. In the past, IBM mostly provided enterprise software to customers who installed it on their own computers.

Software Review 15

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.

Agile 8

Agile Software Review Technical Review Development Team Review 8

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).

Project 15

Project Design Learning Underperforming Technical Team 15

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 7, 2013

But even as big business looks to bring UX and design talent in-house, few companies are willing to embed designers on every product development team (and, frankly, there is not enough talent to go around even if they wanted to). It also provides the executive leadership with a steady stream of "demos" to show off at CES.

Strategy 13

Strategy Strategy Product Development LEAN 13

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 4, 2013

Or take Salesforce.com and its willingness to have self-organizing development teams continuously tweaking code, even though, with a global system serving more than two million subscribers, the risks of introducing errors into its 30 million lines of code would seem to present compelling reasons not to.

Management 12

Management Underperforming Technical Team Agile Software Development 12

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 15, 2012

What I take issue with, however, is our collective tendency to automatically call people in senior positions "leaders" and then be disappointed when they fail to display leadership. At the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative , we use the simplest definition of leader that I have come across: people follow you.

Leadership 12

Leadership Software Development Software Developers Report 12

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 18, 2011

Sometimes it's new leadership that spurs action, other times efforts percolating within companies capture executives' attention. Our operations departments were focused on our products and services, our finance teams on collecting payments, and our sales and business development teams on meeting short-term revenue goals.

Culture 15

Culture Training Report Resources 15

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 4, 2012

Throughout the '70s, Xerox leadership empowered a group of scientists and engineers to develop products for the coming information era. Quite possibly, if the company had allowed its business development team the same innovation infrastructure and autonomy it gave its technology team.

Company 15

Company Innovation Product Development Technology 15

Harvard Business Review

MAY 22, 2018

I know it is critical for the leadership to embrace agile, but the sad reality is that I’m not sure our leadership team will start before it’s too late. I wasn’t a software engineer, and I was tempted to leave agile methods to the geeks. I was ready to start testing agile approaches with my teams.

Agile 15

Agile Software Engineering Course Learning 15

Harvard Business Review

JULY 19, 2017

Senior leadership teams that embrace agile do a few things differently. 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. The CEO and his leadership team share a joint table.

Agile 8

Agile Underperforming Technical Team How To Leadership 8

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 27, 2016

You and Your Team Series. What Leadership Looks Like in Different Cultures. Global Teams Should Have Office Visits, Not Offsites. 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.

Culture 14

Culture Collaboration Software Development Software Developers 14

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 4, 2012

Throughout the '70s, Xerox leadership empowered a group of scientists and engineers to develop products for the coming information era. Quite possibly, if the company had allowed its business development team the same innovation infrastructure and autonomy it gave its technology team.

Company 8

Company Innovation Product Development Technology 8

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 19, 2015

This problem can be compounded when senior executives publicly announce these non-products in an “exciting new space,” creating more pressure on the project development team to deliver something (anything) before it is clear what exactly should be delivered. Fix or kill? Fix: This is a process fix, a mindset fix.

Underperforming Technical Team 14

Underperforming Technical Team Product Development Development Team Review Competition 14