Payson Hall describes a recipe for productivity success. Some ways that could help you include learning to deal with information overload as well as adding administrative support in order to leverage existing staff by freeing them up to do more of the high-value work they do best.

Managing requires a different skill set from technical work, yet many companies promote their best technical workers to management positions. Here are some things to consider when it's time to promote your technical workers.

In classic Scrum textbooks, the Product Owner (PO) permanently hangs out in the agile team room, churning out a stream of user stories, regularly prioritizing the backlog, deciding color schemes for screen design-all while keeping the team focused and making coffee. In an enterprise agile project, it is physically impossible for one person to do everything the PO role requires. Elena Yatzeck believes the enterprise PO must be a team role, where the different people move in and out of their PO responsibilities in a disciplined and predictable way. To illustrate, Elena leads a simulation that takes you through a full enterprise agile project, providing shared PO resources to help you with each aspect of the project. She offers PO advice on organizational change models, team design techniques, extended story templates, and tips for backlog grooming.

For decades-with the exception of agile-dev followers-the IT community has continued to build and protect its departmental silos. Project management, business analysis, development, testing, DB administration, and operations are just a few of the specializations that are carved out and institutionalized. Agile practices seek to eliminate the walls and empower people to deliver the highest value to the business. DevOps is the latest effort in this direction-bringing developers, testers, and operations together to replace their silos with a continuous collaboration pipeline. Paul Peissner introduces DevOps and explains how it is a key to transitioning from continuous integration (creating the finished software product immediately) to continuous delivery (making the product immediately available to users) and adding tremendous new business value.