Understanding the Andon Cord as the Key to Lean Operations
Enhanced productivity with a skyrocketing revenue! Isn’t it every business owner’s dream? Even though that’s the goal of every firm, not all businesses are fortunate enough…
Containerization: A Definition and Best Practices Guide
There are many ways for operations teams to approach hardware management. Some build dedicated hardware for different applications within their stack. Some use virtualization to simplify…
Top 4 Digital Transformation Challenges (And how to solve them)
Companies across industries are investing in digital transformations to improve productivity and deliver innovative customer-centric software. Digital native companies continue to reshape markets, leaving traditional incumbents…
Understanding Microservices and Their Impact on Companies
“If you went to bed last night as an industrial company, you’re going to wake up today as a software and analytics company.” This is a…
Bimodal IT: Definition, Implications, and Dangers
When you’ve been using a certain business method for a long time, you don’t start using a new one just because it’s shiny, new, and cool….
How Lean and Agile Relate and How You Can Win by Using Both
We often consider lean and agile to be two different methodologies to writing software. However, if we take the principles of lean to heart, we end…
Feature Creep Is a Problem. Learn How to Avoid It
Too much of a good thing will often turn out to be a bad thing, harmful even. Take salt, for instance. Food without salt is tasteless…
Scrum vs. Agile: A Detailed Explanation of Their Relationship
Imagine someone walks into your office today and asks point-blank: “scrum vs. agile—which one should we adopt?” What would you answer? Well, as it turns out,…
Using a Burndown Chart for Effective Project Forecasting
Agile can come with a lot of confusing words and concepts. We sometimes find ourselves surrounded by odd-sounding words like story points, velocity, WIP, Kanban, and…
Shadow IT: Learn From It to Get It Under Control
Why does your company have an IT department? At its core, this department employs best practices to ensure that company data is securely accessed, created, stored,…
Infrastructure as Code: What Is It, and Why Should My Engineers Care?
For decades, managing a server or two was a full-time job. System administrators would carefully curate their critical systems and ensure the business ran smoothly by…
Configuration Management: What Is It and Why Is It Important?
Configuration management is an increasingly important foundation for a successful tech platform. Good leaders in the tech space will want to know what it takes to…