Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

You’ve heard over and over how valuable mentors are as you move through your career. You’ve listened to your colleagues’ testimonials. You’ve watched the TED talks. You’re convinced. But what’s less clear is the role of mentorship at this point in your career. Right now. If you went out to seek a mentor today, would you know what you need from the relationship? Maybe, maybe not. And you’re not alone.

Chances are, you are totally over your job. The stress, the office politics, the outdated processes you can’t change… some days it hardly seems worth the paycheck. You’re not alone. According to a Gallup poll, only about 25 percent of North American workers say they’re engaged in their work. A separate survey reports 43 percent admit to staying in a job despite being “checked out”. Why are we so demoralized? Is this the new normal?

Emails and IMs and shared docs – oh my! With all the different communication channels we use every day at work, it’s easy to miss their nuances. Sure, email seems like a good go-to, but it has its downsides. And what about Google Docs or Confluence pages? When should they be open vs. restricted?

From its outset, the agile methodology defined how teams operated for decades. Yet, the success realized within product and development organizations triggered an explosion of adoption. From rapid development, faster time to resolution, to improved communication and better product quality, there’s no debate: the benefits of agile are real and they are impactful. Get stories like this in your inbox.

Pop quiz! What do email threads, restricted documents, and water-cooler conversations have in common? They are the raw materials with which information silos are built. We think of silos as rock-solid structures that can (and sometimes do) survive a category five tornado. But in truth, the information silos we encounter at work aren’t as indestructible as they seem. With a few techniques for more open, effective communication and a little bit of moxie, you and your team can beat the system.

In any organization, large or small, a defined strategy and tireless accountability are essential to making sure all teams are aligned and focused as they go about their day-to-day work. For a company operating in a scaled agile environment, where teams are empowered to make decisions, strategic context must be crystal clear to create a trusting environment where teams can do their best work and drive business results.

By 2022, the skills employees will need to thrive will include creativity, trustworthiness, emotional intelligence, and leadership, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2018. Intelligence matters. But recently, business leaders have begun to place more emphasis on “soft skills” – you know, those intangible qualities that make the difference between being a dear or dreary coworker.

It’s been a few years since the “Spotify Model” became the latest trend for structuring an engineering team. But, like its predecessors, the model based on tribes and squads has some pitfalls. How to structure an engineering team is a question that’s been covered at length, from the strengths and weaknesses of common team structures to a matrix of organization based on risk and scale to why you should choose your own model.

If you’ve ever created products that can be deployed in different types of environments, you know that it can be challenging to migrate between one and the other since the core architecture often needs to be very different. We learned this the hard way back in 2018 on Confluence, when a large number of customers trying to migrate from server to cloud were having problems. It was a challenging, prone-to-failure process that required a lot of attention and preparation from site admins.

Maybe your company just merged with another organization. Or perhaps you were a member of a group that was just bought out. Chances are you’ve been there: more than 75 percent of industries have become more concentrated since the late 1990s and the mergers and acquisitions boom is only expected to grow.