Blog
22.10.2023
I moved my posts to the "Forge of Unicorns" newsletter on LinkedIn.
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[🗓️ 2024] 🎙️ IAD24 - Stop Transforming, Start Evolving
At IAD24, I presented a talk that challenged the traditional, by-the-book approaches to digital transformation and emphasized the need for continuous, socio-technical evolution. Drawing from over 14 years of behavioral engineering research, I unveiled the 5 critical anti-patterns that derail transformations and shared actionable strategies to address them.
The talk also introduced the Unicorns’ Ecosystem and announced an exciting partnership between BriX Consulting and Alcore Academy, combining expertise in behavioral engineering, craftsmanship, and legacy code to redefine modern software craftsmanship.
Key Takeaways: • Why transformations fail and how to approach them as sustainable evolution. • How behavioral engineering can balance human and technological advancement. • Practical insights for fostering generative cultures in organizations.
As usual, slides and recording are available in my IAD24 dedicated GitHub Repository.
[🗓️ 2024] 🎙️ XP2024 - Behavioral Engineering at the Software Craftsmanship Dojo: A 14-year Adventure Empowering Over 15,000 Developers
This talk 🎙️ is an insightful adventure chronicled I'm showcasing, blending the disciplines of martial arts and software craftsmanship to foster transformative change in the IT industry. Spanning nearly a decade and a half, Mike's experience report navigates through the evolution of the SW Craftsmanship Dojo®, highlighting pivotal moments, lessons learned, and invaluable insights gathered from working with thousands of developers worldwide. From the inception of the unconventional dojo concept to its integration with cutting-edge methodologies like DevOps and LeanUX, Mike's narrative showcases the power of holistic approaches to organizational transformation. Through real-world stories and profound reflections, Mike emphasizes the importance of continuous learning, adaptive leadership, and fostering a culture of innovation in navigating the complexities of today's digital landscape. The abstract provides a comprehensive overview of Mike's journey, offering participants a glimpse into the profound impact of the SW Craftsmanship Dojo® on individual, team, and organizational evolution in the ever-evolving realm of IT.
Here is the experience report presented at XP2024 - Behavioral Engineering at the Software Craftsmanship Dojo: A 14-year Adventure Empowering Over 15,000 Developers.
[🗓️ 2024] 🎙️ IT Revolution Enterprise Leadership Summit 2024 - Europe
At the IT Revolution Enterprise Leadership Summit 2024, I discussed the importance of behavioral engineering in digital transformations with my talk "In the Heart 🩺 of the DOJO🇯🇵 13 Years of SW Craftsmanship With 15,000 Elite Developers 🌟".
If you're eager to learn from a Martial Arts instructor how I shaped a Dojo to go beyond the conventional best practices of the Elite IT Arenas this is your talk.
Step into the heart of the dojo, where I, a seasoned martial arts instructor, invite you to embark on a transformative journey through the SW Craftsmanship Dojo's extraordinary odyssey. In this captivating narrative, I unfold the tale of our IT dojo—a fusion of age-old martial arts principles and the cutting-edge disruptions brought by cloud native technologies, containers, AI, and the transformative DevOps revolution that unfolded in 2010.
As the experiment unfolded, profound insights emerged, with neuroscience acting as a catalytic force, fostering neuroplasticity and enriching information retention. Beyond the mere technical aspects, we ventured into the realm of behavioral psychology, addressing the inherent social challenges that organizations face. This led us to refine our approach through meticulous observations and purposefully designed role-play-game sessions, birthing over 100 Key Behavioral Indicators (KBIs) that became the foundational elements of our unique approach.
The pivotal year of 2018 witnessed the remarkable convergence of our SW Craftsmanship Dojo with the renowned DORA model. This symbiotic integration not only propelled our XP-anchored curriculum into the technical domain of DevOps and DORA but also extended into the realms of neuroscience, behavioral psychology, and lean Product Management. Our journey, meticulously documented, transformed from an experiment into a comprehensive research endeavor, accumulating valuable insights from the experiences of over 15,000 individuals over the span of 13 years.
So, join me on this immersive tour into the discoveries of the SW Craftsmanship Dojo. Allow me to share the profound lessons learned and unique insights gained during this transformative voyage—a journey that has undoubtedly left an indelible mark on 15,000 elite developers. Together, let's redefine excellence in software craftsmanship and unlock new horizons in the dynamic world of IT.
[ 🗓️ 2023] 🎙️ ItalianAgileDay 2023 - 'Building a Culture of SW Craftsmanship'
🚀 Saturday, November 18th, I had an incredible time at the Italian Agile Days 2023 unraveling the mysteries of 'Building a Culture of SW Craftsmanship - Unmasking Internal Development Platforms Quality Conundrum.'
🤓 For those who didn't join the conversation, 👉 HERE 👈 is my usual GitHub repo with the deck I used, complete with all the links to my SW Craftsmanship Dojo®, Vimeo, etc. If you're interested the deep dive even more, take a look at the dedicated website ofthe SW Craftsmanship Dojo®. It'll provide you all the details you're looking for.
[🗓️ 2023] 🎙️ Join me at ItalianAgileDay 2023 - A Teaser for my upcoming talk 'Building a Culture of SW Craftsmanship'
In this blog post, titled "A Teaser for my upcoming talk 'Building a Culture of SW Craftsmanship'," I discuss the interplay between Internal Development Platforms (IDPs) and software craftsmanship. The post delves into the complex relationship between IDPs and code quality, emphasizing the need for a strong software craftsmanship culture to bridge the gap. It points out that while IDPs focus on speed and infrastructure control, they often fall short in directly improving code quality. The SW Craftsmanship Dojo® introduces a solution to fostering code quality excellence through continuous learning, gamification via judo belts, and real codebase-based activities. The blog post highlights the upcoming Italian Agile Days presentation, where the insights from this essay will be shared.
Take a coffee and enjoy my post on Medium.
[🗓️ 2020] 🖋️ What is DevOps? … and the related DevOps Mythology.
Are you curious to understand better what is DevOps? Have you ever wondered what exactly DevOps is and how it can benefit your organization? In this article, I'll explore the core concepts of DevOps and how it can improve collaboration and efficiency between development and operations teams, ultimately leading to faster software delivery and better customer satisfaction. Whether you're new to DevOps or looking to improve your current practices, this article is for you.
Here is my essay on Medium.
[🗓️ 2020] 🖋️ The XPFarm - a story of the IBM's developer-centric community of practice based on my SW Craftsmanship Dojo® 🥋
In my transformational executive career, I got very often questions like:
"How may I transform my company?".
For a long time, I tried to reply to my interlocutors, but normally after a few seconds, I was feeling my receiver wasn't prepared (or combat-ready) to listen to what I was telling. I guess this is the typical effect of the adoption curve. Only an early adopter can be in sync to listen to something that is still an emerging, or even worst, pioneering approach. But now the 'community of practice' is a well-known concept. The spark to trigger an enterprise IT evolution. A big thank has to be provided to the Accelerate book and related DORA researches. They raised the global awareness necessary to be understood by almost everyone about the content of my new blog.
So let me share with you how I created an eXtreme Programming community of practice to bring technical excellence into one of the biggest IT companies in the world. Take a coffee and enjoy my post on Medium.
[🗓️ 2020] 🎥 Keynotes Italian Agile Day Milano 📺
After the last conference in Vimercate, I got many requests to explain better the concepts behind 'the Ecosystem'. To my surprise, Cesare Baroni, VP of IBM CIO, decided to do it with style. Hosting the Italian Agile Day Milano 2020 in our new venue, the IBM Studios, and sharing the keynotes with me. 🤩 WOW, that Is a big deal and an honor!
So we started to write down the plot: _'Since the Agile Manifesto was published in 2001, many implementation frameworks have emerged. While most have been successful in small or mid-size organizations, they have struggled to deliver sustainable results at a large scale. DevOps, the evolution of Agile applied to software engineering, has helped to select successful technical frameworks and integrate them into widely accepted practices. These practices include continuous integration/continuous delivery, pervasive automation, extreme programming, shifting left security, microservices architecture, and containerization.
At IBM CIO in 2015, we faced the challenge of adopting an agile working culture in an IT company operating in 170 countries and made up of 380,000 employees. It was impossible to deal with the technical side of the work in isolation from management and organizational dimensions. We had to address both aspects and support our teams on a journey that is still progressing today.
The key to our success was acknowledging that technical practices are not a secondary dimension compared to management but play a vital role in becoming an elite performance organization. Recent DORA research and books like “Accelerate: the science of Lean Software and DevOps” (2018) confirmed our intuition. However, our challenge was how to scale and manage the complexity of a 110-year-old global corporation. We had to go beyond available research and proven frameworks.
We explored how to expand our Agile operating model and dramatically improve product discovery, integrate design, embrace full user-centric product development, adopt Domain-Driven-Design with Event Storming, implement Communities of Practice, and loosely couple our teams and architecture while keeping them tightly aligned. We aimed to build a true “open organization” that engages participative communities both inside and out. We plan to share our Agile journey at IBM CIO, including what we've learned from our failures and successes, what questions we're still trying to answer, and how we're breaking new ground by applying transformative technical and leadership practices on a large global scale, covering the whole history (and future) of software engineering, from legacy proprietary languages to Quantum, from private Mainframe datacenter to multi-tenant Cloud, from traditional relational databases to Blockchain, from legacy proprietary platforms to Open Source.'_
And on a rainy day just before the COVID-19 pandemic emergency, and related Italian lockdown, I went on stage and HERE the recording on Vimeo.
[🗓️ 2019] 🎥 Agile Venture Vimercate 🎬
In June 2019, I had the opportunity to share my 16 years of experience experimenting with the "Ecosystem" at the Agile Venture Vimercate 2019 conference. The conference focused on "DevOps answers the call for rapid innovation in fast-changing markets," making it the perfect place to share my journey. In my speech, I used humor to cover the complexity of DevOps, Agile, eXtreme Programming, LeanUX, Site Reliability Engineering, and DevSecOps, and shared my experience with the Italian community.
I discussed my journey in implementing DevOps and DesignOps/LeanUX in our most advanced development teams at IBM CIO, starting in 2017. I talked about the challenges we faced and how we overcame them. I also shared some important lessons learned from our journey, including how we reshaped the entire organization, starting from the bottom and using OKR to align it all. Overall, it was an inspiring and enlightening experience to share my knowledge with the community.
Here the slides on Slideshare. They lost all the animations, my apologies.
Here the talk saved on Vimeo.
[🗓️ 2019] 🎥 IBM Festival of Innovation 🎉
IBM Fest is an annual tradition in Bratislava, where experts, talents, and students converge in a wonderful venue located in the old town. In 2019, I had the opportunity to deliver a speech to experts and students about DevOps, SRE, and software craftsmanship. With the main theme of the festival being superheroes, I prepared a fun-filled speech centered on the type of developer one can be. Are you Deadpool, the solitary jackass, or Ironman, the tech-savvy team player who is willing to cooperate and make sacrifices for the greater good of the team?
📚 Books
I have a 🚧 Work In Progress 🚧 - with my book about the The-Ecosystem...
