Steffan Surdek is an Agile coach/trainer at Pyxis Technologies. As a coach, he strives to create engaged teams led by inspiring and empowering leaders for the sake of making the software development workplace fun again. Mr. Surdek has worked in IT for over 20 years in collaboration with many distributed teams around the world. He speaks at various conferences and user groups about leadership and agility with distributed teams. Mr. Surdek is coauthor of A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum, written in collaboration with the IBM Scrum Community. He blogs about life and agility at Surdek…
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The new generation is looking for life-work balance as well as inspiring leaders who will fire them up and motivate them. In the new workplace, company values actually need to mean something. People need to see their leaders living and breathing these values every day.
February 2, 2017 | Authored By: Steffan Surdek
In this article, I take a stroll down memory lane, looking back on many of the traditional and Agile projects that I worked on and trying to determine what made them successful. I have boiled it down to some of the key practices we used on these projects and made links between these best practices and what I teach teams every day working as an Agile coach.
October 30, 2014 | Authored By: Steffan Surdek
In an Agile world, we often talk about the importance of involving the client (or key stakeholders) throughout the development cycle. My work experience mainly allowed me to work with two types of clients: internal clients (as part of the IT department in the mid-to-late 1990s) and with product management teams (from 2000 to 2010).
January 29, 2015 | Authored By: Steffan Surdek
We work in business environments where the focus is often mainly on quickly achieving results.
June 18, 2015 | Authored By: Steffan Surdek
Both the Lean and Agile worlds encourage and value learning by doing. The Scrum framework pushes teams to engage in an ongoing PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle to continually inspect and adapt how they work and how they develop software.
July 16, 2015 | Authored By: Steffan Surdek
How can we resolve the polarity in organizations between the need for learning versus the need for producing results? How can we foster a culture that allows taking the time to learn and try different approaches despite the ever-present focus on results? This Executive Update explores learning by doing from different angles and attempts to shine a light on various ways that teams and organizations can speed up their learning curve by consciously taking action and learning from the results.
June 8, 2015 | Authored By: Steffan Surdek
In some companies, leaders may have a hard time participating in conversations because of how they feel they are influencing the conversation.
May 7, 2015 | Authored By: Steffan Surdek
There is a silent leadership crisis going on right now in many workplaces around the world. The generation shift taking place in the market and the changing needs of the current workplace, including software development teams moving to Agile and its model of "servant leadership," are forcing an older generation of leaders to evolve their leadership styles. This Executive Update explores this leadership crisis from different angles and attempts to point toward areas where leaders can observe their own behaviors and consider new possibilities.
April 28, 2015 | Authored By: Steffan Surdek
Cutter IT Journal VOL. 27, NO. 10
October 30, 2014 | Authored By: Dave Rooney
[From the Editor: This week's Cutter IT Advisor is from Cutter Senior Consultant Dave Rooney's introduction to the October 2014 issue of Cutter IT Journal, "
November 5, 2014 | Authored By: Dave Rooney