InRhythm

Your partners in accelerated digital transformation

events

Featured Tech Talk – Andy Philbert Jr. – Javascript Recruiter Extraordinaire

 

Listen to Andy Philbert Jr. – Head Javascript Recruiter of InRhythm, deliver an insightful talk on what his kind look for when interviewing and hiring.

From Andy:
“Recruiters are usually the first people you speak to when interviewing with companies. We are not engineers and screen for non technical qualities that shows that you would be someone amazing to work with and have the potential to be or already are a great engineer. This talk discusses the recruiter’s role within the interview process and how to market yourself as a great engineer without having to rely on just showing your code.”

Session: IR Lightning Talks 1 – Aug 24, 2017, IR HQ

 

A Year in Review – Bring it on 2016

As 2016 begins, we are excited to look back upon a year of significant accomplishments and plan our goals for the New Year. In 2015, we solidified a refined set of core company values that we believe helped to push us towards great success. We are so thankful for your continued support and would love to share our year’s growth and new goals with you.

Bend the Space –  Prioritize and Work on High Impact Items

In 2015, we added several challenging and exciting new projects to our portfolio. We were dedicated to working with the best companies in order to have a significant impact on the space that InRhythm inhabits. We’ve established new partnerships and thoroughly enjoyed continued relationships with our clients whom we’ve helped to advance their knowledge and experience modern platform innovation and digital transformations.

In the New Year, we are excited to dive deeper into the financial sector with thought leadership across Agile, Lean UX, and development.

Hire and Work with Only the Best

We have a dedicated team of internal recruiters who focus on securing the top talent in the tech industry to join our group. We hire only the best so that you can work with only the best. In 2015, we welcomed notable contributors to our group including COO Mariya Breyter and CTO John K. Paul, both respected thought leaders in our industry. Mariya and John have each added a unique voice and expertise that has poised InRhythm to be a pioneering leader in our community.

Challenge the Status Quo – Learn and Grow Daily

At InRhythm we understand that you are never done learning. Therefore, we have added 3 monthly events to help us build relationships and gain new skills: our CTO Breakfasts, run by Gunjan Doshi, Enterprise Agile Breakfast with Mariya Breyter, and monthly Meetups with John K. Paul.

We have also begun working on a collection of internal development projects which will allow us to supply specialty apps to our Operations team to ensure on-going, high impact velocity. This also gives are developers a chance to work on different projects and explore new technologies.

Work with Clarity and Conviction

We believe in having a clear focus and direction on all tasks in order to achieve the highest levels of success. Because of the quality of our work, our business has grown exponentially. This growth has not gone unnoticed, as we were named to INC’s 500 Fastest Growing for the 3rd year in a row and Deloitte’s Fast 500 for the first time. We are extremely thankful for these accolades and are excited to continue the momentum in 2016.

Build Positive & Trusting Relationships

In 2016, we plan to continue allowing all of these core values to guide our work in order to have the best year to date. Much of our success is thanks to our relationships with you. Whether a project we have worked on together or a leadership summit where we have shared ideas and best practices, we thank you for your continued support. We plan to continue to champion thought leadership in a public way across Agile, the international Dev community and C-level 10x plans for growth and innovation.

We are ready to take 2016 by storm, are you?

Written By Ricki Steiner

December Enterprise Agile Breakfast – Cultural Aspects of Agile

Any transformation is hard, especially in a corporate environment with well established processes and predefined expectations. Agile implementation in an enterprise is a complex endeavor that changes the way people think and operate. Leaders of this transformation face challenges that are unique to them but may have been faced by others in similar roles in other large companies. The goal of InRhythm’s Enterprise Agile Breakfast series is to bring these leaders together in order to share advice and support each other on resolving obstacles and bringing success to the transformations including cultural, process, financial, and other aspects of a large enterprise-level change.

When we started hosting monthly Enterprise Agile Breakfasts, for leaders of Agile transformations in large companies in October 2015, our goal was to create a safe container for this group of change agents to be able to share their opinions, form partnerships, and support each other. During the first session, the participants used a Scrum retrospective format and came with a set of topics including:

– Adapting Agile to enterprise – Bending not Breaking

– Taking people to church vs. making them believe in God

– Agile enterprise with offshore teams

– Measuring business value and costs in Agile at enterprise level

– Showing the financial benefits of Agility

– Agile metrics (what really makes sense?)

– Portfolio management at scale 200+ projects

For the December session, we prioritized two topics: cultural aspect of Agile and Agile enterprise with highly distributed teams. Chris Deptula from Shutterstock volunteered to lead the offshore Agile enterprise topic and Olga Lech, who has extensive Agile transformation experience with multiple enterprise-level companies, volunteered to facilitate the Agile culture-related set of topics. The conversations all centered around our role as change agents in building the Agile ecosystem that empowers teams to be successful in a highly scaled environment. In this blog post, I will mention some of the discussion topics the group came up with in relation to the topic of changing Agile culture at enterprise level: “how do we avoid taking people to church vs. making them believe in God”, i.e. how do we change Agile culture at scale rather than establish the processes for everyone to follow without changing their values and help everyone involved in transition – managers, stakeholders, and organizational-level leaders to develop Agile and lean thinking.

The topic started with a dichotomy and continued with a discussion of a number of culture-related Agile dichotomies:

  1. Taking people to church vs. making them believe in God: what do you want to be, a “cult” leader or a leader who has a “divine” purpose.
  2. “Organizational leadership vs. team work” (the concept of “organizational citizenship” resonated with the participants as Agile transformation is not successful if team members do not feel they are “citizens” of the enterprise).
  3. An unselfish leader vs. Machiavellianism and narcissism that helps people’s careers (Olga shared the findings from a recent HBR article, Why Bad Guys Win at Work and applied them to Agile leadership).
  4.  Leaders (A-type) vs. workers (B-type).

Participants shared their advice in identifying and supporting change agents who make Agile transformation a success.

The second topic was related to Agile in a distributed enterprise. Cultural change is not easy at scale when everyone is co-located. Having highly distributed teams across time zones when direct communication is challenging, if not impossible, imposes additional challenges on Agile transformation leaders. Participants discussed hub-and-spoke operating model and how to bring Agile teams together despite time zone and cultural differences. We felt this topic was so important that we decided to continue this discussion at the next session in January 2016. Chris Deptula who led the conversation summarized topics in the following way:

  1. Aligning values and behaviors across teams from different cultural backgrounds (ie: culture of India vs. Thailand vs. Great Britain vs. Eastern Europe vs. US, etc).
  2. How to start implementing a culture of “safety to openly talk about making improvements” and the “courage to see it through”, and the role of PMOs in that.
  3. The group also showed interest in discussing common frameworks for implementing strategy alignment (ie: OKRs) and the Agile program and project management office’s role in doing that.

Written by Mariya Breyter