Aptacore

Every challenge is given to overcome them and make life meaningful. This is the mindset you have that resonates with Agile Transformation. According to worldwide statistics, Agile Transformation fails by about 48% across industries. Huge right? Why is it so hard? Agile transformation in a team is much more different than from an entire organisation. Organisations do sometimes face cultural challenges. And you can’t put all the problems in the same bucket and apply an Agile Soap to clean it. Cultural shifts run over months, years, and decades and require awareness that direction is more important than speed. The more you can impact yourselves and others, the better the impact can be on the organisation. Successful Agile transformation is more a way of thinking and behaving than just going behind a framework. Let us consider that an organisation experiences true agility. This will help the organisation’s employees exercise their competencies and grow skills. In turn, they will contribute more to developing their Agile workplace! And this is where some people feel that they have overcome a big Agile challenge. #agileTransformation #agileAndInnovation #aptaStories

Do you know the Basics of UX? Yes, the basics of UX, which we can break down into five essential elements using the acronym BASIC: Beauty, Accessibility, Simplicity, Intuitiveness, and Continuity. B stands for Beauty: A well-designed product is aesthetically pleasing. But beauty in UX is more than just visual appeal; it’s about harmony and creating an environment where users feel welcome. A stands for Accessibility. Your product should be inclusive. Everyone should be able to engage with it effortlessly, regardless of their abilities. Accessibility is about providing equal access and not leaving anyone behind. S stands for Simplicity: Complexity often leads to confusion. Simplicity in design means stripping away the unnecessary and focusing on what matters most - making things straightforward and clear. I stands for Intuitiveness: The best designs don’t require much explanation. Users should be able to navigate and use your product naturally, as though it simply "makes sense." C stands for Continuity: Consistency builds trust. A seamless experience across all touchpoints ensures the user doesn’t have to adjust when interacting with your product. By following these principles, we create experiences that function well and resonate more deeply with users. Thoughtful UX combines and harmonises these elements into something natural and intuitive. #basicsOfX #userExperience #aptaStories

How many have felt that transformative journey from “I don’t understand” to “I can generalise”? That’s the powerful shift we all strive for. Our challenge in today’s fast-paced world is teaching learners to memorise facts and truly understand them. This is where John Biggs' SOLO Taxonomy—a five-stage model for deeper learning—comes into play. Learners progress from knowing nothing (Prestructural) to grasping individual facts (Unistructural), making connections (Relational), and eventually applying those ideas in new ways (Extended Abstract). With SOLO, learners evolve beyond surface-level learning; they grow into thinkers. Learners were not just absorbing facts; they were creating new knowledge, leaving the session by understanding the subject better and being excited about using it. By guiding them through each stage, we cultivate lifelong learners who can apply knowledge creatively, turning education into a meaningful journey step by step. #soloTaxonomy #transfomationalLearning #aptaStories

With technology evolving at lightning speed, businesses are pressured to keep up and stay competitive. Adopting the right tech has become essential to boost a company’s offerings or services, and managing delivery demand from a tech perspective is critical. For many leaders, the shift from traditional on-premise hardware to cloud computing has been smooth, making it easier to grasp digital processes and streamline service delivery. Because of this, serverless computing is now gaining traction with executives worldwide. Serverless computing is seen by many as the next giant leap in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). It takes things further by entirely abstracting the underlying infrastructure from developers, allowing third-party providers to virtualise runtime and operational management. Essentially, serverless can be viewed as a comprehensive SaaS solution, where companies outsource critical tasks like managing servers, databases, and application logic processes that were traditionally handled in-house. This shift lets businesses focus more on innovation while leaving the technical heavy lifting to external experts. #serverlessArchitecture #IaaS #FaaS #tech #aptaStories

Every brand works out on its strategy to gain the traction of trust. A highly effective way is the brand’s story - or the story that people share about your brand. Just as all good stories possess a few essential features, they progress along a recognisable trajectory. After all, a compelling tale describes something happening, not a static set of facts. This narrative movement is what storytellers call an arc or the advancement of a story’s stages. While literary story arcs vary significantly – running the gamut from comedy to tragedy – compelling brand narratives tend to adhere to a tight sequence. What can be looked like an M? The Arc is about What goal your brand aims to accomplish on behalf of customers. What stands in the way of making that purpose a reality? Which obstacle represents your greatest challenge? What: What critical insight or conviction defines your brand’s approach to that problem? This is the stage where your audience should feel engaged and involved in your brand’s narrative. So What: What does your brand’s insight or conviction mean for the wider world? Now What: Given your brand’s mission and importance, what are you doing to make change happen? This is the stage where your audience should feel motivated and inspired by your brand’s actions. With these insights, your brand can begin to transcend data, harnessing the power of narrative to reach customers and cement your impression in the market. In a world where new technologies send information our way, you’ll need the ancient power of the story to make a more permanent impact. #brandStoryArc #marketingAndBranding #aptaStories

Every Innovation can’t be just about the Idea. You have to do, redo, and undo the Idea. The need for innovation is everywhere, whether service, product, small changes or disruption - anything that solves a problem has always found its place in the business world. But behind every innovation, there is a process. One of the processes turns your ideas into executable projects and gets them out to market faster. Dr Sebastian Vetter’s Two Sides of Innovation - Internal and External Framework is a beautiful framework that identifies future innovation efforts. Whether you are trying to Improve, Create, Reinvent, or Optimize the overall business, your efforts will either have an internal or external focus. “Organisations with an internal emphasis often concentrate on improving efficiency by refining processes and operations” explained Dr. Vetter. "On the other hand, those with an external innovation focus seek to enhance the customer experience or develop new products and services to support revenue growth”. Once you understand whether your crucial customer is internal or external, you can explore creative ways to meet their needs. #internalAndExternalInnovation #BusinessAndInnovation #aptaStories

An Agile mindset is nothing without behavioural change. It means living values through actions that speak louder than words. The chances are high that organisations practising agile are between the two rings: Agile and Doing Agile. As a top mindset change enabler, you must start with the culture change by being transparent, practising servant leadership, and leading by example. By redefining the success criteria, you can focus on the value and delivery and direct the team's accountability level, the learnings, and the value delivered to the end user. Celebrate all the success, enable the art of feedback, and encourage continuous improvement. All these changes will highly impact the entire organisation and help all to align, break silos, and foster communication and collaboration. Agile is a Culture. By behaving, it becomes a mindset. This is why the Agile Manifesto is a composition of values and principles and is the beginning of any Agile transformation. #agileMindset #agileAndProjectManagement #aptaStories

Enhancing a User's experience often raises the Question: Is it worth the effort? In today's fast-paced world, UX enhancements don’t consistently rank as a Top priority unless you find your arguments to validate the necessity. One of the justifications comes in the form of Goals > Signals > Metrics. By starting with the Goal, align your business goals with user goals and determine what you want the product to achieve. Once the goal is set, you should get some signals. What are the signals that indicate progression towards the goals? What should users feel or show to indicate progression towards your goals? What indicates failure or success? And with all the signals, you finally get the Metrics. How do you measure these signals? Decide on the metrics to measure signals overtime at the product level. Comparisons work well. The choice of UX metrics will depend on your company's goals and what your stakeholders want to see. The vital element is being clear on what is being measured and why it is being measured. Hopefully, metrics-driven UX improvements help the stakeholders confidently understand and decide on the changes. #measuringUserExperience #userExperience #aptaStories

We all hear about Critical Thinking, but how about Creative Thinking? Why should we indulge creativity in our thinking? We all probably agree that we should think outside the box, especially when we get stuck. But what is the importance of creativity? How will learners use it in real-life situations? A big part of the answer to why some of our learners hold onto the information we train is dopamine, a chemical in the brain that must be present for someone to retain the information. And how can we increase dopamine? By making the information new and exciting. Transformational Learning is all about sprinkling curiosity and letting it bloom creatively. The activities should be simple, not simplistic, and, in fact, simple and deep. By planning the activities in a compact, the best option is an exercise with several layers, lasagne-style, each offering an entry point into something new and worth remembering. And by combining all these points, the hook has to be ready to snatch the attention. The challenge with attention is that we can’t demand it. Therefore, break the patterns, avoid mental representations, and do things differently for a change. In the end, to create such learnings, creativity gives you the edge. #impactOfCreativity #transformationalLearning #aptastories

Networks and the Internet have become fundamental to human needs. Anything that disrupts them has a bitter impact on our daily lives. One of the most extensive cloud outages happened in July 2024. The outage disrupted operations across multiple industries, halting flights and upending everything from banking and IT services to healthcare systems. Why did this happen? Let’s explore some of the reasons. Accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, governments and businesses have become increasingly dependent on a handful of interconnected technology companies that run on the cloud. In a routine job, a misconfigured network device in the Central US region triggered the failure in many networks. Unfortunately, the problem was worsened by an automated failover system that didn’t function as intended, spreading the issue to other regions and making this a historic event. With such massive interconnected solutions, Robust business continuity planning is crucial. A single-cloud strategy has to be adapted to multi-cloud strategies and multi-provider dependency. The outage has opened new debates. While a car manufacturer faces heavy penalties for faulty brakes, a software provider can often issue another update and move on. Do we get an era where software companies must pay a price for defective products? #techAiData #biggestCloudOutage2024 #Aptastories