Role clarity deficiencies can wreck agile teams

Background One of the twelve agile principles is to build projects around motivated individuals and trust them to get the job done. Such agile teams must self-organize, but this involves conflict, making self-organization difficult. One area of difficulty is agreeing on everybody’s role. Background What dynamics arise in a self-organizing team from the negotiation of everybody’s role? Method We conceptualize observations from five agile teams (work observations, interviews) by Charmazian Grounded Theory Methodology. Results We define role as something transient and implicit, not fixed and named. The roles are characterized by the responsibilities and expectations of each team member. Every team member must understand and accept their own roles (Local role clarity) and everbody else’s roles (Team-wide role clarity). Role clarity allows a team to work smoothly and effectively and to develop its members’ skills fast. Lack of role clarity creates friction that not only hampers the day-to-day work, but also appears to lead to high employee turnover. Agile coaches are critical to create and maintain role clarity. Conclusions Agile teams should pay close attention to the levels of Local role clarity of each member and Team-wide role clarity overall, because role clarity deficits are highly detrimental

Stimulant drug effects on attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a review of the effects of age and sex of patients

Objective: As dopamine functioning varies by sex and age it might be expected that the effects of methylphenidate or amfetamine, the psychostimulants used for the treatment of Attention Deficit /Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), will also be moderated by these factors. Here we review the published literature on whether stimulant effects in ADHD symptoms vary by age and sex. Method: We searched for studies published from 1989 until October 2009. Databases searched included U. S. National Library of Medicine (PubMed), Medline, EMBASE, PsycINFO and ISI Web of Knowledge. Firstly, we reviewed the effects of stimulant drugs on male and female patients and also patients of pre-school, middle childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Secondly, we reviewed studies that directly tested the moderating effect of age and sex on stimulant treatment outcome. Results: Randomised controlled trials confirm that stimulant medication is efficacious for, and well tolerated by, males and females and patients across the age range; although preschoolers appear to have a less beneficial response and more side effects. Few studies that specifically examined the moderating effect of age and/or sex were identified. For sex, no effects on overall response were found, although one study reported that sex moderated methylphenidate pharmacodynamics. The few effects found for age were small and inconsistent. Conclusions: The available evidence suggests that stimulant medication, when appropriately administered, has efficacy as an ADHD treatment for both sexes and across all ages. There are currently too few published papers examining the effects of sex and age to draw strong conclusions about moderation. Further studies of the pharmacodynamics of stimulants on symptoms measured using objective tests in the laboratory or classroom setting need to be undertaken

No evidence for inhibitory deficits or altered reward processing in ADHD: data from a new integrated incentive delay go/no-go task

Objective: Cognitive and motivational factors differentially affect individuals with mental health problems such as ADHD. Here we introduce a new task to disentangle the relative contribution of inhibitory control and reward anticipation on task performance in children with ADHD and/or autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Method: Typically developing children, children with ADHD, ASD, or both disorders worked during separate sessions for monetary or social rewards in go/no-go tasks with varying inhibitory load levels. Participants also completed a monetary temporal discounting (TD) task. Results: As predicted, task performance was sensitive to both the effects of anticipated reward amount and inhibitory load. Reward amount had different effects depending on inhibitory load level. TD correlated with inhibitory control in the ADHD group. Conclusion: The integration of the monetary incentive delay and go/no-go paradigms was successful. Surprisingly, there was no evidence of inhibitory control deficits or altered reward anticipation in the clinical groups

Different effects of adding white noise on cognitive performance of sub-, normal and super-attentive school children

Objectives: Noise often has detrimental effects on performance. However, because of the phenomenon of stochastic resonance (SR), auditory white noise (WN) can alter the "signal to noise'' ratio and improve performance. The Moderate Brain Arousal (MBA) model postulates different levels of internal "neural noise'' in individuals with different attentional capacities. This in turn determines the particular WN level most beneficial in each individual case-with one level of WN facilitating poor attenders but hindering super-attentive children. The objective of the present study is to find out if added WN affects cognitive performance differently in children that differ in attention ability. Methods: Participants were teacher-rated super-(N = 25); normal-(N = 29) and sub-attentive (N = 36) children (aged 8 to 10 years). Two non-executive function (EF) tasks (a verbal episodic recall task and a delayed verbal recognition task) and two EF tasks (a visuo-spatial working memory test and a Go-NoGo task) were performed under three WN levels. The non-WN condition was only used to control for potential differences in background noise in the group testing situations. Results: There were different effects of WN on performance in the three groups-adding moderate WN worsened the performance of super-attentive children for both task types and improved EF performance in sub-attentive children. The normal-attentive children's performance was unaffected by WN exposure. The shift from moderate to high levels of WN had little further effect on performance in any group. Significance: The predicted differential effect of WN on performance was confirmed. However, the failure to find evidence for an inverted U function challenges current theories. Alternative explanations are discussed. We propose that WN therapy should be further investigated as a possible non-pharmacological treatment for inattention

Altered intrinsic organisation of brain networks implicated in attentional processes in adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a resting state study of attention, default mode and salience network connectivity

Deficits in task-related attentional engagement in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have been hypothesized to be due to altered interrelationships between attention, default mode and salience networks. We examined the intrinsic connectivity during rest within and between these networks. Six minutes resting state scans were obtained. Using a network-based approach, connectivity within and between the dorsal and ventral attention, the default mode and the salience networks was compared between the ADHD and control group. The ADHD group displayed hyperconnectivity between the two attention networks and within the default mode and ventral attention network. The salience network was hypoconnected to the dorsal attention network. There were trends towards hyperconnectivity within the dorsal attention network and between the salience and ventral attention network in ADHD. Connectivity within and between other networks was unrelated to ADHD. Our findings highlight the altered connectivity within and between attention networks, and between them and the salience network in ADHD. One hypothesis to be tested in future studies is that individuals with ADHD are affected by an imbalance between ventral and dorsal attention systems with the former playing a dominant role during task engagement making individuals with ADHD highly susceptible to distraction by salient task-irrelevant stimuli

Grease to the wheel or a spanner in the works? An investigation of office and industrial occupier displacement and property market filtering in Tyne & Wear using the chaining technique

The research uses a chaining technique to study the scale and impact of the displacement of office and industrial occupiers in the Tyne and Wear conurbation. The status and origin of occupiers of 20 office and industrial developments, promoted or assisted by the public sector, have been recorded to determine the distance that they have moved and the number of net new jobs generated. Property chaining reveals the extent to which the filtering effect has resulted in reoccupation of buildings and permits the quantification of the amount of property remaining vacant and its location. Analysis of the recorded chains has revealed that more than half of all occupiers on assisted schemes have relocated within the Tyne and Wear area and one in three occupier chains generated by such relocations result in vacant property elsewhere within the metropolitan area. The displacement of employment and economic activity within the conurbation can be mapped and could be used to inform the action of public agencies to reduce or ameliorate the negative side-effects of their intervention. The chaining technique proves an elegantly simple and robust technique by which to determine the scale and distribution of occupier displacement in property markets