My Time Leading Tech at BusinessWeek

Today was my last full day heading technology at BusinessWeek (or CIO as my superiors acknowledge).

I’m very proud of the BusinessWeek Technology Team’s accomplishments during my tenure. Some of our product accomplishments have been very public. We launched, Business Exchange, a social platform for business professionals. If you haven’t checked out this platform then I encourage you to spend some time on it and see how you can use it to find interesting business content promoted by users in topics you’re interested in. My favorite business topics include CIO, Agile Software Development, Enterprise 2.0, Open Source Software and Social Networking. There are many gems in this product; integration with both LinkedIn and Twitter, a profile page that SEOs well and highlights your business interests (see my profile), a news feed from business professionals you select to follow, and the simplicity of aggregated business content in topics of interest. But like all social products, Business Exchange needs time to mature. When it launched a year ago, there were only 200 topics – now there are over 1600 with many more people contributing great content to the top topics. It’s had sponsorship and ad revenue since its launch day. There’s been some interesting press on BX recently, but let’s just say not all the ‘facts’ some news sites published on this business are accurate or complete. It’s a good product, backed by some good technology and a smart team.

We had many other product launches and improvements; a new BusinessWeek.com home and channel pages (tech, finance, innovation...) , upgraded tools for the Business School channel, and a mobile product to name a few. We also made many internal improvements in editorial process, upgraded Salesforce.com reporting, and deployed other innovative analytics solutions.

What you couldn’t see is what we were doing behind the scene. Our newest products were built on a new technology platform based on web standards, XML, and algorithmically generated content. We established an on/offshore agile development and delivery model. We figured out how to integrate agile within a larger enterprise organization, helped develop a feature prioritization process with Product Management and have a real answer on how to integrate QA into an agile process. Our teams were collaborative and innovative, but not reckless. We were agile and nimble, but had a very strong, regimented product planning process and agile application lifecycle.

I’d like to thank everyone on the technology team, and everyone we collaborated with at BusinessWeek and McGraw-Hill for all of this success. It’s been fun, challenging, noble at times, and full of innovation. Congratulations to all of you making the journey to Bloomberg and I hope you will continue to grow the processes we established. To those seeking new adventures, best of luck to you and don’t forget to clap.

Members of the BusinessWeek Technology Team
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Turning Good Ideas into Operational Reality

Lots of companies these days are focused on innovation and idea generation. In fact, one of the major reasons CIOs are backing Enterprise 2.0 is to provide tools to the entire distributed organization for idea capture, collaboration, and ranking. Here are some of my tips on fostering "useful" idea generation so that the organization can implement the best ideas:

  • Communicate the business strategy - I think it's ok for some ideas to be totally "green" and separate from strategy, but most corporations invest a lot of time, money, and expertise into developing a strategy. Ideas that support the business strategy already have the basis for investment so encourage the team to think "on strategy".
  • Define the idea - Good ideas should have some structure especially if you're successful in getting the organization to propose many ideas. By defining a structure, it gives a mechanism to compare ideas. It's also a good mechanism for encouraging staffers to collaborate on ideas especially if multiple skills are required to define them.
  • Encourage (require) collaboration - Brute force is ok here, as in "Ideas must be presented by a team of three or more from the following departments. The best ideas no longer come from department silos.
  • Require transparency - This is where tools help, but they don't necessarily require specialized ones. Define an idea as a structured wiki page, a Google form, a Quickbase App, etc.
  • Accept big and small ideas - It's too easy to focus a process on the big ideas, but small ideas implemented efficiently can also have significant impact.
  • Define a process - Staffers should know when and how ideas are evaluated and staged through a process. Good ideas should be relatively easy to define before they go through a first stage of vetting. Small ideas (see point above) need a fast efficient process. Staffers should know the follow up stages for getting funding on larger scale ideas.
There's at least one piece I'm leaving out which I'll leave for a follow up post. Can you guess what it is?

Special thanks to @robstoltz for suggesting this post!
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No Scrum Master? No Problem

How should Enterprises fill the Scrum Master Role?

I field this question very often and especially from members of technology organizations where agile and scrum in particular is being introduced top down from Management. I've blogged a bit on Product Owners in the Enterprise and Why Project Managers are still needed, but what about Scrum Masters?

Some Thoughts

Here's how this question surfaced over the last week:
  • I met a colleague the other day who's been successful with Agile Development but was hitting a snag. He had a couple of contractors acting as scrum masters and hadn't found a person on his team to fill this critical role.
  • Then, in a subsequent session on Redefining Application Development with Offshore Agile, Greg Reiser presented several organizational models for offshore agile development. Guess what! No scrum masters - they've replaced them with Iteration Managers that have some of the responsibilities of the Scrum Master but also mixed in with other traditional project manager questions.
This role, rather than focusing on just the mechanics of project management, planning and execution, is geared to being the ultimate team advocate, protector of team productivity, facilitator and communicator.

My Thoughts On Scrum Masters and other Roles in the SDLC

When staffing a department or a team, you often have to make some tough choices on the type of people and skills needed. Do you need a business analyst and a project manager? Will a team become more productive if there is a build engineer? Do you need QA Analysts, Engineers, or Testers and in what proportion to developers?

So when it comes to the Scrum Master, here is what I recommend:

1) Understanding the role and responsibilities really well because it includes responsibilities we usually ascribe to either a project manager or a team lead.

2) Decide what responsibilities are clearly needed across your development teams.

3) Think through how best to assign these responsibilities based on the talents of your team members and the structure by which you implement the SDLC.

4) Recognize if you need some training.

5) Review your process and metrics and make adjustments.

So for example, if you have a small number of co-located teams, you might be able to get away with a shared scrum master across them. If you have a larger number of teams, you'll probably need the team leads to fulfill the responsibilities of the scrum master and then have a separate project manager coordinate activities across teams. (Note: Scrum of scrums really works for this scenario!). We've had success at times having a rotating scrum master with a passing of the baton every 1-2 iterations.

Bottom line, I agree with Martin Fowler and do not think agile or scrum is a fixed process and set of responsibilities. It's a framework that needs to be adapted to the situation. Same is true for fulfilling the scrum master responsibilities.


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About Isaac Sacolick

Isaac Sacolick is President of StarCIO, a technology leadership company that guides organizations on building digital transformation core competencies. He is the author of Digital Trailblazer and the Amazon bestseller Driving Digital and speaks about agile planning, devops, data science, product management, and other digital transformation best practices. Sacolick is a recognized top social CIO, a digital transformation influencer, and has over 900 articles published at InfoWorld, CIO.com, his blog Social, Agile, and Transformation, and other sites. You can find him sharing new insights @NYIke on Twitter, his Driving Digital Standup YouTube channel, or during the Coffee with Digital Trailblazers.