Being a CIO: One Year Later

Last year, I published a series on my first hundred days as CIO at McGraw-Hill Construction. I've largely been quiet since then, unfortunately (from a blogging perspective), with my head down working with the Business and IT teams. We've rolled out some new products like Dodge SpecShare Suite, upgraded several technology platforms, and established an agile project management office among many other achievements. I've also spent a lot of time meeting with customers and learning about the construction industry. I am running a CIO panel at ENR's FutureTech conference in December and started a CIO Council for construction industry CIOs (largely general contractor and design firms).

Over the last couple of months, I've contributed two articles to Engineering News Record. My first post covered Three Technologies Where Construction CIOs Need Strategies and I contributed a second this week on Tablets, Laptops and Virtual Desktops: Trends for CIOs to Watch.

Some things that I've learned along the way

  • You have to focus on the now and the future - all while you are still learning. Every day I'm still learning a new detail about the construction industry, our products, customers, and our architecture - yet I still must provide guidance on projects, future initiatives, capabilities, and budgets. 
  • Improving and accelerating application delivery takes both persistence and patience. Persistence to make changes to internal processes, architectures, and priorities - patience for teams and individuals to adapt.
  • It's a cliche to say technology is changing - but it is in more dramatic ways. There is now a feedback loop on technology demands. Customers and users have all seen benefits in leveraging new technologies; mobile/tablets to access information, business intelligence to make smarter decisions, social media to collaborate and other improvements in usability and search technologies. Users are hooked and have higher expectations for smarter analytic capabilities delivered conveniently with better tools to make them productive.  
It's been a fun ride. More to come.




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How to Kill Projects and Develop Agile Programs Part 2

In How to Kill Projects and Develop Agile Programs Part 1, I listed the first steps in moving from projects to programs. Embrace but control projects, execute the agile process, identify and measure productivity impediments.

All three are important. What you need to demonstrate is that you have a team that is transparent, productive, and can execute on business priorities. You want business stakeholders to be a part of the process, gain  credibility with them, and leverage success to fuel future demand.

In your agile program, there are a number of areas to focus on. Do you have the right team and skills? Are you measuring velocity and is it consistent? Are you using retrospectives to address quality issues and can demonstrate improvements? Are you capturing technical debt? Are your deployments efficient?

But most important - do you have a well defined backlog and is there a product vision for new products and enhancements?

Getting to Agile Programs

Once you have an efficient team in place, the leap to programs becomes easier. Both business stakeholders and technologists have incentive to leverage the expertise of the the team and give them another assignment. There are some challenges in prioritizing work; do you enhance the current product, or develop features for the next product? This is a prioritization issue that agile provides tools to address.

There is also a financial issue. If you require financial approvals on projects, how do you run agile programs? This is also not as complex as it seems. If you require a financial approval, package the benefits and costs for a collection of releases and schedule the approval. In the end, this is a timing issue that you have a backlog and business backing to justify the team's next set of development priorities.

The main thing to address with Agile Programs is to govern and manage issues that arise when you have long standing teams developing new products and applications. For another post...
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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.