Improving Customer Experience by Automating Incident Response

The tools and practices of IT Operations have to get better and easier.

Every IT Ops engineer has the job of responding to alerts when a website is down or unresponsive. To restore service, the engineer follows a certain procedure to restart the web server and validate that the website is operational. Maybe it happens again a few days later and another engineer repeats the procedure to restore service. If it happens yet again, a proactive engineer hopefully takes the initiative to develop a simple script that automates this procedure.

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Five Ways to Justify your DevOps Investment

Nothing in life and business is free. In the case of DevOps, you'll have to invest in new practices, technologies and culture change in order to get the benefits.

For some of you working in traditional organizations, this may require you to justify the investment - maybe not in financial terms - but in clear delivery, operational excellence, and other KPIs that are meaningful to the business.

To do this well - and win a leader's support on a DevOps transformation program - you'll need to better understand some of the pain points they are feeling and opportunities they want to hit. That's a step down the road beyond just how IT can do a better job with DevOps. Remember, you'll need an investment.

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Your Features are too BIG! Defining Epics, Features, and Stories in Agile Development

How you define a feature impacts your agile mindset and may impact the culture and collaboration you are trying to achieve.

Following up from my recent article on InfoWorld on 5 tips on configuring Jira for multiple teams, I thought to describe some of the antipatterns in defining features and some best practices.

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Want to change the culture? Start with your front line support teams!

Imagine your customer is having a small crisis. In my case, I was on a flight that went through repeated delays; first when the aircraft needed maintenance at the gate, then when the pilot aborted the takeoff, and then a third time when the airline finally had us switch planes. All told, my flight was four hours delayed. It wasn't a crisis for me, but it was for some passengers that were more nerved by the aborted flight.

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Driving Digital is now an Amazon Best Seller

Two years ago I was just coming out of my last CIO role and started my new role as a consultant. One year ago my book Driving Digital: The Leader's Guide to Business Transformation Through Technology published and I officially launched my business StarCIO.

And today, I'm excited to announce that Driving Digital is an Amazon Best Seller in three categories; Information Management, MIS, and PMP Exams thanks to my supporters in Canada.

Needless to say, I'm super excited! A big thanks to all my supporters especially over the last couple of years.

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5 Ways to Improve Developer Productivity and Quality on Agile Development Teams

Many leaders that are new to scaling agile ask me about measuring individual developer and tester productivity since most agile metrics such as velocity are aggregate measures around a team's performance.

These leaders support team dynamics and some promote agile's self-organizing principles. But they also have significant demands from business stakeholders on the speed and quality of their deliverables. Even the larger sized organizations have relatively tight budgets and want to make sure they are getting value, productivity, and quality from the developers and testers on their team. Leaders ask questions on individual performance regardless of whether their teams are fully in house employees, a mix of employee and contractors, or are heavily outsourced.

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Part 2 of the Twelve Things I Learned from One Year After Publishing Driving Digital

About two months ago I shared my twelve things I learned from one year after publishing Driving Digital. But I only shared six of them and shared the remaining six with readers of the StarCIO Driving Digital Newsletter.

The first six included several important findings including: (1) more companies are developing proprietary software, (5) attend the right conferences to grow and learn and (6) leaders are still learning how to execute digital transformation programs.

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