StarCIO Report: Digital Survey 2019

Several weeks ago, I wrote the article on CIO.com, 5 outdated technology practices that doom digital transformations where I dated several technology practices and suggested others that were replacing them.

Several weeks later, I opened a poll to selected CIOs, IT leaders, and high potentials to tell me which practices were most outdated in their organizations and what digital practices they were focused on maturing. The results are in and published in the StarCIO Report: Digital Survey 2019.

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Episode 4 @DrivingDig : There is More to DevOps and Agile than Rituals and Tools

Going into the Thanksgiving holiday week so maybe you have time to catch up on some reading. Here is Episode 4 of Driving Digital's tip of the day where I cover some of my agile, devops, and other articles.

If you missed them, you can also see Episode 1, Episode 2, and Episode 3.

Also, if you missed by Thanksgiving themed posts, please have a look at 5 Reasons for CIO to be Thankful for this Thanksgiving and my very popular post A CIO Top Ten Guide to Preparing a Thanksgiving Feast. It's also the time of year to consider how you are rewarding top performers on your team.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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5 Reasons for CIO to be Thankful for this Thanksgiving

Six years ago, I wrote a fun post on A CIO 's Top Ten Guide to Preparing a Thanksgiving Feast, where I shared some whimsical advice from building a firewall to outsourcing what you cannot do well. I've wanted to follow up on a new Thanksgiving-themed post since then but for one reason or another never came through with one.

So this week's post shares the real meaning behind Thanksgiving. Looking through some of this year's surveys and research I found five results that support many of the efforts top CIOs champion in their organization from agile, to devops, to change management. I hope you like.

And thanks to everyone who reads this blog, subscribes to the Driving Digital Newsletter, likes my book Driving Digital, learns StarCIO Agile Planning, or works with StarCIO on workshops and transformation. Happy Thanksgiving!

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Becoming a Transformational CIO from the Best CIO Blog on the Planet!

Every once and a while I receive recognition and participate in a webinar that's worth sharing here with everyone.

First, I'm very proud that this blog, Social, Agile, and Transformation was recently listed as the #1 blog for CIOs and a top blog on agile software development.

I've been writing on these topics for over a decade here on this blog, on CIO.com, on InfoWorld, and on several other publications. The best way to keep up with all my writing is through the Driving Digital Newsletter which I send monthly with updates on all my writing.

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How to use Spikes and Deliver Agile POCs

In my last post, I discussed shallow commitments, an agile tool team can use to negotiate with product owners when they are asked to commit to more stories in a sprint above their velocity and comfort zone. Teams commit as usual and then define several stories that sit in the shallows. If the committed stories are finished earlier than expected, then they can pick up new stories from the shallows.

That's one tool development teams can use to make commitments easier. Another one is to use spikes, a way to define a research and development story. Spikes are typically time-boxed and may result in a failure when they are longer or more complex than forecasted. When spikes succeed, then they provide background knowledge to the team to estimate and work on the desired business feature or technical debt improvement.

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@DrivingDig Episode 3: Agility and Rigor Enable Innovation

I'm back to share a mix of tweets on topics that I write about: Agile, DevOps, Digital Transformation, CIO leadership, and AI among others.

Innovation and collaboration are common themes in these tweets and posts!

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How to Negotiate Sprint Commitment with Product Owners

It's that dreaded time again. You've gathered for the sprint commitment meeting and already have a fairly good idea of what the team will be willing to commit. Your velocity is 100 story points per sprint, and over the last three sprints they achieved +/-10% against that target. You're hoping for a 95 point commitment as there is a big meeting this week that will pull the team off task.

Only you know that the product owner is going to hope for a 108 story point commitment. She's aiming to get two more stories done this sprint, one with eight points and the other with five points.

And she'll come with all the right reasons why end-users will want the added improvements sooner. Your team has CI/CD in place but follows a release management standard of 3-sprints for a major release. Continuous deployment wouldn't work for this organization as every release requires some manual testing that can't easily be automated, documentation for SOC-2 compliance, and end-user training that can't be performed more frequently.

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