Developing great products with StarCIO Agile Planning

Writing user stories was once a relatively straightforward exercise. Product owners wrote stories in customer-centric language defining why, what, and for whom the story was being implemented. The goal was, and still is, to establish a shared understanding of the requirements with the agile development team without overly specifying how the story should be implemented.

More mature agile teams develop standards and constrain how a story should be implemented with pass-fail acceptance criteria. Criteria bind the implementation around architecture, data, security, devops, performance, scalability, user experience, and other compliance factors.

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Driving Digital Tip of the Day by @DrivingDig Episode 1

I'm introducing a new opportunity for everyone to learn more about Digital Transformation. Every day, @DrivingDig will be publishing a #DrivingDig Tip of the Day.

Each tip covers one of the themes from my book, Driving Digital. You'll see tips on agile planning, product management, devops, citizen data science, proactive data governance, and leadership topics on driving organizational change.

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Driving Digital 2025: Reaching Enterprise Agility [Video]

I've started sharing insights from my keynote, Driving Digital 2025.

I am writing and speaking about what leaders have to do today to drive transformation over the next five years.

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5 Risk Mitigation Strategies for Agile Teams

I find that agile teams because they are agile, may leave behind fundamental-to-IT risk mitigation strategies that can make sprints, releases, and application development more reliable and robust. Risk mitigation should be a basic tenet of agile mindsets and culture, and perhaps even agile governance. It's particularly important for teams new to agile, teams working on complex legacy technology, and even when advanced teams experiment with new platforms.

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7 Lessons on Maturing DevOps in Enterprises

If you are trying to implement devops in a larger IT organization, please give a listen to my recent podcast on Gigaom's Voices in DevOps A Conversation with Isaac Sacolick.

DevOps largely came from startups that wanted to break the cultural and practice separation between Dev and Ops. Dev teams want to iterate and deploy changes quickly, while operating teams must ensure reliable and compliant environments. Automation, and alignment on goals, and collaboration are key to getting both, but, achieving this in compliant-driven enterprises isn't trivial. Implementing DevOps in these organizations requires a different strategy than what startups can do.

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Celebrating Two Fantastic Years of Driving Digital

Two years ago I received my "author's copies" of Driving Digital: The Leader's Guide to Business Transformation Through Technology. The picture you see here is just after I opened the box. What a thrilling moment it was!

For two years I have been keynoting events, meeting with leaders, leading StarCIO Driving Digital Workshops, writing this blog, and contributing articles to CIO and InfoWorld on the changing nature of leading transformation programs.

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5 Activities to Improve the Culture of Agile DevOps Teams

It's getting close to summer months and many agile devops teams are working hard to close out their Q2 commitments. The summer months are a great time to bring people and teams together to recalibrate on priorities and revitalize their commitment to collaboration.

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