15 Reasons Why StarCIO Agile Planning Drives Results!

I have been introducing different aspects of StarCIO Agile Planning. Last week I shared how continuous planning is used to deliver solid roadmaps. Prior to that, I posted on how StarCIO Agile Planning drives architecture standards and developing great products!

Get the white paper! This week I published a first white paper titled StarCIO Agile Planning: The Missing Practices to Gain Alignment and Achieve Great Results. I'm offering free 30-minute consultations to the first people who sign up for the paper and request to be contacted!

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Agile Continuous Planning to Deliver Solid Roadmaps

Agile teams can't wait till the end of a release to begin planning the next one. The time gap it creates is a tremendous loss of productivity. Furthermore, this approach to planning doesn't simplify drafting roadmaps and forecasts that many organizations require from their agile teams.

And while there are many benefits from the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), its Program Increment (PI) planning may not be suitable for many smaller and medium-sized development organizations. PI prescribes dedicating an innovation and planning iteration and scheduling two full days for the planning meeting. This may be a practical way to align and plan an agile release train for large development organizations that dedicate themselves to all the rigors of SAFe. It also promotes other activities like learning during this sprint.

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Agile Planning Business Roadmaps, Architecture Standards, and DevOps Releases

Agile planning doesn't end when stories are written, accepted by the team, sized, and ready for development.

Story writing is one aspect of agile planning, but it's not the only one. At StarCIO, agile planning is done at several levels depending on the complexity of the requirement.

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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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