At the recent 2019 Capability Counts conference, hosted by the CMMI Institute, I presented a session related to Enforcing Quality with DevOps Pipeline gates, where I provided an introduction to the concepts and technologies of DevOps, and how to use the concepts of Continuous Quality to improve software quality earlier and throughout the application lifecycle.
Here are the slides, published on SlideShare, if you’re interested.
If you’re a small business, the world of cyber security can be very overwhelming and intimidating. There are infinite articles you can read about, a long list of cyber security maturity frameworks and concepts you could try to learn, and an overwhelming feeling that you can’t possible actually defend yourself from the hackers all over the place!
Cyber is a big, complex thing that is hard to do — if you’re looking to better defend your organization and you don’t know where to start, I recommend this approach:
Random product backlog idea: It’d be awesome if companies that offer online, video-based training (e.g. Lynda (now LinkedIn Learning), PluralSight, O’Reilly Safari, Udemy, etc.) offered:
Organizations must intentionally determine how opinionated their collaboration tools (business systems) should be, to align with their culture and business model. Opinionated tools align well with top-down organizational cultures, while non-opinionated tools align well with decentralized, self-organizing cultures.
Organizations struggle at each extreme:
Organizations need to find the right balance between these two extremes for their entire organizational culture, and how they select, configure, and maintain tools to align with this approach. The figure below shows the spectrum I envision, where a company moves the triangle to find the spot they want their organization to be, and then aligns tools with that spot on the spectrum.
Technologies can come out of the box very opinionated (think about a tool like the TurboTax wizard interface, that walks users through a workflow it decides without asking how you want to use the tool) or it can be very flexible (think about Microsoft Word — you can write your letter first, and then format it; or you can setup the page size, orientation, and header before you write your letter).
Technologies can also be configured to be very opinionated — JIRA as an example is an issue/ticket tracking system that has a variety of Agile planning/management capabilities. Out of the box, the tool comes with a few standard ticket types and workflows, but you could let each team in your organization configure their own ticket types, workflows; leaving all the permissions wide open for the organization. However, most organizations make JIRA “more opinionated” before they deploy it, only letting a few select leaders/administrators make changes to the system.
On the opinionated this spectrum, I see organizations selecting and configuring tools with a heavy focus on ensuring employees use a tool exactly the way the organization’s senior leaders want them to be used (highly opinionated). Allan Kelly recently write a great post about how dangerous this power centralization can become for organizations.
On the non-opinionated side, organizations struggle to stay cohesive. They can become organizations of individual teams or almost a group of consultants who are trying to accomplish things; but can’t leverage the scale of their organization to accomplish great things. This can devolve into anarchy, where teams don’t help each other. Think about a team who can’t share talent with other teams, because they’re using different processes or technologies. Or a leader who isn’t able to report on progress because each of her teams is using their project tracking tool completely differently.
Organizations, and the Office of the CIO organizations that should be enabling them, need find the balance, like a train station where the rules of engagement are clear (Where do I get a ticket? Where do I get on the train? Where do I get food?), but different people can get to their trains in different ways. Organizations don’t have to be the wild west with teams doing whatever they want (think about a SharePoint site with no governance where you can’t find anything) and organizations don’t need to be top-down culture where no work gets done because everyone has given up on requesting approvals and resigns themselves to the slow-moving status-quo.
I recently spoke at the 2017 Capability Counts conference, put on by the CMMI Institute. 
It’s an interesting event that isn’t focused just on CMMI maturity models — instead it’s a conference where a few hundred people get together to discuss process improvement, Agile, software engineering processes, and a variety of other related topics.
The keynote (shown in the picture above) is David Anderson of LeanKanban University talking about the core concepts of Kanban, which go far beyond most people’s understanding of 3 column boards.
I spoke on using Atlassian’s JIRA product to help an organize scale — sharing some best practices/recommendations on how to use a tool like JIRA to get information out of email, hallway conversations, and meetings and into a system where work can be clarified, prioritized and tracked.
This morning I got to share IT infrastructure, business strategy, and business
architecture tips and recommendations with some local current and future entrepreneurs at The Capitol Post in Old Town Alexandria. Capitol Post is a great organization focused on inspiring Veteran entrepreneurs to find professional clarity and scale those visions. They offer several great things, including a cool co-working space right in North Old Town Alexandria, classes, and a startup accelerator program.
Here are the slides and strategy template I went through with the group this morning, helping entrepreneurs deal with IT. We talked about:
We talked about how IT for non-technical entrepreneurs can be like personal finance for non-financial people — it’s very important, but it’s hard to motivate yourself to invest the time you need to understand it, make some solid plans, automate it, and then move on to creating value.
It’s been a year since I last taught at Capitol Post (https://mikehking.com/2015/09/11/talking-technology-bunker-labs/), and it’s great to see how much they’ve grown (the office is beautiful and their getting ready for their next cohort to go through the Bunker Labs DC accelerator.
I recently wanted to copy a large set of photos (over 10,000) out of Apple Photos (Mac-based photo management application/database) and save them on a USB hard drive so I could import them to Google Photos (cloud-based photo management service). I did an export of all the photos out of Apple Photos, which saved the date and time information in the EXIF metadata, but not in the file metadata itself. Here’s how I solved this (which I’m sure isn’t the most elegant solution), using a Mac:
If you’re the CIO, Director of Technology, IT Person, or Only Person (Solopreneur) at your organization, here are 5 areas of questions areas to consider when determining if a specific IT system or process would align with your small company’s needs:
Shameless plug: If you’re interested in learning more about setting up the technology for your company, or future startup, check out this free class I’m teaching next week (Thursday, Sept 10, 2015), sponsored by Capitol Post, in Old Town Alexandria: Technology 101 for Entrepreneurs (How to Choose to the Best Systems for your Business).
I’ve recently realized that I’ve been drawing a similar pie graph several times recently, explaining how I spend my time as a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at a small business. I thought I’d share for those interested in how I spend my time juggling the demands of CTO across various company priorities.
If you’re interested in learning more about small business CTO activities, including technology strategy when you’re too small to have a dedicated CTO, check out this free, upcoming training in Old Town Alexandria, sponsored by Capitol Post, that I’m teaching next month (Sept 2015): Technology 101 for Entrepreneurs (How to Choose to the Best Systems for your Business).
