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September 14, 2017

Featured Resource: The Cornerstone for Winning

By IT Revolution

Leading up to DevOps Enterprise Summit 2017 San Francisco, we’ll be releasing our most valuable DevOps resources to our community on a weekly basis.

Each of these resources come to you straight from the DevOps Enterprise Forum, where more than 50 technology leaders and thinkers gather for three days to create written guidance on the best-known methods for overcoming the top obstacles in the DevOps Enterprise community.


Most organizations have challenges with optimizing for the delivery of business outcomes. Technology delivery takes too long, costs too much, and ends up missing the mark when it finally makes it to production. Often it can be unclear why this is happening and blame is cast in all directions.

This resource is intended to provide guidance and a framework for organizations to use to determine the highest business priority and maximum allowable WIP (work in process) to improve speed to market, optimizing delivery of business outcomes, and to create strategic alignment between business and technology.

We discuss this in three sections:

  • The Problem — Most of our businesses have a long list of projects or initiatives that, when completed, should enable the business to increase and sustain its appeal to the market. When too much work is in process at any given point, however, it leads directly to conflicting priorities. In this first section we discuss how bad multitasking can make it tougher and tougher to meet the needs of the business.
  • Direction of the Solution  With the understanding that limiting work in process is the key to satisfying both of the business needs—more new technology solutions to increase and sustain market appeal, and enabling the tech organization to get all of its work done and done well—the direction for the solution emerges. In this section, we identify the three key elements of the solution.
  • What Now? Rather than start with an attempt to identify and prioritize every job, project, initiative, ticket, or other form of work, in this final section we recommend a way to help you identify the priorities, understand the load, and limit the work-in-process.

The authors on each of these resources will be prominent figures in the industry, and on this particular one, we have four industry leaders working together. They include:

  • Alanna Brown, Director, Product Marketing, Puppet
  • Courtney Kissler, Vice President, Retail Technology, Starbucks
  • Dominica DeGrandis, Director, Digital Transformation, Tasktop
  • Lisa Scheinkopf, Global Director, The Goldratt School

Here are two amazing presentations from authors on this week’s resource.

Dominica DeGrandis

Courtney Kissler & Jason Josephy


If you’re eager to continue learning about these topics and more, come see how you can be a part of DevOps Enterprise Summit 2017 San Francisco. We spend three days talking with the leaders of large, complex organizations implementing DevOps principles and practices, with the goal to give leaders (like you) the tools and practices they need to develop and deploy software faster and to win in the marketplace.

- About The Authors
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IT Revolution

Trusted by technology leaders worldwide. Since publishing The Phoenix Project in 2013, and launching DevOps Enterprise Summit in 2014, we’ve been assembling guidance from industry experts and top practitioners.

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