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The Cornerstone for Winning

By Alanna Brown, Courtney Kissler, Dominica Degrandis, Lisa Scheinkopf

How To Get Strategic Alignment

Most organizations have challenges with optimizing for the delivery of business outcomes.

Technology delivery takes too long, costs too much, and often 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 paper 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.

  • Publication Date 2017
  • Pages 17

Features

  • Practical Guidance

    This paper provides practical guidance on how to successfully determine the highest business priority to improve speed to market and optimize delivery of business outcomes.

  • Expert Authors

    This paper is written by experienced practitioners who have led their own successful DevOps transformations within large enterprise organizations.

  • Business and Technology

    This paper helps show how to create a successful strategic alignment between the business and IT departments.

  • All Roles

    This paper is written for any change agent in an organization, no matter their role or experience.

About the Resource

Most organizations have challenges with optimizing for the delivery of business outcomes.

Technology delivery takes too long, costs too much, and often 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 paper 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.

Alanna Brown
Courtney Kissler
Dominica Degrandis
Lisa Scheinkopf
1 4
Alanna Brown

Alanna Brown

Product marketing leader with experience scaling hyper-growth startups. Creator and author of the award-winning State of DevOps Report, a 10-year study of DevOps and high-performing IT organizations.

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Courtney Kissler

Courtney Kissler

Courtney Kissler is senior vice president of Customer & Retail Technology for Starbucks. In this role, Courtney is responsible for delivery and performance across all retail platforms, including point of sale (POS) and store networks. She also drives transformational programs such as next-generation technology in Starbucks stores all over the world. Courtney’s engineering teams are responsible for extending customer digital engagement through world-class web and mobile experiences, supported by modern scalable cloud platforms and integrated services to build innovative solutions and enable business capabilities across the global Starbucks enterprise. Courtney returned to Starbucks in 2023 after serving as Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Technology at Zulily, and as the Vice President of Global Technology at Nike, where she was accountable for building a re-usable seamless platform to power Nike Direct to Consumer experiences, core commerce services, user services, consumer data engineering and global retail solutions. Courtney also led Nike’s Global Supply Chain, Fulfillment and Logistics teams, and drove transformation across the supply chain ecosystem. Courtney was vice president of Retail Technology at Starbucks from 2016-2017, where she led global POS and retail store technology experiences. In all her leadership roles, Courtney drove transformation in ways of working, moving to more outcome-based delivery of technology using modern practices, including DevOps. She grew up in Spokane, Washington and moved to Seattle in 1997 after graduating from Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Washington with a bachelor’s degree in computer information systems and a minor in computer science.

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Dominica Degrandis

Dominica Degrandis

Dominica DeGrandis is the foremost expert in Kanban Flow within the IT industry today. Her work has shown working IT teams how effectively improve workflow and optimize throughput to produce the best result throughout the value stream. Her passion involves the use of visual cues and transparency across teams and organizations to reveal mutually critical information. As Director of Training & Coaching at LeanKit, Dominica combines experience, practice and theory to help teams level up their capability. She blogs at ddegrandis.com and tweets at @dominicad.

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Lisa Scheinkopf

Lisa Scheinkopf

Lisa Scheinkopf is the founder of Jenrada LLC, offering programs and coaching to help leaders and teams ask better questions, develop better solutions, and focus with clarity to achieve meaningful, impactful and sustainable results.

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