While finding great new talent, don’t forget to regularly re-recruit people you already have. In recruiting, part of the process is taking time to explain why they should want to come work with you. This isn’t an activity only for recruits. Tell your people why they are valued, and make sure they understand why they should continue working with you.

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Design security in from the start, so it improves speed. Help teams understand how to be secure, so security never slows them down. Empowering teams to use security tools themselves limits the risk of finding security issues too late in a release. Tools such as code review tools can be automated into every test pass during sprint team iterations. Leverage templates and scripts to ensure security controls are active and operating as expected.

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Can you combine data you already have to create new value? Is there a business model hidden in what you discard? For example, we had years of enterprise sales opportunity data. We were about to purge it since all the opportunities were long past. Then we discovered the data was useful to train a machine-learning model that accurately predicted success of any new sales opportunities. This opened up many new ideas.

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Historically, IT measured success using compliance, uptime, and delivery: on time, on scope, on budget. These are still worth tracking, but should not define success. It’s the wrong incentive for IT to deliver just what is asked of them. Instead, define success based on bona fide business improvement, not IT delivery. And measure end-to-end processes working as expected, not uptime of IT services.

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Transformation is not going faster with the same historical IT practices, or getting more done by just working longer hours, or adding capacity with more lower cost resources. Don’t just overlay what teams knew historically on top of Agile practices. Using shorter waterfalls completely misses the point. Fundamental change is required. Dedicated coaches can help teams really transform faster.

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Teams that bear the weight of the world on their shoulders and don’t enjoy a joke are more likely to fail.

PMs need to promote an environment of work balanced with a bit of fun to keep the team motivated and excited.

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Team members that publicly bad-mouth decisions undermine the credibility of the entire team.

PMs need to ensure an environment of healthy debate while reinforcing the need to support decisions publicly.

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At times chosen technologies are a poor fit due to misunderstood, absent or ignored requirements.

No technology is going to meet 100% of the requirements.  Know the gaps and decide how best to handle them.

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A problem that cannot be quantified makes solving the problem highly subjective and more subject to failure.

Ensure there are clear and objective criteria for knowing that the problem was solved. No squishy criteria.

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When the team doesn’t understand the problem the likelihood of a satisfactory solution is left to chance.

Take the time to ensure the team understands the problem the way the sponsor understands the problem.

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