TOP CIO Investment Priorities: People and Digital Transformation (Part 1)

“Software is eating the world.” - Marc Andreessen

As we continue to build innovative technologies, the nature of work will evolve rapidly. Engineering teams, and in particular, CIO’s, are focused on investing in their organization’s future. This often means pushing the edges of innovation to build products and services further and faster. Let’s explore how Allstacks directly supports the core priorities concerning talent and digital transformation.

CIO Priority #1: People/Talent - Training, Acquiring, and Leading

People are your company’s biggest asset, but staffing the right team is one of the most challenging parts of leading any organization. How do you discover talent? How do you nurture your people? What insights are necessary to help unleash talent to build great software?

These are the sorts of questions that we are asking ourselves at Allstacks. CIOs are focused on People emphasizes how critical building the right engineering teams will be to organizational success throughout the next wave of digital evolution.

Success will rely on identifying, developing, and leading talent using integrated data and proactive insights. In a previous blog post, we mentioned how you can’t manage what you can’t measure, and this is especially true for talent in your organization. Managing engineering teams without data is like trying to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar -- without ever seeing the jar!

CIO’s are focused on People because, let’s face it, good people are hard to find. Yet, acquiring top talent does not directly translate into retaining and growing these people. If you want to acquire, develop, and lead top engineering talent, you need a tool that allows you to see work and collaboration patterns from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. We’ve designed Allstacks to help you do just that.

Our Individual Report allows you to understand how your People are growing over time. By investigating performance across many metrics, focusing on internal consistency and team fit, you can build a healthy, high-functioning organization. For example, looking at how a team member interfaces with the team can often reveal rising stars in your organization. If their contributions span broadly, not just limited to items they own, they may be showing signs of leadership potential. Identifying and nurturing these latent talents will pay dividends down the line.

Allstacks helps you understand the nature of your team member’s contributions to the organization. With our individual report, you can quickly see how they are doing over time, recently, and in comparison to their peers across several focus areas.

Every team is different and faces its own challenges, but Allstacks helps you see through the chaos and find the happy path to success.

CIO Priority #2: Digital Transformation

When we talk about digital transformation, many CIOs think about digitizing back-office processes or removing old paper trails. They don’t necessarily believe that digital transformation could also mean optimizing already existent engineering teams. To be truly transformative, engineering teams and organizations will need to re-conceptualize how they operate and measure their work. Otherwise, the technologies that we build and the processes that we use to develop them may just transpose rather than transform our organizations. This is especially important for software engineering teams.

Enabling effective communication between your business and software development teams is paramount at every step of the software lifecycle. Effective communication enables product owners and managers to make informed decisions surrounding prioritization, testing, and implementation of future builds. There are many tools to choose from, but leaders still lack a holistic solution to monitor, course correct, and optimize “transformative” initiatives in the current state.

Our Retrospective Report allows you to identify areas where your team can benefit from training or re-alignment. A high number of bounce backs or an abnormally high number of story comments, for instance, may indicate that your team needs direction. Pull requests that are open longer than usual or with a high churn rate are other indicators that your team may be struggling. By identifying these sorts of patterns automatically, Allstacks helps you see and address instances before becoming roadblocks.

Allstacks Work In Progress report also provides complete visibility across your software engineering teams so you can understand the impact of decisions on the entire system. For instance, explore stories, pull requests, and commits throughout different time frames with the assistance of automatic alerts. Allstacks runs deep dives for you and synthesizes hot ticket items so you can focus on what matters now.

Armed with the proper tools and data-driven insights you need, Allstacks helps you transform your business while also nurturing the people and investments that make it run. To learn more about how Allstacks can help your organization, drop us a line and stay tuned for part two of this series.