The Effective CTO
The Effective CTO
Best practices for IT departments
About the Book
No matter if you are an engineer, VP or CTO. Times in IT have changed. Massive trends like cloud computing, lean product development and continuous delivery are destroying conventional wisdom.
This book covers best practices of the world's leading companies in five areas:
- General organization of the IT department
- Culture
- People and teams
- Product
- Engineering
These best practices will be a game changer for your daily work and will allow you to successfully run an IT department in an ever changing world.
About the Author
Table of Contents
- About this book
- General organization of the IT department
- Purpose is the basis for success
- An agile roadmap for long term planning
- Objectives And Key Results (OKRs) for short term focus
- Essential meetings for your department
- How to get feedback from teams before problems pile up
- How to structure teams of your department
- Tech radar helps to guide your engineers
- How to organize the documentation of your department
- Ban acronyms
- Announcing difficult decisions
- Culture / Establishing a learning culture
- How your department benefits from retrospectives
- Tolerating failure is the prerequisite for innovation
- How Post-Mortems help to improve
- Pre-Mortems for project success
- People and teams
- How to make remote teams work
- How the Pomodoro Approach can help to forge a remote team
- Praising your employees is the basis for success
- How to deal with toxic team members
- How to make collaboration between product and engineering work from a technical perspective
- Traits of high-performance teams
- How to deal with single points of failure
- Optimize onboarding
- How to source employees for hiring
- Career paths as essential ingredients for employee satisfaction
- Hiring consistently the best people with a structured hiring process
- What when employees leave
- How OKRs help to manage your direct reports
- Multi-focus is deadly for teams
- Checklists - for everything
- Team maturity is a crucial concept for successful team formation
- Product
- Product Owners - not Product Monkeys
- Get feedback quickly from customers
- Difference between an Agile Roadmap and a wishlist
- Analytics is the basis for a Product Owner
- Acceptance criteria to define when a feature is finished
- Use internship programs to connect engineers with users
- Follow up on customers quitting your software
- Engineering
- True continuous deployment supercharges productivity
- Keep an overview of your services and systems
- Why teams are the key to stable systems
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