Test and learn. Fast. Encourage open discussion. Give your team time and space to express their ideas. Follow with fast test and learn cycle.
Category: process
Small sample sizes reduce precision of estimation. Try to acquire more data but avoid simply adding “more of the same” as obtaining lots of small samples from the same population will not help. Applied more broadly: seek different opinions to avoid confirmation bias.
As the CTO you are not important in the next 60 seconds. Dev fixing bugs, writing a line of code, support helping a user, PM holding a project meeting are all more important than you.
It’s hard to stay humble when everyone laughs at your jokes. But you are probbaly least important person in the IT organisation in the next 60 seconds.
How do you make tech decisions? How do you make them under under pressure? In a stressful project situations? When a deadline is approaching and dev delivery is late?
Develop a set of standards that relate to domains (data architecture, solution design, versoning, dependency management…). When you are faced with a decision think about how it relates to your standards which will help you make better decisions faster and also it will make you aware when you compromised and added to you tech debt – your legacy elephant that you need to drag with you.
SVC or Mercurial or Git or TFS. Pick one and make a use case for it across the organisation beyond the IT. We like cloud-native service. Check that it integrates with the key Dev / Data / Modelling tools and that it doesn’t create an admin overhead for the IT. Structure versioning so that picking up a version you can create the full deploy so include dependences like data model, scripts, server configs. If you cannot create a runnable deploy you are missing something. You don’t want to waste time chasing loose ends.
or if you prefer a paid version of a task tracking tool, Asana. Use those to get to the status of your projects faster. Tools don’t replace face to face meetings in which to exchange ideas or come to a decision but are great at surfacing somewhat obfuscated project management reporting. To further optimise the process pull data to a dashboard (Asana has an add on) via a microservice API to automate reporting further.