Mark Schwartz > Quotes

“Risk is managed not through cautious planning but through bold experiments combined with frequent inspection, feedback, and adaptation.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“Saying that “the business is IT’s customer, and the customer is always right” seems like a good idea when there is deep dissatisfaction with IT that stems from a long history of unreliable service. But over the long term, this value trap sets up the IT unit for failure because customers are often wrong (especially about matters in which they are not experts), and calling colleagues “customers” puts a wedge between IT and the rest of the business.9”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table and The Art of Business Value: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“Enterprises are filled with technologists who are trying to bring their companies into the digital age and who are focused on achieving business value with technology. And they’re frustrated trying to do so.”
― Mark Schwartz, War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age

“Agile thinking simply says that we should empower small teams to inspect and adapt rather than stick to a plan. Lean thinking gives that small team ways to speed up its inspecting and adapting process to maximize its impact. Continuous Delivery and DevOps place the entire value stream in the hands of that small team so that it can “optimize the whole” (a term of art in Lean thinking) and be empowered as a team to own the entire value delivery process.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“cumulative flow diagrams help us pinpoint process flaws;”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“Donald Reinertsen’s book The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“DevOps simply adds the idea that small, cross-functional teams should own the entire delivery process from concept through user feedback and production monitoring.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“My fellow IT leaders, we must use these new Agile, Lean, and DevOps practices as a lever for changing the relationship between IT and the rest of the business. We”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“The real value—and the real effort—lies in helping business managers identify how to change the business and then helping them play their roles in implementing those changes.”
― Mark Schwartz, The Art of Business Value

“The Enterprise and Scrum.”
― Mark Schwartz, The Art of Business Value

“The difficulty is that culture is unwritten and unstated. For the Agile team to use culture as a guide to what is valued by the business, it must excavate, deduce, hypothesize, and test. One thing that it cannot do is to try to rip out the existing culture and replace it with a “more Agile” one. Corporate culture is not an impediment to Agile adoption; it is a valuable clue to defining the success of Agile adoption.”
― Mark Schwartz, The Art of Business Value

“Security is not the guys in the dark glasses with impenetrable network diagrams on their huge computer screens. It is your grandmother telling you that you’d better brush your teeth.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“Impact”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“believe that this is simpler than it sounds. It is about identifying the obstacles in our way and taking today’s best-practice ideas—those found in the Agile Manifesto and in books like Lean Startup, Lean Software Development, Lean Enterprise, The DevOps Handbook, and others on today’s management bookshelves—and applying them to IT leadership.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“Shocking as Standish’s results appear, there is a very different way to interpret them. Perhaps they’re really just a confirmation of uncertainty, telling us that early estimates are invariably unreliable, that success can’t be measured by reliance on an estimate made before enough information is available. In this interpretation, the Chaos Report is simply a confirmation of Figure 6: The Cone of Uncertainty in the prior chapter. Standish’s study errs in imposing a value judgment on neutral data.”
― Mark Schwartz, War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age

“a way, the Agile community is suffering from the same insecurity as the CIO community. While CIOs feel that they need to justify their existence and claim a seat at the table, the Agile community is stuck on the idea that it has no place until dramatic cultural and organizational changes happen.†”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works. —James Joyce, interview”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“In the case of a transformational business initiative, for example, management wants to create fundamental change in the organization’s processes, but individual users in the organization may not share that vision or may not be expert in interpreting and applying it. They might have smaller, more “local” priorities than the big-picture transformation that management has in mind.”
― Mark Schwartz, The Art of Business Value

“It is difficult for IT to gain a seat at the table when IT is always failing, but on the other hand, an IT leader who is reacting to statistical noise—failures that he or she has already chosen to accept—is destroying business value. An IT leader must have the necessary technical skills, make impeccable decisions under uncertainty, and then have the courage to face the consequences.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table and The Art of Business Value: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“Jeff Patton in User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product,”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak. Epictetus, The Discourses Make for thyself a definition or description of the thing which is presented to thee, so as to see distinctly what kind of a thing it is in its substance, in its nudity, in its complete entirety, and tell thyself its proper name, and the names of the things of which it has been compounded. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations”
― Mark Schwartz, The Art of Business Value

“Obsessed with proving that it deserves a seat at the table, IT leadership continues to frame its problems in the same old ways—oblivious to the deep changes brought on by the Agile revolution—while the Agile world, ever suspicious of management, proceeds as if it can manage without the involvement of IT leaders.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“In the long-distant past, we were taught that IT was the keeper of technology and that IT leaders were service-providers to the rest of the business. Their job was to stay aligned with business strategy, taking orders from the business and delivering new systems. If they kept the systems running and delivered new projects on time, then all was good. That time is over, and has been for many years.25”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“I have discussed the challenge of defining business value in The Art of Business Value; even more challenging in this case is defining what we mean by business value delivered by IT. Business value is delivered by the enterprise with support from IT—IT is part of a whole, a complex system in which its ability to deliver value depends on factors outside of IT. The only way that IT can deliver business value itself is through cost-cutting within the IT cost structure—in all other cases that I can think of, IT is delivering product that might or might not then be used by someone else to deliver business value.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“There is my CIO role in a nutshell: establish the goal, learn from the team, and render their ideas in rules that apply to future teams as a form of institutional memory. There must be a feedback cycle from the teams’ learning to leadership’s context-setting and rule-making.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table and The Art of Business Value: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“Given the importance of digital technology, and given which companies now serve as role models for executive leadership, it might be that instead of CIOs learning to wear suits, the rest of the executive team should be ready to start dressing down. Or perhaps the business should be learning how to align with IT, rather than the other way around.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“The IT leader must have the courage to own outcomes.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it—a costly myth.”
― Mark Schwartz, Adaptive Ethics for Digital Transformation: A New Approach for Enterprise Leaders

“Remember that these are the same project executors that we chose to execute the project—presumably because we believed we could trust them to make good decisions. They were probably trained, or at least hired, by the enterprise to make sure they had the right skills. So when the project is off schedule, is it natural to first suspect those project executors?”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table and The Art of Business Value: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility

“There is no a priori reason that IT cannot lead the business’s digital transformation. The fact that organizations widely don’t believe this suggests that there is something wrong with the way we have been defining IT.”
― Mark Schwartz, A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility