Shenandoah Speers shared: I was asked to serve in a detail role as the Center CIO for Ames Research Center about 6 months ago. Initially I had my reservations on doing this as I did not want to leave my amazing leadership team and staff of the NASA Application & Platform Services organization but it has been a fantastic experience connecting with the Missions and the Center of Ames. I am happy to report I will be the permanent Center CIO for Ames and I look forward to helping Ames achieve its missions.
I would be remiss if I did not stop and take a moment to thank all of my leadership and staff of the Application & Platform Services for all they did for me and the organization during my time leading. Thank you team.
We transformed to agile ways of working over many years, while dealing with multi-million dollar budget cuts, hiring freezes, DRP all while transforming to a new way of working – changing culture is one of the hardest thing any organization can do.
But we did it! We implemented scrum and scaling agile frameworks with Lean Portfolio Management to help prioritize our work aligning with our capacity, not everyone was happy as a lot of things had to be put on a backlog due to our resource constraints but what we did commit to we delivered on with over a 90%+ delivery rate, it is true we could not commit to everything but that is the point of prioritizing and backlogs.
