 I often find myself in discussions about the desirability of a frequent software delivery to clients and businesses. The most common argument against frequent delivery is that software delivery is perceived as interruptions of daily business, and represents a risk to the business at hand. Not seldom, processes for managing change are designed to slow down change rate; driving the "transaction cost" related to deploying software.
I believe that the fundamental issue at play here is a lack of trust throughout the business value chain. In plain English; IT (or a software vendor for that matter) is still deemed a support function; not an integral part of business value creation. Moreover, I predict that companies that continue along this line of reasoning will lose their competitive edge and be replaced by competitors that are able to integrate the operational value chain all the way from IT development and delivery to business performance. This is particularly true for businesses that are subject to the ever increasing rate of digitalization that is going on….and the number of industries that stand on the outside of digitalization seems to be dropping rapidly. Research in the field of DevOps offer support in favor of frequent delivery of software. The perhaps most prominent research in the field is presented in the State of DevOps report. In the 2018 edition of the report, the authors state that "a common industry practice, especially in government or highly regulated fields, is to approach throughput and stability as a trade-off. But our research consistently finds that the highest performers are achieving excellence in both throughput and stability without making tradeoffs." The report presents compelling evidence for the relation between software development and operation practices and business performance. This is consistent with my experience from leading software development organizations over the past decade and half. Moreover, the frequent delivery of software is really just an extension of what I find to be sound principles of strategy execution. As described in "The 4 disciplines of execution" (book by Chris McChesney, Jim Huling, and Sean Covey); an crucial element in achieving important goals is to have what they call a "Cadence of accountability". The point of a accountability is to be able to "highlight successes, analyze failures, and course-correct as necessary". Also, the deployment of frequent accountability allows you to focus on lead measures; essential predictors of business success available early and frequently. They offer this as a complement to lag measures, which measure business outcomes but are often available too late to found basis for analysis and decision making along the way. Working with software development and delivery, it is often necessary to deploy software so that it sits in the hands of users in order to enable analysis and decision making based on reliable facts. Thus, I conclude that the frequent delivery of software is an enabler for business execution - not a risk to it. Comments are closed.
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