The triangle of basic business complexity based on Scope, Time and Quality has been manipulated in many ways to accommodate an ironic "Fixed Scope & Fixed Cost" paradigm in software solutions industry.
On one hand, business leaders directly correlate revenue projections to
software features. Hence delivering on time with committed scope and quality
will provide better budget projections to the stakeholders. However, on the
contrary, it is considered as an industrial norm that software is delivered
late, has lower quality (than anticipated) and curtailed scope.
Inherent mistrust between business and software solutions department is
the fundamental of current organizational realm.
Having been involved in optimizing numerous organizations, i’ve been
associated with large fortune 300s (ranging from 6 to 300), there is no doubt
that business departments do not trust the development organizations. Denial,
blame, justification and general dysfunction in such organizations is
considered as a norm.
The irony behind this chicken and egg situation is that without
visionary leadership, the trust can never be established. In the current
economic crisis, once the business stakeholders can count on the commitments,
the status quo demands that they start doubting the current forecasts. This is
based on the basic assumption that "how could you if you are delivering on
time?". This implicitly results in over-commitment and end-user
expectations are raised accordingly.
- Motivation
- Innovation
- Predictability
- Productivity
- ....
Not only is this unbalanced state - a significant challenge for most
organizations, but available methods for improving predictability and
productivity features over time are not readily available to most technology
leaders. Morphing development organizations can accurately predict their
delivery in time, scope, and total quality while continuously finding ways to improve
their productivity.
Some basic recommendations that have been nearly fruitful to mitigate
the situation include:
- Bringing
the business and solutions organization closer by face-to-face
communication,
- Having
regular life feedback sessions with the development team,
- Sharing
simple metrics in addition to live demos,
- Running
continuous improvement (retrospectives) as a combined group.
- ....
Can we have Time, Cost and Quality fixed and still maintain good
business vs solutions delivery relationship? Some questions are better left to
luck while hoping for the best...
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Thank you very much for the insights and suggestions.