Making a bigger army than only the IT, Software, and Engineering teams.
Applying changes to systems and processes is complex! Meaning, many projects become over time and over budget. This is what makes adapting to change in a business environment harder to achieve.
On average, large IT projects run 45 percent over budget and 7 percent over time, while delivering 56 percent less value than predicted.
IT systems become competitive elements in many industries – McKinsey said. Therefore, there is no surprise to see organizations gearing up and expanding in-house software development departments and teams. And as we all know, Agile development methodology (by any definition you practiced it or know of) is winning the battle of all software development life cycles (SDLC).
However, as we discussed this “Agile” methodology and practice is quite different from business agility, and still does not address the issues of overtime and budget based on the stats from McKinsey and many other consulting firms. Yet alone, does not reduce the complexity of adapting to changing business requirements, rules, regulations, and so on.
Do Agile the Right Way!
I know many agile coaches that are teaching and leading the teams on the Agile approach. But let’s face it, with a shorter sprint even with removing the time window and doing continuous delivery still business expects more, projects are over budget and time, and many of requirements get deprioritized on the planning meetings (McKinsey: projects delivering 56 percent less value than predicted).
So doing agile the right way is not only about getting the “process”, “collaboration”, “meetings”, “planning” and principles of agile right. It is about empowering everyone to deliver, so the software engineers should not be the only people in the team responsible for baking the changes into processes and systems.
We can increase business agility by empowering everyone to be the main contributors to applying changes across processes and systems. In regulated environments, if you put the reason behind the required changes into perspective i.e. regulation, policies, laws, market dynamics, new offering, product re-configuration, validation, testing market, pricing, etc. more than half of the time most of the changes are not about applications, technology, and infrastructure, but they are about the actual “business logic”.
Therefore, empowering operation, business, and domain experts to be able to take care of those changes will significantly address over time and budget issues.
To empower everyone to become the main contributor of the change adaption, tools become a critical factor. A team needs a tool and language that is understandable with every contributor (techie and non-techie members such as operation people and domain experts).
There are other criteria to evaluate the right tools and platform that we explain here if you want to know more about what tooling is required.
Putting the tooling discussion aside, another positive side effect of this approach is the separation of the lifecycle of the actual application from the changing “business logic”, therefore, will significantly reduce the complexity around change management and release management. Also, hence many of the changes happen outside of the actual applications and processes the complexity of the codebase reduces so as the technical debt.
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The Most Effective Way of Adapting to Changes in a Business Environment
When a business wants something, they want it yesterday! Marketing pricing change, product configuration and reconfiguration, creditworthiness, and so on are uses that have lots of complex business logic i.e. business decisions that do not require to be part of the actual applications and processes IT builds. By separating and maintaining them outside of the actual applications and processes we can empower every leader – business, operation, and IT to become the main contributor in the adaption to the change by empowering them, giving them the responsibility, and making them accountable for it.
Last updated February 28th, 2022 at 10:40 pm, Published February 11th, 2022 at 10:40 pm
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