[originally at jlottosen.wordpress.com, Sep 2023 ]
Every day I hear a focus on delivering reliably. Day-to-day project tasks, milestones, and generally keeping busy. Given all the changes happening in our world and industry, we must also be adapting to change – just to keep up. You need to make room for new things, as John Cutler puts it: You have to make room for the high-value ad-hoc/new activities. You can’t just ADD this on top of everything else. Otherwise,you’ll have no energy stores available to practice and work through the discomfort.
The DevOps Handbook framed the challenge of adapting and delivering reliably like this:
“the chronic conflict of pursuing both: responding to the rapidly changing competitive landscape for features and platforms while maintaining business as usual”
The DevOps Handbook, How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations, 2016
What I see more and more is that this applies not only to delivering software solutions using DevOps practices. The challenge is inherent in any technology organization – when you are delivering consulting services, software solutions, and cloud solutions.
Do We Need New Models?
While reading how Simon Knight applies research from outside product management to product management in the recent article: On Signals & Noise, I wondered do we really need to invent the wheel all over again? Do we need yet another strategy framework to both keep up with change and deliver reliably? Would the techniques of today apply to the challenges of tomorrow?
The thing is, though, for technology organizations to tackle the core conflict above – has been solved, documented, and proven successful. If you want organizational monetary performance, job satisfaction among the staff, and sound organizational culture as a technology organization, look up the research in Accelerate as illustrated below:
Notice how lean product development (work in small batches, visible flow, Customer feedback, and Experimentation) applies not only to software development – but to any delivery for a technology organization. Similarly is Lean Management in itself a key driver to support items like Less Burnout, Software Delivery Performance, Job satisfaction, and a generative culture.
Business organizations can be designed – and they can be designed for flow. This has been documented in Team Topologies: It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity.
(Rant: Stop talking about centers of excellence already – design your organisation for flow (Team Topologies) and learning)
There is a model for your trouble already
Which leads me to the map below. To prioritize reacting to a rapidly changing competitive landscape, you need to make an active choice to move your practices along the lines of “Accelerate” and “Team Topologies.”