Why is it hard to think beyond our short term vision? Rapid delivery of incremental value is common sense, no one would object to that - within the ability of the business to absorb this value of course. This is called the Business Rhythm.
But that rapid redelivery of incremental value is only a means to an end. The end is a set of capabilities of the business that allows that business to accomplish their Mission. To do something as a whole with those incremental features. That is turn the features into a capability.
Think about a voice over IP system, who's feature set was incrementally delivered to 5,000 users at a nation wide firm. This week we can call people, receive calls from people, but we don't have the Hold feature yet. Are you really interested in taking that product and putting it to use?
How about an insurance enrollment system, where you can sign up, provide your financial and health background, choose between policies, but can't see which doctors in your town take the insurance, because the Provider Network piece isn't complete yet.
These are not notional examples, they're real projects I work on. For these type projects - most projects in the enterprise IT world - an All In feature set is needed. Not the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). But the set of Required Capabilities to meet the business case goals of providing a service or product to customers. No half baked release with missing market features.
You might say, that incremental release of features could be a market strategy, but looking at actual products or integrated services, it seems there is little room for partial capabilities in anything, let alone Enterprise class products. Either the target market gets the set of needed capabilities to capture market share or provide the business service or it doesn't and someone else does.
An internal system may have different behaviours, I can't say since I don't work in that domain. But we've heard loud and strident voices telling us deliver fast and deliver often when there is no consideration for the Business Rhythm of the market or user community for those incremental - which is a code word for partially working - capabilities.
Of course the big bang, design, code test, paradigm was nonsense to start with. That's not what I talking about here. I'm talking about the lack of critical assessment of what is the value flow of the business and only then applying a specific set of processes to deliver that value. Outcome first, then method.
So Now The Hard Part
The conversation around software delivery seems to be dominated by those writing software, rather than by those paying for the software to be written. Where are the critical thinking skills to ask those hard nosed business questions:
- When will you be done with all the features I need to implement my business strategy?
- How much will it cost for all those features I to provide those capabilities that fulfill my business plan?
Questions like that have been replaced with platitudes and simple and many times simple minded phrases.
- Deliver early and often - without consideration of the business needs
- Unit testing is a waste - because those tests like the internal documentation that provides a long term maintainability platform, aren't what the customer bought
- We can decide about all kinds of things in the software business without having to estimate anything - a completion violation of the principle of microeconomics, which requires we know the impact of our choices in some unit of measure meaningful to the decision maker. You know something like Money.
