General

The world around us is changing quickly. Organizations need to rapidly respond to a changing world. In a knowledge intensive world, pressured by hypercompetition, new forms of organization are required to keep up. Especially around the topic of enabling value delivery, organisations need to balance the paradox of steering. Either steering via management (coordination) or empower teams to organise themselves. John Child in his book Organizations describes the concepts of integration and coordination, mechanisms to enable delivery of value.

At some point in history when the British ruled India, the colonial government were concerned about the number of venomous cobras. No one likes to be bitten by a poisonous snake, right? They decided to put a bounty on every dead cobra. Intended effect was that people would capture and kill the snakes reducing the population of cobras. However, another thing happened. People started to breed cobras intentionally, so they could  kill them and receive the bounty. When the colonists learned about this, they stopped the reward program. Now with the cobra’s not having any value the breeders released them....

A desire to improve. Each organization I have met is searching for new ways to do better. A higher quality of their product. Optimize their process to deliver software quicker. A caveat however is that organizations are typically focused on technology. Learning new skills, introducing new tools. Yes, they have their benefits. They can make your product better or improve the process. However, if you are solely focusing on the technology you only reap part of the benefits. In worst case you are even actively harm the organization.  Making the technology process more sustainable  Nicole Forsgren, the lead researcher of the State of DevOps reports, puts it in this...

Here we are. A fresh new year is beginning. Hopefully you were able to take a rest during the Christmas break. Typically, this period offers room for reflection. To not only think about what has happened, but also about what is yet to come. So, have you been making plans for 2021? And if so, have you thought about the execution?

Each organization involved in creating software eventually has a need to deliver that software. It is what we call the software delivery process. Typically, software delivery starts at the moment that a developer has written code locally and wants to publish it. Or, as Martin Fowler puts it: From the developer finishing the feature to getting that feature into production. At Qxperts, we have a more holistic view on software delivery.

When leading an IT department you are faced with numerous challenges across the board. Whilst attracting and retaining IT talent is one of the biggest challenge, it is often paired with the challenge of understanding and displaying the value of the IT department towards the organisation. So, let’s look at some ideas to regain a focus on strategic software delivery. By dedicating attention on reflection and finding areas of improvement, we can provide better conditions to succeed and contribute to the goals of the business.