Today every company runs on software. So whatever company you work for, software is everywhere. Whether the users of your software are customers or internal users, they all have the same fundamental needs:

  • they want software development to be fast
  • they want delivery to be predictable
  • they want a stable production environment
  • they want this in a cost-efficient way

Meeting just one of these needs is easy, but you need to do it all! Most companies have a hard time doing all of these at the same time for the following reasons:

  1. Their software engineers are not responsible for operations. They are asked to deliver fast and often then they cut short on non-functionals in order to meet timelines. As a result they are fast on the short term, but production runs less stable.
  2. Their operations team is not responsible for timely delivery. They implement formal procedures that makes them feel safe. As a result they run more stable on the short term, but that comes at the cost of speed.

Their software teams have short term focus only. Visibility is one or two sprints ahead. As a result they lack the long term predictability that their stakeholders or customers need to optimise the value of plans in relation to the investment made.

These kinds of challenges become even bigger at larger scale, because these companies scale up practices that do not work. First find the right solution, then scale up.

Although it seems hard when you apply conventional practices, you can achieve speed, predictability & stability at scale when you use my approach. I’ll provide and overview of that approach on my next blog post.