Delivery Process Optimization

Delivery Process Optimization gets to the heart of why your technology organization struggles to release system and application changes in a consistent, repeatable and transparent manner, then focuses on designing and implementing effective and scalable service delivery processes that drive quality, predictability, and ongoing improvement.

Does getting new technology out the door feel like a combination of blood, sweat and tears, with a sprinkle of black magic on top? Do stakeholders get frustrated waiting for their changes to be developed and delivered? When new technology does get delivered, is it widely adopted or is it met with resistance?

Getting delivery right requires ownership, stakeholder involvement, collaboration, and making decisions. It is about understanding what’s important, understanding what your team is capable of, understanding the conditions that allow them to do their best work, and understanding the potential system-wide impact of implementing changes.

The areas of enterprise architecture, applications, and service delivery where I can provide significant value through expertise and direct experience include:

Requirements Definition / Prioritization
Product Shaping / Management
Stakeholder Engagement / Relationship Management
Design / Co-Design / Prototyping
Application Development / Software Architecture
Development Operations (DevOps) / Continuous Integration (CI)
Release Planning / Management
Retrospective Strategy / Implementation
Continuous Process Improvement

An overarching problem that I have observed over decades is when organizations don’t want to address the tough challenges underlying ineffective delivery processes, but instead adopt highly prescriptive frameworks, toolsets, and methodologies thinking they are the easier or safer options, and everyone loses except for the vendors selling “solutions” based on the magical thinking that technology fixes all problems. There are entire industries built around this grift.

Every organization is unique. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. The usual suspects at the core of delivery problems are typically people and process issues:

Lack of clear direction and priorities
Lack of ownership
Lack of executive support
Lack of focus
Lack of transparency
Communication / collaboration issues
Competency / skill deficiencies
Overconfidence / overoptimism
Politics / power dynamics
Misaligned motivations / incentives

There is no easy button for getting enterprise technology service delivery right. It takes planning, discipline, and patience to analyze, design, implement and maintain the underpinning processes and systems.

We would work together over time to design a customized delivery process optimized for your organization’s short and long-term needs, and then monitor the process and make improvements where necessary.

The high-level methodology that I bring to the table for optimizing enterprise IT delivery processes is not a rigid framework with strict boundaries, but more of a set of approaches and a rich toolkit of field-tested and proven processes and patterns collected over decades of delivering enterprise software and applications across many industries and organization sizes.

Although I do not adhere to any specific frameworks or methodologies for IT service delivery, I have experience with many and have “borrowed” the most pragmatic and impactful thinking from frameworks and concepts such as:

Theory of Constraints (ToC)
Systems Thinking
Design Thinking
Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
Jobs to be Done (JTBD)
Scrum
Kanban
Lean
Total Quality Management (TQM)
Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)

Other concepts that I have incorporated into my personal methodology include the “Shift Left” approach of moving up important processes that are highly dependent on team cohesion and collaboration to earlier points in the delivery process, as well as the shift from Project Management to Product Management, as modern technology initiatives are iterative and ongoing rather than the one-time, heavy-lift “set and forget” scenarios of decades past.

Is it time to step up and take your technology delivery capabilities to the next level? Are you spending too much time and energy on the “meta-work” of maintaining prescriptive frameworks at the expense of actually delivering technology? Do you find yourself thinking there has to be a better way of doing this?

I get it. Let’s connect to compare notes and see how tackling this challenge together might work and what you can expect from the process.