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 significant value can be enabled 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.
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.
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