Application Strategy Summit VIC 2023 - Speaker Q&A

Tech deliveries these days are agile but businesses are not. When tech wants to move fast, business blocks the pace. How should we resolve this issue?

There could be various ways to interpret this question. To me, it smells of lack of cohesion, partnership and may be trust between tech and business. Probably, it is not that business doesn't want to go fast, it is that business doesn't understand?how tech can help them go fast. They may not have resources to partner with tech to help analyse needs, testing, change management etc as they probably see what they are doing is more valuable than working with tech to add value. I would recommend starting with baby steps like asking them to spend 30 mins every sprint on looking at sprint demos (which also needs to be done in business terms not tech terms. Businesses lose interest in demos as we start talking about APIs, SQL, microservices etc. To keep them attending, talk in terms of how we are building a system that will help us do something e.g. find the open orders and display 10 at a time instead of enabled pagination in the APIs). Another way could be Tech doing lightweight prototype and demoing to business to get them excited. However, the foundation is to establish rapport with business so that they see tech as a partner.