Elephant in a bullet train

If we manage to snoop into the strategic & year plans, one would hear 'transformation', 'DevOps', 'Automation' and if there is a smart person around, one would also hear 'AI' and other buzzwords. Enterprises are trying to steer dinosaurs, led by tech transformation and that transformation driving the business through the paradigm of Tech@Core. Separate CoEs( Center Of Excellence) are created who transform the legacy systems, bring in new engineering culture and practices. Accelerate metrics is a key talking point in tech transformation. The ability to transform a culture through these metrics which in turn demand a host of practices is indeed path breaking. We shape our tools and after a while the tools shape us

In all, enterprises desire to have an ideal delivery engine - an infrastructure that's automated, pipelines that can deliver anytime, automation tests to go faster, sprint deliveries to reduce batch size, microservices based architecture to reduce the change blast radius and happy faces all around.

What is this article about then ?

Imagine this whole delivery engine as a bullet train that can really deliver fast, recover faster, run more frequently and you use it to transport an elephant, virtually cut into pieces and transported ( apologies for the gross description). What gets to the back is the product, because you have an excellent delivery engine, one tends to add more and more, forgetting that you don't need an elephant but probably a couple of tigers.

Here's the inflection point - enterprises need courage to be able to go lean and fight the startups. Delivery engines alone do not make that happen, enterprises need continuous lean product development & evolution . If we delve deep on the underlying causes, it has two different vectors

1. Annual Budgeting based on blocks of scope than impact
2. Lack of Feedback based Product Management lifecycle

Typically the annual budgeting for the portfolios is based on previous year budget , set of new strategic initiatives, political muscle, cost cutting initiatives. The ideal solution of going for an incremental budget and evolving it based on practical evidence is easier said than done- a budget assigned to a portfolio is not just an indicator of the strategic importance but also a measure of how powerful an individual( i.e owner of that portfolio) is in the organization. So typically, a set of inflated business case with bigger scope & benefits is used to win bigger budgets. Having submitted a bigger scope, the imperative is to execute that scope come what may happen- and there comes the elephant chunked into various compartments of the electric train.

Even assuming we follow Incremental budget based on the value produced by the products/portfolio, the methodology using Lean Product management Lifecycle is not an easy chasm to jump from a methodology of delivering chunks to a methodology of delivery value. Delivering continuous prioritized value requires a focus on benefits, a set of measures that validates the value, a set of technical capabilities ( Canary release etc), a collective alignment of non linear growth in adoption. Lean Value Trees, OKRs help to provide frameworks to channelize the value better but the 'human' problem of dealing with constant change in scope based on the feedback and having a reporting mechanism that scale from the delivery team to CXO are some challenges that one could face. Many of us are risk averse and would prefer a predictable scope delivered in chunks rather than a set of benefits delivered in zig zag fashion.

Enterprises can save at least 20% of their budget if they pick at least some parts of a value based portfolio and a lean product management lifecycle but a collective alignment, courageous executive, a way to keep the individuals secure in the face of transformation is required.