Speed to Value

Organizations get it wrong whenever they exclusively reward IT teams for getting projects done "on time and budget." Because that reward fails to encourage the one thing that business leaders need of their IT teams: speed to deliver business value. 

To be successful, we need to measure speed in terms of the time it takes for the business to realize the expected value and not project start and completion dates.

However, it's not simply about getting a service or application into a user's hands quickly; it's about asking yourself, "Have I fulfilled their needs quickly?" 

So, how should we think about this? 

We can improve speed to value by breaking up the deliverables into smaller pieces and then organizing those deliverables. Consequently, end-users get useful features before the end of the project. This is the most basic tenant of iterative or agile development.

Start by identifying the soonest date you can deliver value to end-users. Write that down. That is where your value measurement begins. Then, release the project deliverables in stages until realizing full project functionality and project completion. Continue measuring during the post-delivery period until achieving end-user satisfaction. This technique measures how well IT supports its end-users by measuring the rate of project adoption.

In the end, we can deliver solutions at warp speed but, if employees aren't adopting them, there can't be any sense of value creation.