I’ve always been struck by the dichotomy of organizations that live on quarterly results, but whose technology planning aligns with annual (or longer) planning and delivery. As a business leader, I need to provide quarterly updates and guidance on how my company is doing while hoping that the projects that have been approved will deliver the value that has been identified (even if only loosely defined).
Waterfall project management provides leaders with false comfort and evidence of how a project is progressing (how many projects are green right up until they are red right at the end?) but what this does not provide is any understanding of the work being done is delivering any value and we won’t know until the project is over. Worse we rarely track whether the expected benefits of the project were realized, instead happy to have this project in the rearview mirror.
If we want to align quarterly business needs with value delivery, we need to fundamentally change how we intake, plan and execute software projects. It must start with value identification, are we able to quantify the value we expect to receive, and is it aligned with our strategies? Outcomes delivery value, not output (which is what our current delivery capabilities, agile or otherwise, focus on)
Value must be the driver of what we do and that value must be realized in smaller increments of work. This is where Agile can help, not with the implementation of frameworks, but through the adaptation of your organization to short-term value delivery. You will find in this mindset that every aspect of your organization will need to be rethought to support this. Implementing a framework to make you Agile will not deliver value in the way you need to operate in the fast-paced world we all live in.