Month: July 2012

Categories
The Business of IT

Wanted: Change. Generous Reward.

Simon Wardley recently satirized the typical response of corporate IT departments to technology change as follows:  Ignore, ignore, ignore, “no”, “no”, “I said ‘no,’ dammit”, “Oh no”, “Oh, f**k”. It reminds me of the classic Toys-R-Us TV commercial from the 1980s featuring children singing about not wanting to grow up. Resistance to change is not unique to children or to IT departments – it is a feature of every organization. How can you help your organization avoid being stuck, and instead drive change before it’s unnecessarily painful to “grow up”? The key is urgency. Growing up is a good metaphor for organizational change: both are normal, both feature resistance, and in both the stakes increase over time. Immature people, like immature organizations, do not reliably achieve their goals. And the longer that inertia dominates, the further behind they remain. Failure to adapt – getting stuck – can be fatal, as it was for the Eastman Kodak Company. In personal as in organizational growth the pressure to change – the urgency – is fostered by discomfort. To increase urgency you need to cause people to feel discomfort with the current state of affairs. John P. Kotter’s seminal work Leading Change offers several kinds of tactics to increase urgency:

  • Show that the present isn’t working: Allow a crisis to happen, publicize poor results, force encounters with unhappy customers, publicize lost opportunities.
  • Change the metrics: Create performance targets that are high enough and/or broad enough they can’t be reached with business-as-usual.

These tactics to increase urgency all work by fostering discomfort with the present. A client found himself spending inordinate lengths of time evaluating opportunities and procrastinating a decision on which ones to pursue. When I showed him how his lengthy decision process was limiting the number and quality of opportunities that presented themselves, he realized that he could grow his business significantly by streamlining this process. He saw the urgency of addressing the issue, we worked together to fix it, and his business has grown threefold since.

Creating a sense of urgency is the first step in a successful change program. Kotter describes further steps to a successful change effort, but urgency underlies them all.

In short:

Ouch! Now, change.

Categories
Cloud Developer Tips The Business of IT

Developing Means Delivering

An informal survey of my application developer friends revealed four main types of motivations driving developers. These four types of motivations are represented in this diagram:

Individual developers can be motivated more or less altruistically. Individual developers can also be focused on the external manifestations of success – such as appreciative customers – or on the internal manifestations – such as more power or money. The diagram above is not a judgement of “better” or “worse” motivations – it is simply meant to capture two personality factors and their expression among individual developers. Also note that developers may have different motivations at different times, or even simultaneously in combination.

Just as individual developers can have varying motivations, organizations can also be more or less altruistic, and focused more internally or externally. Internally focused organizations spend an undue proportion of their energy and resources doing work (or inventing work to do) that will not be visible to the outside world, while externally focused organizations measure their results based on their effect on the outside world – market share, profit, and customer satisfaction.

Where do you rate your organization on the above diagram? Most business leaders want organizations firmly motivated by providing value to the customer, and software businesses are no different. Developing software is all about delivering value. Your software development efforts can only provide value if they are successfully delivered to the customer – and in today’s “as-a-serivce” world, that value is constantly provided via the internet. This means that you should spend significant effort ensuring your customer can actually reach your service to receive the value. It means automating your deliveries. It means measuring and improving your delivery speed and success rates. It means involving your customer early on so that you know the value they seek and so you can provide it. It means making sure all your teams work together to get this to happen.

Because ultimately, it means a developer’s job is not finished until the customer has derived value.

Categories
Cloud Developer Tips The Business of IT

Software Delivery Operations

Like companies producing any kind of offering, software companies require three elements in order to successfully deliver: knowing what to build, knowing how to build it, and knowing how to deliver it to the customer. When each of these three functions – research, engineering, and delivery – does its job independently, you get slow progress and uninspired, sub-par products. But when all three functions work together in a customer-centric fashion, you get excellence – in implementation, innovation – in concept, and world-class results – by delivering those two to the customer.

With the explosion of internet-based services in the past decade delivery has by necessity become an ongoing activity. And so in recent years much attention has been devoted to integrating development with technical operations – DevOps. DevOps integrates into a single team the skills of how to build the service and the skills of how to deliver it. But, as pointed out earlier, DevOps teams often lack the most critical element: the customer’s involvement. DevOps teams can build and deliver really fast, but don’t know what to build.

Integrating development with the customer-facing functions (marketing, sales, etc.) without technical operations results in an organization that knows what to build and how to build it, but doesn’t know how to deliver it to the customer. This organization is full of ideas – even innovative ideas – and implements them, but they don’t see the light of day. I call this a “feasibility practice” – it can show you what is feasible but it can’t deliver it to customers.

Teams that know what to build and how to deliver it to the customer, but not how to build it, also do not provide value to the customer. Such teams are close to the customer both on the inbound (understanding the customer’s needs) and the outbound (explaining the company’s offering) directions. Marketing sits squarely in this space: it knows what to build and how to deliver but can’t transform that knowledge into value for the customer.

As an executive leading a software delivery effort, make sure your organization occupies the very center so it can understand, build, and deliver the right value to the customer. The customer is here in the center as well: he participates in validating the ideas, critiquing the implementation, and accepting the delivery. It is only here that your organization can achieve excellence, innovation, and world-class results.

Categories
Cloud Developer Tips The Business of IT

The missing layer

Traditional descriptions of cloud computing and the various cloud operating models – IaaS, PaaS, SaaS – focus on the locus of responsibility for various layers of the system: facilities, network, storage, servers, etc. But these descriptions typically omit a critical element. Can you spot it in the diagram below?

The missing layer is the only layer that really matters – the customer. Ensuring that your application can actually be consumed – that delivery can be successful – is a critical part of providing your value. Your application’s facilities, network, and storage may be running properly, but will your customers actually benefit? Without a properly staffed, trained, equipped, and managed operations team, your service won’t last long enough for customers to care. If your customer is important, then so is your operations team.

Categories
The Business of IT

Being Good and Being Known for it

The owner of a home-based baking business once described his marketing strategy to me as “my cookies speak for themselves.” True, they were delicious cookies. But he completely neglected marketing so his customer base never grew beyond friends and family, and his business failed as a result.

At a recent client meeting I was reminded of that baker. The CEO of a fledgeling tech business said to me, “our differentiating factor will be our superior service quality.”

“Wonderful!” I said. “So I’d expect to see significant investment in engineering and quality control. Is that the case?”

“Yes! Here is our R&D and quality program…,” and he showed me.

“That looks reasonable,” I said, after glancing at it briefly. “Tell me about your marketing.”

“Oh, we hardly need any!” the CEO replied. “Our customers will love our service quality so we don’t need significant marketing.”

I was immediately concerned. “Let me show you something,” I said to him. And I drew the following:

Being good and being known for it are both essential. New businesses begin in the lower left quadrant. At first there is no product so it’s not good, and nobody knows about the company. Here customers are neutral about your offering: if they knew more they’d know it wasn’t good – and if it was good they still wouldn’t know it. In the upper left quadrant you’re no good and customers know it, so they leave. In the lower right you’re good but nobody knows it, so you lose opportunities to do business. The goal is to be in the upper right quadrant, where you’re good and customers know it, so you grow.

A business will traverse the playing field as its quality and reputation change over time. Sometimes quality will suffer or improve, sometimes reputation will have ups or downs. The key factor in achieving success is the ability to nimbly correct course, heading always toward being good and people knowing it. Identify improvements and deliver them to your customers quickly – and make them aware of the improvements. You’ll need agile product development, minimizing the time between concept and delivery. You’ll need to measure your customers’ perception of your quality. You’ll need to empower every employee to satisfy the customer as quickly and completely as possible at every level. The net result of enabling quick course correction will be that you get good and you get known for it – and you grow.

Thankfully, this CEO was convinced by my explanations. He agreed that “being known for being good” is as important as “being good” and I helped him craft his marketing, development, and customer support efforts accordingly. The cookies will speak, and he will make sure people hear them.