The Game is Changing

Where is your project's goal-line?  Where is that line you cross then breathe a sigh of relief and celebrate accomplishment?  For many it is when user-acceptance tests had passed, and the necessary documents were signed, and then the party begins.  The team pats each other on the back, the project manager gives a speech recounting the personal sacrifices made during the 'crunch', and a glass is raised.  In a few days or a week most are off on other projects, their focus reset to a new goal line off in the distance while the last project begins to fade from memory.

So what happens to the newly created application?   Why did we build it again?  Oh right - to support or fulfill some function of the business.  Possibly a critical function of the business.  So there are a few steps remaining.  The application needs to get deployed, made operational, users trained, and (fingers crossed) delivering business value.  Maybe it's an application that manages and supports new drug trials, or tracks the import and export of commodities, or provides online trading, or any number of other business functions.   To the business, until the application starts supporting these functions it is a cost (often a large cost) with zero associated benefit.  A 'negative'.

The goal-line is shifting for application development teams.  The game is changing.  A couple of trends are underway that are moving the goal-line towards 'closing the loop'.

The first trend is DevOps – the gradual melding of Development and Operations.  Much of this is a necessity to support the faster and more effective deployment of applications as part of the shift to continuous delivery of applications.  Related pressures are simply that the costs from inefficiencies between the two groups is forcing barriers to drop and their processes to be intertwined.

 Another trend is where projects are becoming more accountable for business value delivery, as opposed to software delivery.  This is largely in response to the dismal track record of IT software projects where rate of 'successful' delivery has been stuck in the 25-35% range for almost two decades now. 

By responding to these trends the original purpose of the project instead of getting foggy or lost along the way, now becomes the goal-line.   The loop gets closed.  No pats on the back, no parties until the delivered application actually fulfills its mandate.   With all eyes trained on this goal-line and with every daily decision weighed against this objective, the chances of hitting it go way, way up.