The complexity of software development continues to increase with more Software as a Service (SaaS) products, more frameworks, generative AI, cloud computing, etc. The software development landscape is full of options and capabilities to choose from, making it difficult for leadership teams to pick the right options.
Investing wisely in your technology creates efficiencies, expands your capabilities, and increases profits. Picking the wrong software, wrong vendors or going through a bad implementation can destroy your budget in the short term as you try to find the value you were originally looking for.
This article is designed to help you find value as you navigate software development decisions. Continue reading as we explore these keys to success:
Delivery Focus
Enablement Mindset
Vendor Alignment
Pricing
Engagement Models
To walk across a fast-flowing river on stones, you need to:
Delivering technology is no different from this simple analogy. You must first have a rough idea of where you will end up, then purposefully take each step, assess your progress and take more steps. All that matters is that you get to the other side. In technology, that means delivering value for the business and not how cool the technology is or isn’t.
Most companies have a governance mindset, where there is a lot of checks and balances at the end of work being done. This is the opposite of what we call Enablement Mindset. Companies with an Enablement Mindset look for ways everyone can help “enable” other teams to go faster. Could I ask for all the access needed for a new customer right away, could I ask multiple teams to work together before we run into problems, etc.
The reason enablement mindset wins over governance mindset is purely from speed and quality. If people work together to enable each other, quality goes up drastically and the speed to deliver goes up even more. Start by asking yourself, your teams and your vendors this: How could we be enabling each other to go faster?
Your vendors need to be more than order takers, they need to be at the table thinking with you, challenging you and helping guide you through your decisions. As we mentioned earlier, there is no shortage of vendors to choose from. So, all your vendors need to be excellent. If your vendors are not 10 out of 10, find better ones.
In Software Development Consulting, we heavily discourage the use of Project Based fixed cost models. Learning is a critical piece of success and fix pricing most often constrains the learning process.
