Recently I was talking to one of our customers about how they feel about our services. This reminded me again of Dave and my conversation on the Definitely, Maybe Agile podcast on this very topic. Which is indeed the topic of this latest entry in our business agility series: why business agility needs customer interaction.

As we have in previous weeks, we will highlight three areas of consideration on this important topic, building on last week’s topic of business agility success depends on feedback loops. 

Now we’ve known this for decades. It has been common knowledge that it is an essential skill to frequently ask your customers to guide your direction yet, perhaps in recent years it has become truly essential. We see companies that if they take their eye off the ball can find themselves becoming obsolete extremely quickly. The pace of change is only accelerating. 

Whether individually or for an organization we have a tendency to spread our focus to multiple projects at the same time. The illusion of efficiency this creates is fulfilling. After all, it is fun to start something new, we get a rush of engagement and learning. Whereas finishing a task comes with much more peril. If it is a task we enjoyed, we’ll be sorry to have finished, and if it is one we hate, we’ll want to find something else to start on. While starting a new task gives us a sense of achievement and moving forward, in fact, it slows us down.

In this week’s article on business agility, we will be exploring how confusing having lots of work underway with moving quickly. Put another way, confusing speed with focus. This is important as the sooner you can deliver value to your customers, the sooner you can learn. In turn, this prevents teams from reaping the benefits of business agility practices, such as reducing delivery costs and increasing revenue. Below we discuss three ways in...

The next topic in our series on Business Agility for your bottom line is how the adoption of business agility practices can help increase your revenue. When it comes to building a profitable organization, a key goal is to increase revenue. Business agility helps an organization’s revenue growth in many ways, here are three:

• Put out high-quality products into the market

• Accelerate feedback loops to learn from customers

• Identify opportunities to capitalize on

Ever since John Allspaw’s “10+ Deploys a Day” and Patrick Debois coining of the term “DevOps” in 2008, DevOps has been transforming businesses in terms of software development and deployment. The DevOps culture has enabled teams from the software development and IT operations to collaborate and develop more reliable products, as well as respond to customer needs, to achieve business goals.

The increasing number of businesses utilizing DevOps platforms to enhance business operations has fuelled demand for advanced IT transformations. In fact, according to PR Newswire, the global DevOps market is projected to be valued at over $23 billion by 2027, with the U.S and Canada as major contributors. 

Where is DevOps heading?

The last decade has seen a lot of companies accelerating their digital transformations to improve software delivery. To keep up with the demands of a rapidly evolving business and technology landscape post-pandemic, the DevOps community continues to improve its practices to i...

Creating more value for customers is a core business strategy. With more technologies being developed, companies have been optimizing their software delivery to get the best value out of their products or services. Instead of focusing on individual functions, companies are now developing an interest in the end-to-end value chain. Software development is no longer just the business of IT departments. Company leaders and management are taking an active role in making sure that the software delivery process is driving value to the business. In a way, every organization has become a software company. 

Unfortunately, even after investing considerable time and resources on IT transformations, companies still experience misalignment in business vision, strategies, and goals. While they may have implemented new ways of working, such as Agile and DevOps, there is often a disconnect bet...

In previous posts, we discussed what you can learn about your team from tracking a minimum of data. We introduced throughput as the most meaningful metric you can get from only the completion time of a work item. In a subsequent post, we explained how you can calculate cycle time and work in progress by tracking the start time of a work item. In this post, we focus solely on how to calculate failure demand and what it tells you about the true delivery capacity of your team.