In episode 150, I reintroduced this series with a new pitch. It was my way of taking what I've learnt over the last three years, the last 150 episodes, and almost 33 hours of content and updating the why the podcast. Over the coming episodes, I'll take a deeper dive into the themes of the pitch and why they made the cut. If you listen back to the pitch, you will notice that it is almost half way through the 5 minutes and 21 seconds before I actually mention "software development" - which might seem odd for a podcast entitles "Better ROI from Software Development". In this episode, I explain why I devote pretty much the entire first half of the pitch to talking about the business context we find ourselves in.
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Published: Wed, 02 Nov 2022 16:47:14 GMT
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In the 150th episode, I reintroduced this series with a new pitch. It was my way of taking what I've learnt over the last three years, the last 150 episodes, and almost 33 hours of content, and updating the why of the podcast.
Over the coming episodes, I will take a deeper dive into the themes of that pitch and why they made the cut.
By all means, if you've not listened to the pitch, please go back to episode 150 and listen to that before carrying on with the rest of this episode.
If you listen back to the pitch, you'll notice it's almost halfway through the 5 minutes and 21 seconds before I actually mention Software Development. Pretty much the entire first half of the pitch talks about the business context that we find ourselves in.
This might seem odd for a podcast entitled "Better ROI from Software Development", but while I may consider software development a craft and potentially can even elevate itself to an artform, our software development, at least for the purposes of this podcast, occur within that business context.
It exists to service a business need. It does not exist in a vacuum.
As such, so much of the success of your software development is tied to the business to get the best outcomes. Software development cannot be done as part of a vacuum.
Yes, we can apply modern principles and practices to just the software development and we will see improvements, but they will be localised improvements. We will be just improving one part of the organisation.
To truly gain the benefits, we will need to apply them to the entire business, of which software development is but part of the story.
You'll notice that I referenced many of the practices I've claimed are good for software development as also applying to the business.
I mentioned the need for business agility.
I mentioned the need for an experimental mindset - the approach based on the scientific method:
- we observe,
- we question,
- we hypothesise,
- we experiment,
- we analyse the results,
- we draw conclusions
- and then we repeat.
In the business world, we can see this as taking small bets on promising ideas. If we fail, we've lost that small bet, but we've learnt something. If we succeed, then maybe we double down on that bet.
Gone are the days of betting the organisation on the "one sure thing". We know there is no longer a "one sure thing".
Rather, we optimise our organisations for learning and we learn through that experimental mindset - that experimental mindset where failure is just as valuable, and maybe more so, than success.
These approaches are not new. Software development borrowed them from the scientific community who have been using them since at least the 17th century.
We use them in software development to handle uncertainty and to minimise risk.
And because of this, our software development looks considerably different when you consider it as a series of small bets - rather than the all or nothing legacy approach of funding multi-million pound, multi-year projects. Where we could find the whole premise of the work was flawed only after massive spent and wasted efforts. Massively delayed or failed IT projects almost became an expected event - with success almost seeming to be the exception.
So as software development has adapted and learnt how to do things better, it has needed to bring its business along for the ride. As I've said, yes, we can get benefits locally in software development, but we really need the entire business to buy in for the full benefits to be felt.
And that is where we are seeing organisations learning the benefits of those approaches and then applying them organisation wide.
Not just aligning themselves better for getting the best from software development, but also as a response to the complexity of the current age.
And the Age of Software and Digital is the theme that I want to dive into next week.
Thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast. I look forward to speaking to you again next week.