dannorth.netDan North & Associates | faster organizations, faster software

Dan North & Associates | faster organizations, faster software Dan North & Associates Contact Courses Software Faster Faster Organizations Testing Faster Blog Talks Books Case studies About Archives Introducing BDD Classic SOA Deliberate Discovery The Art of Misdirection What’s in a Story? Better Best Practices faster organizations, faster software Welcome to DNA: Dan North & Associates What do you do? We help your organization go faster. What do you mean by faster? Imagine: A product manager wakes up with a great idea. He tells his manager. She sees its commercial value and works with the product manager to put a proposal together. The proposal goes into IT. If you’re lucky you might have business case sign-off within a few weeks, feasibility underway within a couple of months and a prototype a few months after that. Instead: A product manager wakes up with a great idea. He tells his manager. Within a couple of weeks they have a working prototype. They field test it and make a few changes. You have a new product in the marketplace a few weeks after that, generating revenue. Faster. You’ve hired smart people into your business, management, technology and operations, and then everyone gets frustrated at how slow things move. Business blames technology, technology blames operations, everyone blames management. That’s just how things are. We help you understand how your organization works and why it moves slowly, and we show you how to make it go faster. But surely that’s impossible, otherwise we would already be doing it? The problem is, you are looking where the action is and trying to make it more efficient. We look where the action isn’t : the hand-offs, the waiting, the back-and-forth with process documents, the stuff that falls between the organizational cracks. Most business activities, including yours, are over 90% water. We know, we’ve measured it. And you are concentrating on optimising the 10%. If you could make that work take zero time , you would still hardly notice the difference. Efficiency isn’t the answer. So it’s a trick right? Once you show me the trick I can do it myself? Yes. At least it’s a shift in thinking. Which requires a corresponding shift by your staff. Which causes a shift in process, which leads to changes in structure. These then require a shift in management style. You discover your existing technologies can’t move quickly enough so you adopt new ones, and new methods for building and deploying software. Your corporate governance model changes as you redefine what success – and risk – looks like. All of this comes from a shift in thinking. That sounds big. How can you help with all that? We work with your management team to introduce the shift in thinking. We show them what to expect as things change, and how to respond when they do. We coach them along the way. That way there are no surprises. We work with IT to show them how to respond quickly to business needs. The shift here is about methodology, tooling, technologies and even programming languages. Some technologies encourage rapid delivery, others don’t. We work with operations to show them how to monitor, measure and manage in this new environment. They will have more visibility and control than they have ever had before, and they will need help coping with the volume of new information. What about my people? Won’t they be upset about the change? Only if you don’t involve them. When you introduce change without explaining it people see it as interfering. If you tell them what you are doing and involve them in defining and shaping the new organization they will come up with ideas you would never have thought of. That sounds exciting. What do I do next? Contact us and we can discuss how to get started. Conferences Classes None scheduled Tags agile architecture articles bdd career change coaching design discovery effectiveness-patterns estimation events flow lean learning open-source planning process productivity programming ruby soa software summary talks tdd testing throughput trade value @tastapod on Twitter My Tweets Feeds RSS - Posts RSS - Comments Share and enjoy This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License by Dan North . Legal notices Blog at WordPress.com. Post to Cancel...