Improve How We Work? Not Now, We're Busy

Improve How We Work? Not Now, We’re Busy

“Our development process? Oh yes, there’s room for improvement. But not now, we’re busy.”

Do you sometimes think that? That could be risky.

Perhaps you don’t see an obvious and pressing reason to change anything. After all, your teams are shipping software, customers are using it, and the company is hitting targets.

But the process (more accurately, the way of working) also produces negative business effects. These include: not quite solving the right user problems, responding too late to opportunities, delivering less/later than needed, and more.

The process also produces hidden and unnecessary waste, arising from lossy handoffs, task switching, relearning, abandoned work, and extra steps.

And then there’s an often-missed side effect: the way of working causes all sorts of detriments to itself. On the product side, it makes future maintenance more expensive than it needs to be. On the human side, it catalyzes disengagement, regrettable turnover, self-serving behaviors, and cultural drift.

Thus, the way of working produces successes while compromising business performance and its own future viability.

And yet, most organizations, most of the time, don’t do anything about that. Even when they know they need to, they don’t prioritize the effort, invest in it, or commit to it.

The reasons all sound, well, reasonable:

“That’s just how things are done around here.”
“There’s no budget for that.”
“We’re already using best practices.”
“Everybody is already giving 110%.”
“We have to use method X; so-and-so insists on it.”
“We can’t change Y anyway.”
“We’re just before / after / during a reorg.”

Everyone is caught in a loop. These coping mechanisms justify the status quo, and all this time, the business is hurting.

How to snap out of it?

Articulate and visualize the business impacts and the detriments of your current way of working. That will help you understand what the status quo is truly costing you. Then you can have a reasoned conversation about the investment — and the cost of delay — of fixing it.

→ I’ve written a white paper that dives into this problem and how to fix it effectively and sustainably. Get it here. ←