There’s more to get right than business value

Focusing on business value is critical in every transformation program and yet still overwhelmingly overlooked.

As the project progresses we prioritise measuring sprint velocity, being over or under budget and our timeline. There are many ‘successful’ projects out there that are on time and on budget but delivered zero business value, and there are many projects that ended up with a very different timeline and budget than when they started but with a transformational outcome.

But there’s one metric that is overlooked, how agile is your platform? Let’s define platform agility as the speed at which you can go from thought to value. It’s fuzzy, let’s unpack it further. If you have a good idea that you’re pretty sure will bring a big benefit to our users, let’s say it’s a self diagnosis tool for your home appliances brand. I have that idea today, how long will it take to get that idea into a pilot group’s hands. That’s platform agility.

Do you have a lean platform with excellent code and also, lean and mean? Less is more, 80/20 principle etc… Are you bogged down with a huge platform with big overheads and no decoupled principles. If we want to build one thing, are there 1000 other things to consider. Do people get nervous about build?

It’s not only build. Platform agility is also your change management processes, documentation standard, approval, ideation, validation and testing. It is however, measurable.

The speed at being able to make changes in the future is as important as the change you’re making today.