Speed is a value-driving advantage to these businesses. The issues technology leaders face slow down the learning, innovation, sign-up, sale, resolution of customer queries, and identification of risk, all of which directly impact business value.
Firstly, let’s define what speed to value means. I see this taking on different forms:
From my experience, following these principles will help you accelerate your speed to value, to achieve any or all of the outcomes above.
One of the biggest risks to delivering value sooner is the organisational structure standing in the way. This doesn’t mean that business functions such as commercial, legal, regulatory compliance, risk, operations and so on are not essential components in the system. However, the siloed communication between these business teams and technology needs to change. It can hinder the ability to decide what needs to be done, and to build, measure and learn together.
Engage the business early in new initiatives, cross-pollinate your technology teams with business representatives as far as you can, communicate clearly and openly, and break down those walls.
Business approaches to CapEx and OpEx funding can have huge implications for delivering value sooner. Taking a project-funded approach, or reviewing and revising budgeting on a short-term basis, often leads to short-term teams. Short-term teams with limited control and sight of the goal take time to form, and will never fully optimise their working patterns before they are disbanded and the next team is spun up to repeat this process again. This slows down, not speeds up, the time to deliver value.
Teams that understand the context, believe in the goal, and are given relative freedom to figure out how to get there are the teams that will deliver sooner for you. Teams that are long-lived, have learned how to ‘perform’ together, and already have the domain context accelerate this ability even further.
Work with finance leaders to switch your funding model from projects to teams. Promote within, recognise and reward achievements, and encourage a culture of ownership and accountability - I’m particularly passionate about this, as I’ve seen the difference in motivation and output firsthand.
The more you decide up front or the longer the lead time to an outcome, the more likely it is that the outcome will miss its intended value, or the world will have moved on, and the original decision will deliver little to no value.
Shortening feedback loops removes risk, refines learning and allows faster decision-making, accelerating your speed to value. Break down large initiatives into smaller iterations. Build in opportunities in your processes to inspect, learn and adapt. Encourage your teams to share what they’ve learned openly and often.
More code slows you down. I’ve seen this time and time again as the by-product of businesses throwing more bodies at the problem or building things just to show some progress. However, this raises the complexity and time in building, deploying and maintaining products and services. It can also come from the misdirection of enterprise architecture, designing business systems that are over-engineered, or deciding to build things that are already available off-the-shelf.
Build custom technology where it brings you business differentiation, buy technology products where they serve a commodity, and augment only where you need to. Find ways to work with what you’ve got, balancing modernisation against business value. Aim to write as little code as possible.
Treating the teams who deliver your products in your organisation as a system, and continually optimising that system, removes the friction standing in the way of speed to value. Technology, people and processes are an interconnected web of information and communication, with multiple dependencies. It’s tempting to optimise parts of the system we’re closest to or that we feel most comfortable with - I’ve made this mistake many times! But often we’ll be tinkering with 5% of the system and missing the gains in focusing on the remaining 95%.
Focusing on lean practices in the quest to ‘optimise the whole’ helps refine this complex web. Zooming out to look at the whole process from idea to scaled product live in market, rather than one part of that system, allows you to identify and remove the greatest levels of drag on your speed to value.
It’s an obvious point to make, but in most businesses there are still vast amounts of manual processes impeding speed to value: whether its test coverage, business systems, workflows, everything is open to automate. And with the potential of AI tooling exploding, the opportunity to improve the efficiency of business processes has never been greater.
Start by identifying and measuring manual processes. Build in automation where it reduces time while still being attached to value. Keep trialling AI tools to understand how they can accelerate your processes. Invest, build your own extensions on top of them, train them on your data only where necessary, and where you see differentiation for your business.
If you cut corners to go faster, reducing quality and focusing on short-term value at the expense of your product, or even your team, then value diminishes over time. The additional management overhead, the rework, and the potential burn out of your team, are all debts that you will pay back further down the line. You need sensible voices in your teams that challenge compromising on quality at every turn, so there is a healthy balance of getting to an outcome sooner, but not at the cost of quality.
This is not just the system improvement but the end value measurement. Data can show you where you can optimise to deliver sooner, and it can also be used to justify investment if questions are raised at quarterly budgeting meetings. I’ll often use operational metrics such as a team’s lead time to change or deployment frequency as the starting point, and build in flow metrics as leading indicators.
Linking team metrics with business impact is the holy grail. Looking at more holistic product metrics, such as % of time spent on ops or technical debt versus time spent on new capabilities, is a good start. And then relative business impact delivered over time by a team, if revenue is directly attributable, even better. Combining improvements in delivering sooner with business impact gives you all the justification to continue investing in your teams, tooling and processes to accelerate speed to value.
Adopting these principles will help your teams deliver real business value sooner. If you have any questions or thoughts on accelerating speed to value in your organisation, please get in touch.