Oct 19th, 2020
End to End Delivery
Part 9: Reacting to Change
Written by: Craig Vosper, Chief Delivery Officer
We’ve spent the last few weeks reviewing the 4 delivery tenets at Clientek. Today I’d like to focus on reacting to change. As a quick review, here are all 4 tenants:
- React to Change
- Deliver Value Sooner
- Being Predictable
- Ensure High-Quality
A project without change means that we’ve stopped thinking. We must have a delivery process that is built to manage change as it naturally occurs. Poorly managed changes are often the cause of project failures. Too many organizations track, measure, and view project changes as a bad thing, but they are absolutely essential for success!
So, what do we need to know in order to make a change? Well, we first need to be able to answer at least three of our four primary customer asks: project timeline, associated costs, and expected value. The best part is the fact that we can use the same tools to answer these questions as we did to plan the project in the first place!
Expected Value – We start here to ensure that everyone has a clear understanding of what success means and why we are proposing a change. How will this change impact our existing business goals and objectives? Does it introduce a new goal we haven’t considered? If you cannot quantify a change by the value it provides, then toss it!
Associated Costs – Depending on the proposed change, we may choose to add a new Minimal Marketable Feature (MMF) or adjust an existing one in order to estimate its size. Having determined the impact on expected value as well as the associated costs, we can now decide is the change is worthwhile.
Project Timeline – Use the size estimates from above alongside your current team’s velocity to lay out the release plan and identify timeline impacts. With size and velocity determined, a new timeline can be established in a matter of minutes.
Once we’ve answered these three questions we can decide if it’s a good decision to execute the change or not. We also have everything we need in place to effectively manage that change.
By using the techniques you will find that managing change is simply an everyday activity. It shouldn’t take much time or effort to demonstrate the value and impact a change will make.