Are you in discontinuous business?

Challenge and opportunity of continuous development

With some perspective of doing various kind of development projects I am more and more convinced that in many cases the challenge and opportunities of continuous development still remains to be fully discovered. Project being big or small, product or service – the same challenges seem to exist.

There are few facts that we know regarding just about any project or development effort
-    The budget and timeframe is always challenging, often both fail short
-    The final results are not perfect – not even when it was exactly what was envisioned when starting the project
-    Lack of understanding what really needs to be done – requirements and the features of the “thing” is understood not until the project is already well on its way
-    Listening customer – Once the project is completed we start getting the real feedback from our efforts, but very often chances to react are limited because of lack of resources (which are often released soon after the “thing” launches)

All of these are symptoms of one-phase-single-try discontinuous development.

This does not make sense – unless you are in a discontinuous business.

Reasons for this are:
-    Business is continuous evolving interaction with customer – (at least should be)
-    The launch of the product or service is just a beginning of that interaction, the work really starts from there  – not end as many have tendency to believe
-    If the product/service development is subcontracted the customer wants to have long term development partner
-    The subcontractor wants to have successful customer providing continuous stream of development orders also in future

So the solutions part – nothing above was anything new for anybody -  iterative and agile development are the practical tools for these, HOWEVER on the business management level we STILL seem to operate like the old days of deliver-and-forget kind of mode.

Simple solutions:
1.    Start with small steps – not major big bang but gradual increments
2.    Try different things – test and experiment various opportunities to reach your goal
3.    Start spending in right points of time – when you have proof that something seems to work, focus resources to develop that particular area
4.    Reserve resources for continuous development – note that this does not mean MORE resources but rather using those same resources for the right things at the right point of time
5.    Build for long-term-result based partnerships rather than one-time-deliveries

Sounds easy? Too easy? What do you think?