July 18, 2023
In today’s environment, technology leaders in industry are under immense pressure to improve technology delivery performance and operational efficiency. The common refrain from our execs is ‘Why can’t we move faster?’ And ‘Why can’t we be more like a startup?’
And as tech leaders in industry we often look in envy at the performance and agility of startup and product-first organizations. But we know we are in a different context. In this article we want to look at why improving technology delivery performance is more challenging in industry but also suggest how it can be done.
We must acknowledge that tech leaders in startups and product-first companies are in a fundamentally different context to those of us in industry. Firstly, they tend to have greater visibility of their teams’ performance. For example, a CTO in a startup can remain close enough to their teams to know what’s working and what isn’t. What’s more, their teams also tend to be inhouse rather than outsourced. It’s fundamentally easier to manage a team if you own that team. Tech leaders in industry are in a different situation. They often have larger and more dispersed tech functions. They rely on a mix of inhouse and outsourced teams and vendors. And real visibility on what’s going on, the data of performance, just isn’t there in the same way.
What’s more, unlike tech leaders in startups who are typically starting from scratch with newer technologies, tech leaders in industry often have to deal with older, larger, and more complex systems. These systems may have been built over many years and may involve a mix of legacy and modern technologies. Improving these systems, integrating new technologies, and maintaining system stability can be a significant challenge.
While tech leaders in industry often have more resources, they also have more competing demands for these resources. They need to fight for their share of the budget, and there may be more pressure to show immediate return on investment.
In startups the entire org is aligned around the value of technology to success. This isn’t quite the same in industry. There are often more stakeholders to manage, including different departments, executives, board members, regulators, and sometimes unions. Also, it is too often the case that your peers may not really understand the value of technology. To them it is just a cost. And larger legacy organizations tend to more risk-averse. Tech leaders in industry do not live in a turn-on-a-dime culture like in a startup. All of these realities challenge alignment, slow down decision-making, hinder agility, and make it harder to implement beneficial changes.
Another issue is that, almost every week, there’s a new technology optimization playbook, a new approach to technology strategy, or some other new methodology that promises to be the silver bullet that will solve all your technology delivery performance woes. But we all know that these off-the-shelf solutions rarely deliver on their promises. To coin the phrase:
‘All happy teams are alike. Each unhappy team is unhappy in its own way’
Finally, too often technology delivery is viewed as a developer problem. That is, if you get better developers and get them to do more will solve your technology delivery problems. But this is fundamentally wrong. Technology delivery performance is about teams. Of course, teams are built of individuals but their performance works as a team. And that team is supported by an entire organization. You need to go beyond developers.
With all of these issues, it is hardly surprising that tech leaders in industry face such challenges in improving technology performance. When you look at it from this point of view, you see, in some ways, how easy tech leaders in startups have it. They are close to their own teams. They are aligned. They are team focussed. And they have visibility and actionable data on their performance. This simply isn’t the same in industry. However, we believe that tech leaders in industry can improve technology performance by getting real about their situation.
The first step to improving technology delivery performance is to get objective data and visibility on how your teams are performing. As we said above, tech leaders in startup have this visibility by virtue of their teams being small and close to them. Tech leaders in industry don’t have this. This means they must look at internal data to analyze and benchmark performance around delivery velocity, code quality, and system stability. These metrics provide an objective picture of your current team and vendor performance.
Delivery velocity, for example, can be measured by tracking metrics like lead time (the time it takes from the moment a new task is defined until it’s ready for delivery) and cycle time (the time it takes to implement, test, and deliver a feature or product). If these times are longer in one of your teams than another, or very poor against industry standards, it could indicate issues with project management, resource allocation, or technical debt.
Code quality is another crucial area we benchmark. Metrics like change rate, customer change rate and defect density (the number of defects per size of the code base) can provide insights into the quality of your team’s output. A lot of post-release changes and defects might suggest a need for better design and requirements, improved testing procedures, more rigorous code reviews, or additional training for your team.
System stability is often a challenging area too. Looking at metrics like uptime, the frequency of system failures, and the mean time to recovery after a failure can indicate problems with your infrastructure, a lack of proper monitoring tools, or a need for more robust disaster recovery plans.
Understanding where you stand in these areas is critical to any attempt at delivery performance. To be clear, the purpose of benchmarking isn’t simply to compare yourself to your peers. It isn’t about vanity metrics. Rather, it is about getting insight into your team or teams strengths and weaknesses, identifying potential bottlenecks, and finding opportunities for optimization.
The second step in improving technology delivery is to ‘get real’ and acknowledge that not all technology delivery problems are actual problems to do with developers and technology delivery. That is, many issues that impact technology delivery performance stem from factors outside the engineering function.
For instance, an unclear product strategy can significantly hinder technology delivery performance. If the product vision isn’t clearly defined or communicated or, worse, doesn’t exist, your technology teams will struggle to understand what they’re building and why. This will lead to misaligned efforts, wasted resources, and products and features that don’t meet business or customer needs.
Reactive roadmaps are another common killer of performance. When we are working with clients we look at the volatility metrics of backlogs and stories to see how well an org is actually presenting work to engineering. If teams are always reacting to the latest most urgent demands, rather than proactively planning for the future, it creates a chaotic environment for the technology team, leading to costly context switching, burnout, and a lack of focus.
Never underestimate just how much poor feature design and bad requirements can impact technology delivery. Requirements that are vague, constantly changing, or not properly communicated result in rework, delays, and increased costs. Again, a benchmarking or baselining of design as practiced in the org will quickly highlight challenges. Obviously, no one ever likes to be told they are falling short, so communicating to other departments must be handled delicately. But that’s where benchmarking and objective data helps.
Organizational culture and leadership can also play a significant role in technology delivery performance. For example, a culture that doesn’t value collaboration and communication can lead to silos, misunderstandings, and inefficiencies. The loudest person in the room is too often wrong. And the hot shot developer isn’t always right.
Similarly, if the leadership doesn’t understand technology or fails to support the technology team, it can lead to unrealistic expectations, lack of resources, and low morale. In our work with clients, we very often find a benchmarking exercise actually helps align the senior leadership around the reality of their org performance. It gives everybody objective data on performance and objective metrics to monitor that performance.
Finally, don’t forget the ‘why’ of all this technology activity in the first place: the customer. Look at customer satisfaction to see how well your technology delivery is meeting its intended goals. This can be measured through customer surveys, net promoter scores, or customer churn rates. If the product is internal you can talk to your own stakeholders. If satisfaction is low, it could indicate that your technology delivery is not meeting customer needs or expectations, suggesting a need for better alignment between your technology, product and business strategies.
One note of caution here. If your design and UX practice is weak, it might be advisable to get an outsider to do this outcome research. Getting customer feedback is a skill and we often find that orgs with poor product management or design practice, or with culturally defensive teams can spend lots of time listening to customers but not actually hear what they are saying. And sometimes customers are just too polite.
The third and final step to improving technology delivery is to focus on getting better. Too often this is when a consultant arrives with the new playbook to transform the organization – decks sold by weight and costed in years. We all have Onedrives full of such decks.
Rather then a one-size-fits-all magic solution, use performance data and insight to inform your optimization initiatives. Don’t try and do everything. Be smart. Be focused.
Your benchmark metrics will help to identify the blockages that are impacting you and your teams. For example, we often see that the most immediately impactful changes to velocity are those that simply focus on improving the teams’ workflows and processes. Focusing on the benchmark metrics around quality is also incredibly beneficial. Small targeted changes here can deliver massive productivity improvements. Oftentimes, from what we see, the tactical wins have greatest impact.
Obviously, investing in your team’s skills and capabilities, providing training in new technologies, methodologies, or tools will also help your team work more efficiently. But again, having benchmark data will help better communicate the impact of issues on the business.
Of course, focusing on the wider issues like how product vision, design and requirements are impacting performance take more time and investment. But, let’s be clear: improvements in these areas deliver more and better value to customers – and more and better impact to your bottom line. Again, benchmark data can help to align the wider org around their responsibilities to technology.
If you are going to improve technology delivery holistically, you are going to have to challenge your organization to become more outcome-focussed. This means becoming something of an evangelist and even, perhaps, an annoyance in making the case for clarity of outcomes for each technology investment. This means challenges your colleagues and leadership and also taking on a more central role in strategy.
Improving technology delivery performance may seem like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be. As you’d expert from us, it starts with data. Get data on your existing performance. Then get real about your wider org and how they are impacting delivery performance. And, finally, get tactical about your improvements in a data-driven and focused way. Use data to monitor your impact as a leader and show your ROI.
Obviously, improving technology delivery performance is not a one-time task, but an ongoing process. It requires commitment, patience, and a willingness to adapt and evolve. It can appear overwhelming. But how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. And work with your team and your wider org – it’s even easier to eat the elephant if there are more of you. Make it a cook out.
We specialize in helping technology leaders use data and metrics to improve technology delivery performance and achieve better outcomes.
Want to learn more? Drop us a message and we’ll get back to you.
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