How business agility reduces cost of delivery

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Madison and David Sherrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello and welcome to another episode of Definitely Maybe Agile. Today we continue our series on how business agility impacts your bottom line. What's on the cards today, Dave?

I was going to say begin our series or or continue our series. Let's see where we start. Hopefully, the most rapid impact you can have by introducing business agility to an organization is around reducing the cost of delivery.

Yes, by automating processes, by accelerating how we work together, but even just looking at our workplaces and how we work together and identifying the waste in the system allows us to reduce the cost of delivery, makes it uh cheaper for us to get new product out to the city.

Well, yeah, I think there's there's kind of two things that come in in a balance. It's a little bit like a I think it's a teeter totter or a seesaw, right? There's on the one hand is we get better at getting stuff out of the door. So whether it's you know automation, it's reduction of wasted activities, there's a whole value stream optimization piece that we look at. But the second piece is not building stuff we don't need. And that whole you know, with the product management piece of it, making sure you're building the right thing at the right time rather than trying to you know serve all needs, or whether you're just trying to get as much, squeeze as much through the pipeline as possible.

Yeah, the YAGNI principle, right? You ain't gonna need it. We're not gonna build something that we don't need yet. We're gonna have to make sure we we're building the right thing for the right purpose at the moment that we need it.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean it's it's really uh powerful when we start thinking about what is it that we say no to. So I uh in many um conversations that we end up having, is the focus becomes on. In fact, I had the conversation today. I just got off the phone call with an organization that is sitting there saying, our IT department, the delivery team, well, they're doing pretty well, but we think they're delivering a bit slow. We don't think they're you know doing quite what they could. And there's this misconception that in order to get more, you need to deliver more quickly.

Right. And it's uh it's not just that, it's making sure you're delivering the right thing. It doesn't matter. I mean, we can deliver very, very quickly and deliver a lot of crap. And we can say a lot of things that we don't need.

Uh we we need to make sure or that it's just too far ahead of its time. You can look at it in lots of different ways. It's but it's just you know, your customers need certain things. We need to give them what they need at the time they need it to some extent. Um, a a consequence of that sort of paring things down, and we always talk about limiting work in progress in this space, but a consequence of that is not just building what's needed, but also the final kind of piece that maybe sits in the middle between the two sides on this teeter totter that we're describing is um the impact of focus and and in specifically the churn of working on things which aren't important or which we decide we pick up and we drop and we pick up and we drop.

And that dropping piece is the critical part because it's uh the sunk cost fallacy is one of the biggest problems. It's like we we've spent time on this, we've put money into it, we've put effort into it, we've got to continue, we've got to continue, we've got to continue, so we won't put it down. And we're never gonna stop. We're we're never gonna say no, we're never gonna uh go back and say, okay, what what should we actually be focusing on at this point? Maybe even though we've done this amount of work, have we got to the point where we've learned what we need to learn and that we're ready to put it to one side.

So maybe if I try and wrap this one up, because it's a small punchy piece here, is the benefit of business agility in an organization, specifically to the bottom line, is the reduced cost of delivery, whatever it costs you to get something out of the door. Now, we've talked about this from three specific areas. We've talked about it from we get better at delivery, we get more for the same price, effectively, more for less, through automation. I mean, there's investment involved here through automation, through process improvement, through self-uh organizing teams, all of the wonderful things that we're very familiar with. Number two, uh, we reduce the cost of delivery because we don't throw things away. We build what we need, and we're very, very deliberate about deciding what we're going to spend time and energy on rather than this sort of what we often see as that sort of haphazard all projects start on the first of January because that's when our financial year starts. All of these things about let's focus on what we really need right now, get that out, and then pick the next thing, and then pick the next thing. And the third impact of that is reduced churn in terms of multitasking, context switching, in terms of picking things up, dropping them. That you you described it in terms of um feeling the need to finish everything, the sunk cost fallacy where we hold on to it, we keep going, and we keep going. When actually we've learned what we need, we can let go, we can move to something else. What we've not talked about there is reducing the cost of delivery by eliminating roles or by outsourcing or anything like that. Anything you'd add to that?

No, I think you summed it up nicely. I think uh, yeah, and we will get into as we move along in this series, into the the anti-patterns that we see, the things that we see as people that prevent people from being able to get there and do these things. So uh I look forward to those conversations too. So with that, I will wrap up for today, and you can send us your feedback at feedback at definitely maybeagile.com. Thank you, Dave. Thanks, Peter. You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts, Peter Madison and David Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital, agile, and DevOps at scale.