Necessary and Sufficient

Recently I was kicking around some ideas with some work colleagues on the topic of software development and architecture (my slide deck is included below). On this topic I'm a firm believer in taking a holistic view on software development. That is, you need to focus not only on the details of the technical elements but also on both the short- and long-term business objectives of the process. This applies to the technical team as well as the BAs/managers driving the project.

More often than not there are both functional goals and business goals attached to the development exercises. The functional spec, if you have one, will elaborate on the functional goals/reqs that perhaps you have mutually agreed with your client/customers, or you may have crafted them without input from your current customers. This identifies what you are going to build but often doesn't indicate why you are doing it. Sure, "this feature solves that problem for the user" might sound like the obvious answer, but resource constraints force teams/companies to only do a limited amount of things that they could do. So then the question becomes what to prioritize, given your business' strategic objectives. These strategic goals are especially significant if the revenue of the firm is dependent on the quality and market penetration of the software you are building. After all, you need to ship before you can sell but once it hits the street [after countless iterations no doubt] your product needs to stand tall next to competitors' products. That brings me onto the topic of innovation...

Why is innovation important? Well, if you just imitate others you'd better out-execute them, or under-price them because that's all you'll have on them. This works for some companies but not for long and the margins are never great. The harder but significantly more profitable route is to out-innovate your competitors by building features that add a lot of value to the user and ARE HARD TO DO. Things that are easy and useful are going to be done by everyone - but the things that are very hard to do present a barrier to innovation that many organisations can't address even if they recognize the issue. So go looking through your Too-Hard basket and see if there are seemingly-crazy, but potentially killer ideas in that lot. You might be surprised!