Rethinking big-budget line items

The upside of embracing a incremental delivery mindset.

April 7th, 2021 in  Blog, Agile

Imagine having the ability to fund technology products, projects, and programs differently. In this blog post, you’ll discover how a bold new project funding and product mindset can create positive changes across your organization.

Not long ago, companies routinely purchased software licenses they failed to deploy. Or, they paid for features and services they never used. Then, shrewd Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs came along and saw an opportunity to rethink software delivery. In essence, they reinvented the customer experience and shifted the software industry from a sales to a subscription model.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) changed everything. The pay-as-you-go subscription model radically reimagined the way organizations shopped for and consumed software. SaaS freed organizations from big-budget purchases and vendor lock-in, providing customers with a cost-effective way to use technology.

What if you do the same to your software development?

Every fiscal year, organizations fund technology initiatives with enormous budgets, determined to achieve the best ROI for their tech investment. Inevitably, they end up compromising. This approach results in innovative projects being sacrificed to fund critical large-scale development programs, often digital transformations of old legacy systems that are risky, challenging to manage, and inevitably go over budget. Like hungry mouths to feed, these big projects gobble up the entire budget for the year.

Consider a new approach—replace your monolithic budget with smaller, incremental expenditures tied to specific deliverables. The resulting micro-initiatives will make it easier to steer to success—without trying to swallow the entire project at once. Embracing an incremental delivery mindset for future projects, programs, and products can release your technology budget’s full potential and provide an ideal opportunity to integrate Agile development best practices within your organization’s fabric.

Business thought leaders agree the solution is Agile

The most influential business thought leaders, including McKinsey, Deloitte, PWC, and KPMG, promote the adoption of an incremental project delivery mindset as part of an Agile approach. However, Agile is far easier to recommend than adopt. Change is difficult, especially when it requires that established teams adhere to a new methodology and practices.

Your technical team needs more than articles and tips to adopt an Agile product delivery mindset. Without experienced Agile practitioners to co-team and co-develop with, many internal development teams managing legacy dev projects cherry-pick Agile practices, arbitrarily adopting some practices while ignoring others. An ad hoc approach leads to ad hoc results.

Unlock the power of an Agile partnership

Enterprises looking to adopt an incremental delivery mindset can talk to Agile pioneers like Intelliware. They routinely partner with clients to deliver outstanding software as they empower them to build better going forward. With a keen focus on incremental delivery and secure remote co-teaming and other collaborative techniques, development teams learn and adopt Agile practices effectively.

Teaching someone how to do something is more helpful to them in the long run than just doing it for them. Remote Agile adoption services give your team expert guidance to maximize your change to incremental delivery and budgeting.

Don’t outsource; partner instead.

Adopting an incremental delivery mindset within your organization won’t happen when you outsource product development. For companies that have taken years of investment to build a technical culture, the idea of surrendering your autonomy and technical capacity to a vendor doesn’t make business sense.

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Before you outsource, consider that you may already have the resources you need to succeed. Try empowering them with an incremental delivery mindset through Agile adoption.

By signing up to Agile Adoption Services, your company empowers your people to improve how they develop, build new capabilities, gain self-confidence, and consequently, drive innovation from within your organization. Implementing an incremental delivery mindset leverages the capabilities of existing teams, turning them into productive powerhouses.

Turn your big-budget line item into smaller, incremental expenditures that deliver results by leveraging your technical team’s potential.

Agile adoption success stories

Intelliware has taught technical teams at major organizations how to implement an Agile product delivery mindset successfully for years. You can read more about these types of B2B engagements in the following Intelliware success stories.

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