Our purpose is to improve the quality of service for customers. Quite simply, our goal is to delight customers. But Goldratt said 'the goal of every company is to make money'. Making money is mandatory but fixation on profit and obsession with costs is a sure way to become detached from customers. Our goal is not do delight shareholders. Delighted customers become loyal customers and loyal customers provide repeat business. They even do marketing for us. They tell their friends and family who then give us their business and they’re delighted so they tell their friends and family. Making money is a consequence of delighted customers!
There are lots of people who can be considered customers and they have different needs so satisfying them all is difficult. Lets not get hung up on the definition of the word customer. Just think of these people as deriving some form of value from what we deliver. So our deliveries must somehow balance their needs. This isn’t easy but we have a chance when they share a vision, have common goals and are able to provide consensus on priorities. There aren't many delighted customers out there!
But we know this. And yet, change is all the rage. IT is awash with improvements. It still doesn't feel like it's any easier to get stuff done. Consider for a moment, all the things that, in your experience, might be needed to get something out the door. There's a lot of different things right? Organizations are over-organized!
We get separated by specialty. These days it's common to have core platforms and infrastructure with centralized teams providing services like build, testing and release management. The problem with centralization is that it comes at the cost of complexity introducing dependencies, bottlenecks, waste, etc. It's difficult to understand the big picture when all we see is part of the product through a window in our silo. Living in a silo we just end up chasing local targets creating local optimizations and not really helping the product as a whole. It's all too complicated!
Most changes we've observed organizations making attempt to tackle symptoms. The underlying problems remain and consequently people go back to how they were doing things before like zombies back to the shopping mall. Dealing with complexity goes in the too hard box. Complexity is not a setup for success.
The unspoken truth is that failing conventionally is the status quo!
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