Questions challenge assumptions.
Digital businesses depend on technology choices enabling Quality at Speed to continuously adapt their value proposition.
But the underlying assumptions about technology are like mirages: beautiful from far, disappearing nearby.
Questioning our choices is critical to improve our decision-making.
“By doubting we are led to question, by questioning we arrive at the truth”.
—Peter Abelard
The truth we are searching for is to deliver Quality Engineering to remain valuable in a highly competitive ecosystem.
Instead of arguing why we should use a particular technology, I found more valuable to challenge not using it with the following 21 questions within 7 categories.
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Do you really need that technology?
The value proposition of digital businesses is supported by technology to customer interactions and business processes.
Technology is, therefore, a means to an end—you don’t need technology for technology
“It’s obvious”.
I challenge you to reflect on past technology propositions: was the goal crystal clear from a business perspective?
It is usually not.
These questions assess the real need for a candidate technology:
- Why do we need that technology? For whom? Why now?
- What will it enable today and tomorrow? Will we gain speed?
- Can we do that already? What are the alternatives?
Are you ready to handle it?
New technologies are pitched like diets: full of promises that will happen overnight without effort.
You may lose a few kilos with such a program, sharing the results of a promising test to the board meeting.
But true changes take time.
Cutting-edge business improvements are the sum of accumulated changes that finally reach a tipping point.
And it’s not only about technology—the entire scope of MAMOS¹ needs to evolve (Methods, Architecture, Management, Organization, Skills).
Use these questions to evaluate the time-horizon to capture technology value:
- What are the underlying assumptions and requirements of the promises?
- How much technology deployment can enable to reach a tipping point?
- How much time do we forecast to master the technology? Make it x2.
Is there a simpler solution?
Technology can be worse than buying a house; even paying initial taxes, integration and on-going taxes never ends.
The value of that technology must therefore compensate for its overall costs, including its impacts on the landscape.
That changes the equation.
Vendors aim to capture recurring commissions on your business value-chain, displaying minimal upfront and visible costs.
Your job is to balance the overall value of adopting a technology—equally considering the option to stay in the as-is.
Assess the need for less technology for more value asking:
- What are the inherent taxes for setup, integration & run of this technology?
- Which existing technology can it replace? Why, how, when, for how much?
- What are the overall impacts, trade-offs and effort of this technology?
Is the technology already mature?
Technology maturity is linear: the more time passes, the more mature it becomes. So why rushing so early?
Adoption curves are non-linear. They start from an innovation trigger, followed by an inflation peak and a trough of disillusionment (Metaverse?).
The majority of us don’t want to be there.
Quality Engineering delivers Quality at Speed by adopting technologies early on the scope of enlightenment, just before the plateau of productivity.
Your business value proposition will rarely become a game-changer with immature technologies; and they need to converge.
Like with investments, technology usually requires to wait for the right time:
- What is our business maturity for new use-cases enabled by this technology?
- How much effort do we need to integrate this technology in our landscape?
- Has the technology passed its trough of disillusionment?
Are you creating more problems?
Entropy is the natural tendency of all systems towards disorder, that can make a system reach a state of freeze.
A single complex system is already a problem; you can’t afford to buy another house while renovating the one you are living in.
And entropy exponentially increases with new elements.
Plus, once a technology is there, it’s hard to revert. Limiting the number of technologies in use contains entropy in the first place.
Be alerted when you hear “it would be better to start from scratch”—it’s a warning sign of an eroding investment leading to more entropy afterwards.
Assess the entropy when considering a technology by asking:
- What is the entropy level from 0 to 10? Is it realistic to add technology?
- How many systems will this technology need to interact with?
- How many times will we keep old and new systems in place? Can it be faster?
Are you slowing down value delivery?
Delivering software has similarities with manufacturing: repeated steps in a particular order produce finished goods.
The volatile nature of software makes it harder to streamline for repeatability, predictability, and stability.
But switching costs are equally valid.
A change in your software delivery lifecycle means shifting attention of the team for another setup, context switch, and learning phase.
Significant time is lost performing the switch but also in the time required to be concentrated on the main goal: deliver value to the users.
Carefully assess the impacts of adding a new technology:
- How much time will it take away from the standard lane?
- What is the switching cost in time, money and attention shift?
- Is it really the right time to open the subject? When do we capture the gains?
Is the technology ready in the ecosystem?
Mastering a technology takes time. Sooner or later, the technology you will like to use won’t be known by your team members.
Your team will therefore have an additional cognitive load on top of the already overwhelming flow of information.
Technology needs to simplify their day.
Complex solutions come with a whole set of problems: high training needs, dependency on experts, lack of business focus.
With a major talent issue in technology, you better avoid picking a technology that is not ready—lacking resources and simplicity.
You can access the readiness of the ecosystem for a technology by asking:
- What is needed to use this technology? How fast can my team learn it?
- How the technology is deployed from market-share, resources pool & school?
- Is there a technology more mature, deployed, simpler for what we need?
If you really need it, do it fast
These questions force to identify the big picture and concrete implications of adopting a technology, for the good of the business.
Digitalization requires organizations to leverage Quality Engineering implementing the Minimum Valuable Technology.
The accumulation of technology leads companies to become slave of what should have been their enablers.
Your role in Quality Engineering is to contain this entropy to make technology the powering force of the value proposition.
Quality Engineering can even simplify your questioning:
“Can this technology improve Quality & Speed with less Complexity?”
—Antoine Craske, Technology assessment with Quality Engineering.
So, ready to assess your next technology?
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References
¹ MAMOS is the Quality Engineering Framework from the QE Unit available under the following license: attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).