Speed results from a system of good quality.
While this may seem an obvious premise, the realities of businesses (and people) are often quite different. Many people try to work “quickly” by first searching for their documents in 50 icons within their desktop.
On the contrary, the pursuit of speed at all costs creates negative effects that end up slowing down the system. Speed is the result of processes which, once mastered and adding value, are optimized and result in a lasting velocity.
This article describes the need for a systemic approach to developing an antifragile software production system which leverages its consequent resilience and velocity, enabling companies to remain competitive through quality.
The consequences of speed at all costs
When we go too fast, we turn speed into haste, with all its cascading problems: uncontrolled impacts, additional work – all costly and time-consuming issues that can sometimes get worse if they can impact health or people.
The cost of the additional work is far from minimal. Blend Jet, for example, had to recall 4.8 million units, as did Tesla, which, despite remote software updates, had to callback 120,000 vehicles.
“If you only quantify one thing, quantify the cost of delay”.
-Don Reinertsen
The financial impacts are also indirect, as the cost of delay reduces the competitiveness of companies for whom speed is a differentiating factor in capturing value on the market and extending it through network effects.
Research on the half-truth of the first-mover advantage identified two key factors for successful value capture: (i) the speed of technology evolution of the product or service, and (ii) the speed of the market growth.
Organizations must therefore change their reflexes to invest in their best competitive advantage: the ability to deploy digital offerings with a high yet sustainable update frequency, and to pivot on the most promising markets.
Effectiveness comes first through quality
In this ever-changing ecosystem, customers have access to a multitude of options and are better informed than ever before thanks to digital means, enabling them to compare offers and opinions in just a few clicks, and also switch to a competitor.
To keep their customers and acquire new ones, companies must therefore succeed in proposing offers that best meet their needs and make them satisfied with their perception and appreciation of quality attributes.
In this respect, the shortcut between “quality” and “high quality” is still too common. For a number of offers, companies need to find a balance between the value paid by the customer and the cost of production, without necessarily going for luxury.
Once you’ve found a market for your product and made it effective, the next step is to address the quality of your software production system, so that you can iterate rapidly, at lower cost, and adapt quickly. To achieve this, quality must be built-in.
In addition to lean, extreme programming and agile approaches, we need to succeed in developing software production capabilities that have a greater impact on improving effectiveness, without forgetting efficiency.
Efficiency, a prerequisite for sustainable velocity
Efficiency is a company’s ability to maximize its contribution per unit of resources consumed. Sometimes seen as an extra, it is now becoming a necessity when resources are in short supply.
The primary fuel for companies is cash. And this is starting to be distributed in a more weighted way-divided by 2.5-since the end of 2022, with an injection focused on companies with the greatest potential in AI and biotech.
Add to this inflation, geopolitical and macroeconomic slowdown factors creating disparities in global competition, and an increase in the shocks companies have to face in a short space of time.
On the talent front, companies are fighting to fill their open positions with missing profiles on the market, leaving 20-30% of positions vacant. Organizations also tries to maximize employee retention of which 39% are likely to change jobs in 3-6 months.
With such structural factors, achieving a sustainable velocity requires optimizing the various resources of the software production system to enhance resilience and continuous adaptation capabilities.
Investing in sustainable velocity
Companies face the challenge of maximizing the number of software iterations needed to create value, which can easily fall into the trap of local optimization of workflows by engineering teams that are divorced from real customer issues.
Organizations must therefore succeed in moving beyond organizational silos to address (i) the areas with the greatest potential for value creation, and (ii) the performance-limiting factors in their software production system.
This approach requires a holistic 3-step vision in order to :
- Assess the maturity of your software production system
- Identify core issues, strengths and weaknesses
- Define the minimum actions with the highest potential.
The maturity level is defined by evaluating 10 systemic performance indicators in 5 categories (business, organization, delivery, reliability, efficiency), positioning performance from fragile to antifragile.
Next, we move on to Problem Space, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the software production capabilities described in MAMOS in the face of concrete problems of quality, speed or efficiency.
Investment choices are then defined by the architecture of systemic solutions to solve systemic problems, defining the minimum actions required for maximal impacts that will stick, where traditional approaches would remain superficial in time and effects.
Going further with systemic software production
Systemic software production enables companies to develop their competitive advantage by frequently updating their offers in high-potential markets through an antifragile software production system.
This antifragility is achieved by maturing software production capabilities in 4 levels (ad-hoc, modeled, mastered, optimized), which together enable the development of a fragile, robust, resilient to an antifragile system.
Each performance level enables the organization to better channel its iterations towards value creation by aligning its increasingly resilient, efficient and resource-optimized software production system.
The steps described for investing in sustainable velocity are condensed within the AAA method (Assess, Architect, Accelerate), an iterative transformation model for delivering value as early as possible with maximum lasting impacts.
Start systemic software production with AAA.
References
2023. BlendJet Recalls 4.8 Million BlendJet 2 Portable Blenders Due to Fire and Laceration Hazards. Consumer Product Safety Commission.
David Shepardson (2023). Tesla recalls 120,000 vehicles over doors that could unlock in crash. Reuters.
Cost of Delay. PMI.org.
Fernando F. Suarez and Gianvito Lanzolla (2008). The Half-Truth of First-Mover Advantage. Harvard Business Review.
Hirotaka Takeuchi and John Quelch. Quality Is More Than Making a Good Product. Harvard Business Review.
Antoine Craske, Rémi Dewitte (2022). On Defining Quality Engineering. QE Unit.
Darren Hagman. Today’s Project Management Blueprint: A Comparison of Lean, Agile, Scrum, and Kanban. Toptal.
Jamesin Seidel (2023). A Deep Dive into Q3 2023’s Funding Landscape. Medium.
2023. The State of Organizations 2023: Ten shifts transforming organizations. McKinsey & Company.
Antoine Craske (2024). Measuring software performance: 10 key indicators from fragile to antifragile systems.
Dan Olsen. The Lean Product Playbook.
Systemic, Thwink.org.