Delivering capabilities that support key requirements, goals, and initiatives helps you improve business outcomes. By working with stakeholders to define the capabilities you deliver, you can better align your solutions with real business needs. In addition, establishing a regular cadence for capability delivery lets you continuously improve your maps, apps, services, and information products, so they can provide additional value and meet evolving requirements. Consider the following as methods for effective capability delivery.
Delivering capabilities that support your business requires smart resource investments. Organizations that spend years on expensive, complex development projects often end up with solutions that are difficult to use or that don’t align with current requirements. To maximize the value of your investments and better support the evolving demands of your business, you can work with stakeholders to identify areas where you can provide the most value in the least time. This business-first approach helps you establish a cadence for rapidly delivering high-impact capabilities and information products that meet business needs.
Engage with stakeholders early in the planning process to envision capability needs, identify the business value a capability will provide, balance value against risk, and set development priorities. You can then apply a configure-first approach, deploying low-effort capabilities first. This delivers value quickly and builds toward long-term success. Once you have a final product, you can invite stakeholders to test it and offer feedback.
By focusing on incremental enhancements that provide clear value, you can avoid spending development time on functionality that adds unnecessary complexity and deliver new value quickly and often. A rapid release cycle should be 30 days or less, with each iteration producing a usable deliverable. To meet this short release schedule, you can keep requirements simple and focused, and leverage COTS and configurable solutions when possible. With each new release, you can solicit stakeholder feedback to drive the next iteration.
Establish a regular lifecycle cadence. This will help you to continue iterating on your solutions as long as the business gains new value from each iteration. Once you satisfy your stakeholders’ needs, you can suspend further iterations, then resume them if future business needs require additional enhancements. When a solution no longer provides value, its lifecycle is complete. By deprecating legacy solutions, you can avoid consuming resources unnecessarily.
To deliver capabilities that maximize business value and make effective use of development resources, consider these recommendations.