What are you doing IT for?

“A Purposeful life”. Many of us have that motto high on our priority list. Not only in private environments, but in every aspect of our daily life. Therefore, this would also apply to your professional environment, your work life, right? This starting point, having a purposeful and meaningful life, paired with professional ambition, should result in purposeful and meaningful products, right? No. Not right. A lot of times this is not the case, although everyone connected to the initiative was doing their best to be purposeful and meaningful.

“The initiative was run exactly as prescribed by the company and the coordination was done by a very knowledgeable person, understanding perfectly what needed to be done to stay in scope, in budget and on time. 

• The definition of the product was done according to all relevant standards and the architect used all the correct tools available at the company to prepare the definition with.
• The product owner was skilled and had a great drive. He planned the sprints well, chaired the meetings in a great way, listened to stakeholders well and made sure the most important things were done first.
• The build team worked very agile and burned a lot of points, they are a great team and have an optimal scrum setup, resulting in great achievements and never a complaint about any Definition of Done.
• The testers performed excellent, they gave the feedback in the right format, worked with the test scripts according to plan and the few minor discrepancies they saw were picked up asap and fixed.
• And we can go on… Handover to support went well, support staff responded correctly etc. etc…”

Still the end result was not what was anticipated upon…
In fact, the end product was only used for a short while, and then phased out!?!
The application did not do what it was envisioned to do…
Or, more important: the outcome was totally different from the anticipated outcome.

Now why does this continue to be a challenge. The reason for this is straight forward (but not simple!):
There is no transparency and communication between the initiation of an initiative and the development and delivery of the initiative.

Organizations often try to fix this missing element by stressing the form and function of delivery. If they would use the same energy to communicate and keep communicating about the (real) reason something is necessary, the result would be much more in line with expectations. This call for transparency is one of the key pillars of flow in the IT4IT framework. Here we connect (literally!) the reason of everything in the chain of delivery. If we cannot find a reason for a part of the deliverable to be present in the architecture, support setup etc., it should at least be challenged and most of the time not be built at all! Everything should be done with the right purpose in mind, to make sure you deliver what is necessary in the first place. Now that is purposeful!

Author: Rik Burgering, Solution Consultant