IT Development as a Production Line. Are You Serious?
Yes! This is the exact thesis presented in Mik Kersten’s book, Project to Product. In the digital era, the need for continual development and enhancement of technical platforms should no longer be the domain of project management but production management, argues Kersten. Changes to the IT infrastructure are no longer the unique, one-off endeavors that project management was designed to control. So why continue to establish a new team for every new requirement? Why disband a team that has learned to work together at the end of each initiative? Why indeed! The answer is evident: if technology change is continuous, then set up the technology teams to delivery continuously.
Even though you may still have some discreet development endeavors for which a one-off project-type perspective is appropriate, it’s likely that you are also investing in software development that’s continually ongoing; for example, updating/upgrading/rearchitecting your Web portal. As organizations invest in modern platforms and standardize architectures, significant changes may be delivered by the same repetitive process using similar capabilities. In Lean, this process — or product orientation — is called a value stream and an IT function may have more than one!
In this webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Jon Ward will help you understand why shifting to IT development production lines, managed in the same way as car manufacturers manage their vehicle production processes, can improve delivery in your organization.
Discover how making the mindset change to a value stream approach will make it possible to deliver solutions more quickly. Understand how the concept of an IT development production line enables organizational learning, and greater delivery efficiency as the process is optimized. Learn tips on:
- How to manage short-term and longer-term software investments in a value stream
- Understand the role of functions, such as the PMO, play in a production-line scenario
- The use of Lean-Agile practices in the value stream
- The metrics used to measure and improve value stream delivery efficiency and performance.
Watch this webinar on-demand and learn how the project to product concept could be used to improve the delivery of IT developments in your organization. Register, then watch now.