According to the lean approach, every single project in a company should support corporate strategies. In other words, each project’s objectives (business requirements) should be aligned with corporate strategies. Otherwise company resources are rooted in the wrong direction, and that results in project portfolio- level waste.

To ensure strategic alignment and prevent waste, requests from all business units within the company for new and enhanced products should be received, evaluated, and prioritized by a dedicated group of people.

In large-scale companies that create products containing software technology, this dedicated group may be a separate enterprise architecture team that works in coordination with company executives to understand business strategies, evaluate business unit requests against these strategies and steer technical teams in building products that meet today’s and tomorrow’s business and customer needs.

Since product development takes a considerable amount of time, enterprise architects should guide technical teams in creating a  flexible  technical architecture that can serve both today’s and tomorrow’s new product development initiatives. Otherwise technical limitations become a bottleneck rather than an enabler for the company.

The enterprise architecture profession requires business knowledge, technical skills, and the ability to see the big picture with a bird’s-eye view. Hence the most suitable people to fill enterprise architecture positions are experienced business analysts, product managers, and project managers who gain these competencies naturally as part of their profession. Thus in small-and midsized companies, project management offices (PMOs), product management teams, or a team of experienced business analysts should be responsible for evaluating and prioritizing product development/enhancement requests from all business units and ensuring the alignment of business and technical architectures.

Air Traffic Control Tower

In our clients, we witness an overwhelming number of new or enhanced product development  requests  from  business  units.  Managing  these  requests  is  like

managing the air traffic control tower at a very busy airport.

A huge number of requests waiting in the demand management pipeline creates a high technical debt.

Despite all their hard work, most technical departments are blamed for not being able to meet the expectations of business units. Business units mostly criticize technical departments for not delivering new or enhanced products fast enough.

According to Einstein’s relativity theory, observations that you make about time differ from observations of others who are moving at different speeds. Similarly, project durations are relative for technical teams and business units of the same company. While six months will be considered a challenging time frame by most technical teams to develop a new product, it will be considered as  a  long duration by business units.

If delivered late, product development projects lose their importance for the business due to rapidly changing market conditions and fierce time-to-market pressures.

If you search for the root cause of technical teams’ latencies, you will see that they can only allocate limited time to the development of new products. They spend the majority of their time on an overwhelming number of enhancement/modification requests for existing products to “keep the lights on.”

“Keep the Lights On” Projects

A high number of these enhancement / modification requests also demotivates business analysts, product managers, developers, and project managers because, instead of being involved in new and innovative projects, they have to spend their time firefighting existing products.

If the additional cost of these enhancement / modification requests are not tracked systematically, the total cost of ownership for existing products will reach a very high amount. Usually this total amount outweighs the replacement of the existing product with a new one and creates product enhancement / modification-level waste.

Sometimes enhancement/modification requests are classified under the same category with maintenance requests. This is also an inappropriate approach since maintenance is a different category, and its aim is to ensure continuous operation

of a product rather than to enhance its attributes. Each product should have a separate maintenance and enhancement / modification track to identify the best time to totally replace it.

The status of these enhancement / modification requests should be continuously reviewed. Some of the requests waiting in the pipeline may become obsolete due to changing business conditions. These obsolete requests should be identified and eliminated to optimize the utilization of technical resources and prevent waste.

Case Study: Mobile Application Development Project

A local CEC (consumer electronics company) outsourced its requirements gathering, documentation, and analysis process to BA-Works.

Company Overview

The CEC sold TV sets, speakers, home cinema systems, and DVD players via independent dealer stores. These dealer stores were also responsible for product delivery and repair.

The CEC worked with an outsourced call center company that was only responsible for customer service. It had no direct sales to customers.

The CEC managed its procurement, inventory, accounting, and sales operations on an ERP system and marketing operations on a CRM system.

Business Need

The CEC’s  website was  only being used  to present  product and campaign information. There were no sales on the web channel. At that time the CEC didn’t have a mobile application.

For the last two years, discounted prices on e-commerce websites  had  been driving the CEC’s customers to the competition.

To overcome this situation, the CMO (chief marketing officer) of the CEC was considering creating the company’s own online sales channels. The CMO planned to initiate the online strategy with a mobile application. At that time other consumer electronics companies didn’t have mobile applications for this

local market. The CMO wanted to make the CEC the first consumer electronics company that used mobile as a sales channel. He discussed the mobile application idea with his team members and asked them to move forward.

The company’s marketing business unit entered this request on the CEC’s demand management system as an urgent, high-priority demand. They noted that they wanted to release a mobile sales channel earlier than competitors, and thus the project had to be completed within two months at the latest.