The second most important thing in software development is how quickly a team can make a small change in software.

The Story of Change

There was once a software organization trying to build a piece of software to support an evolutionary step in a device improvement.   The technology on which the device ran had shrunk in cost and size by a factor of ten.  The small software organization spent one million dollars and started building the software. Then they started asking questions and adapting. What does the customer want? What does the customer prefer?  What is the customer asking for that is  different than they expected? As the answers to these questions started to come in the product  changed. The company asked more questions and the product changed again; they kept adapting to the requests of their customers.  Then they discovered  that a larger organization was designing a product to solve the same problem that their product was attempting to solve. The larger company had more resources, both people and money, to throw at the project. This giant competitor made the little upstart very nervous.

The small company continued work on the project while looking over their shoulder at the giant in the rearview mirror. In the end the small company completed the product using change-focused approaches for a total cost of $7M. The competitor built the same product using a planned project approach for a total cost of $70M.  But there was one problem. The large competitor’s product couldn’t compete in the market (it was getting crushed). The larger company bought the small company’s product for $350M in order to stay in the marketplace. Why did the larger company spend 420 million dollars on a project that cost the small company 7 million to build. How does a small company spend such a small amount of time and money making a product that creates a $350M paycheck?

The smaller company’s software changed direction dozens of times. They delivered up-to-the- week what the customer and marketplace wanted and they did it for a fraction of the price and in less than half of the time of their larger competitor. The large organization studied the problem, made a plan, and followed it. Unfortunately for them , they could not keep up with the speed of change necessary to stay in the market.

Speed of change wins.

Welcome to the second metric!