The organisation’s ability to build and deliver software effectively and efficiently to the end-user is a prerequisite for business success today. Companies leverage bespoke software to both provide the core business value to customers and stakeholders, and disrupt verticals and industries, compete for new customers and develop new revenue streams.

However, many organisations today fail to deliver cutting-edge and high-quality software in a cost-effective and timely manner. Most businesses are still struggling to apply efficient lean software delivery management (SDM) best practices because of complexity and the sheer size of systems and applications that leverage numerous tech stacks across highly interdependent yet poorly integrated application delivery pipelines. This impedes the overall agility of software development and results in many technology investments being made without taking data and insights into consideration.

Although it’s pretty a new approach that’s still gaining traction among delivery managers, SDM is considered to be an essential prerequisite for any development organisation’s ability to deliver software.

Accelerated Strategies Group has recently conducted research to understand SDM’s current state in the software development industry. In particular, research findings prove SDM to matter most when it comes to high-quality software delivery.

Let’s walk together through the key takeaways from the research to see how SDM helps respond to the main challenges facing software development companies globally, and how SDM can enhance the ability of software teams to communicate and collaborate better as they build and deliver software.

Key Software Delivery Challenges in 2020

• As much as 65% of organisations cannot quantify the real cost of each feature delivery delay accurately.
• More than 84% of companies admit that the inaccessibility of information impedes their ability to do their jobs and/or make informed data-driven decisions promptly.
• Software sprawl, i.e. an ever-growing number of software licenses in a company that either overlap or are underused, is rampant and hinders informed decision-making and negatively impacts collaboration.

In addition, the research has also found a significant communication gap between layers of management, which indicates that information is not flowing vertically within organisations.

How SDM Helps Respond to Challenges

Companies that have already out in place their SDM strategy, point to the following advantages:

• 67% are now able to prioritise the development and delivery of features based on expected business impact;
• 63% have plans to “promote and articulate” the value of new features released to users;
• 61% say SDM helps shorten the lead time for feature delivery.

Accelerated Strategies Group has determined three key benefits of using SDM for better software delivery.

Key Benefits of SDM

• SDM helps quantify the impact of your software delivery investment.
• SDM improves communication and collaboration of delivery teams.
• SDM provides end-to-end visibility into the value flow of software delivery streams.

Now let’s delve into each for details.

How SDM helps quantify the impact of your software delivery investment

According to the research, more than 50% of development organisations today are unable to break down the cost of application development by functional areas. Nor can they calculate the business impact of feature delays or measure the cost of debugging after the release.

All of the above leads to the lack of visibility into the software delivery value streams. 

At Evolve, we always track what tasks our developers spend time on – building new features vs fixing bugs or eliminating technical debt. We use this information as a key measurement of the maturity of our teams’ ability to deliver software, and as a measurement of software quality itself.

As a tech consultancy guiding startups and blue-chip companies throughout their entire software development journey, we also use this information to help our clients make informed decisions on where in the value stream to invest and at what stage of their software development life cycle.

The research found that more than 50% of companies do not compare developers’ time spent on new feature development vs time spent on retiring tech debt. However, the inability to gauge where your developer’s time is being spent is a bottleneck that needs to be addressed.

How SDM helps improve communication and collaboration of software delivery teams

• More than 60% of survey respondents agree that functional silos still exist in their firm.
• More than 85% admit that silos impede the free flow of information across the organisation.

Agile teams should be familiar with the development and delivery tools from across the spectrum of open source and commercial models, including SaaS/PaaS. At Evolve, one of our key objectives within SDM is to seek and provide our teams with the best-of-breed platforms and suites featuring excellent vendor integration support.

As a software team extension provider, we supply client-tailored teams distributed across locations. Our SDM/DevOps strategy helps ensure they work together with in-house teams to deliver the robust complex systems enabling our clients to operate and stay ahead of the curve. 

How SDM provides end-to-end visibility into the value flow of software delivery streams

More than 50% of today’s companies don’t have access to quality data and insights from across the toolchain and across multiple projects and applications.

At Evolve, software delivery is a data-driven activity. We foster data-driven decision-making within our Agile teams and among our customers. Instead of keeping valuable project management data locked in tool-specific data stores and detached from software delivery pipelines, we tend to adopt the right technologies within our teams to enable free information flow and full accessibility of data to decision-makers as early in SDLC as possible.

Check out how we breathed new life into an innovative recruitment platform thanks to efficient SDM.

In conclusion, the SDM strategy allows software development organisations to mature at a much faster rate, and maturity is the first step to long-term success.

Are you looking for a technology partner with an excellent software delivery track record? Drop us a line and let's discuss how we can help!