Get to Production

22 April 2012

[The] team is presented with a detailed project plan and a set of requirements that it then works through, incrementally delivering software (but not to production) as the production release process runs at a different cadence. I’ve experienced the excitement of a high-functioning development team, and watched that team tear itself apart as it ploughs headlong into the process and politics of its host organisation.

The article hints at a solution: help the business close the feedback loop by getting software into production. Failure to remove roadblocks and deploy to production is as much a failure as not delivering at all; you can’t demonstrate value if your software is sitting on a test environment.

If you can’t get to production, for whatever reason, you may as well pack up, go home and stop wasting everyone’s time.