Follow the Money

Chapter 1. Why Money Flows Matter

A Note for Early Release Readers

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This will be the 1st chapter of the final book.

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This chapter tells a typical story of an engineering-led initiative that fails to scale in a large organization due to a failure to understand the financial architecture of software. It seeks to bring to life some of the themes of this book, such as budget cycles, sources of funding, incentive alignment, and alignment with business goals. If you are unconvinced of the book’s central thesis - that the ultimate source of major software transformation failures are rooted in oragnisational money flows - then this chapter may help persuade you. If you are already convinced, then this chapter will resonate with you and help you feel less alone in your frustrations!

A Story From the Trenches

Let’s start with a story. It’s from some of my own experiences in the software industry, and you might recognise some aspects of it. Hopefully it brings to life some of the challenges that technology initiatives can face as they try to scale across more and more parts of a business.

It’s 2010, and Jan is an engineering manager who works ...