Transformed

CHAPTER 7Changing How You Build

Your technology investment is all about creating value for your customers and your company.

There are several important aspects to creating this value, but at the end of the day, the primary skill you depend on to build your products is your engineers.

For many technology-powered companies, the engineers are the single largest line-item cost.

In most of the prior models, typically each technology effort is treated as a project.

Each project is funded, staffed, planned, executed, and delivered. The project ends upon delivery, and people roll off to other work.

Realize that everything we build has two outputs that could create value: what we make and what we learn. In the project model, we lose most of what we learn.

If and when we want to work on that area again, we spend time and money relearning things we already paid for once. Or, more likely, not learning them, and making costly mistakes.

Further, teams that have to live in the code they build treat it differently than teams that know they are rolling off at the end of the project. This is why technical debt is so rampant in the project model.

It's similar to the difference between remodeling a house to sell it versus to live in it. In the former case, just painting over the wallpaper is faster and cheaper, and who cares if the paint peels later?

It's not a coincidence that this is the way outsourcing is done, and we often say if this is how you want to work, then you may as well hire Accenture ...