Wednesday 16 July 2014

Rate of Change Management

We hear a lot in IT discussions about change management, but maybe it's time to start talking about managing the rate of change as well.  I think we are starting to discover that every organisation has a limit to the amount of change it can sustain in any particular amount of time, and that rate does not necessarily match its budget.  As far as IT projects go, this limit will typically be defined by culture, availability of key individuals, the length of the development life-cycle and the amount of technical debt the organisation is carrying.

Where the change budget is lower than the rate-of-change (RoC) limit there isn't really anything new to manage, and simply managing budget is often sufficient.  I suspect most organisations have fallen into this category up until now.

However, as overall IT productivity rises through new tools and best practices we are starting to see budgets overtake the RoC limits, and this is raising new challenges.  Organisations now find themselves in the frustrating position of not being able to spend all of their budget effectively, because they simply cannot accommodate all the change it would deliver.

As is frequently the case in life and business, the first step in dealing with this is realising you have a problem.  If this really is an issue that real organisations are actually suffering from, we as an industry should start raising awareness of it.

Once an organisation has recognised that it has a problem with its RoC limit, it can then start to develop a plan to deal with it.  "Excess" budget that cannot deliver change itself should be refocussed on longer term initiatives designed to increase the rate of change that the organisation can sustain; paying off technical debt, for example, or shortening the development lifecycle with more agile practices.  

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