Parts of the process was deemed to work well for a period of time, but alas no-one recorded the before and after to see whether the new found processes improved the flow through the system. Even more importantly, no-one measured whether the development team delivered value to the customer.
The IT department started to monitor work it realised that it was slow to deliver change to the business. The processes that had been put in place to manage the work were not delivering value to the customer as quickly as the IT department had envisioned.
The solution to delivering value was simple but hard to implement. The IT department needed to realise the following:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
- That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
Fortunately, the IT department realised that it needed to evolve from its current state in to a new state, where it delivered high value software to its customer. This was only going to happen through hard work, and through frank conversations within the team, and by evolving there processes to match their customers’ needs.