It’s time for you to be agile, and more importantly, it’s time to manage your agility. With budgets changing, due to reduction in revenue, or as a precautionary measure, business leaders will have more pressure to be agile and improve business efficiency.
The goals for most businesses will be the same. Manage cash flow effectively through the period of reduced revenue, keep the pipelines flowing, and take advantage of opportunities to improve. When those opportunities require software development or integration services, how do you achieve that without blowing the budget? We’ve outlined a few tips we find helpful when we’re under the same constraints.
Look for improvements
- Review the stability of your apps and services. During this period of disruption, reliance on your apps and connection points may have changed. Start reviewing business systems and workflows to identify new potential points of failure and under-provisioned services
- Look for workflows which may now become bottlenecks or fall apart under the new disrupted operating environment. Especially if there was reliance on manual processing
- Review your backlog and determine if any priorities have changed for current and future enhancements
- Keep your internal team focused on improving the business workflows and processes, your team has the knowledge
Control development costs
- Understand the effort and costs required to maintain and support your apps
- Split the development budget between maintenance and project/capex spend
- Have the maintenance of your development managed by an operations team or external provider, if you can lock the maintenance of your app at a fixed rate then it’s a win for your budget and one less dynamic expense to worry about
- Avoid project creep. If your developers are working in an Agile methodology, this will be a key focus area. With your dev maintenance being static, then Project work and enhancements are the only areas with risk of blowing out
- Ask your development provider what measures they are taking to help avoid estimated effort on tasks blowing out. What fail safes are they putting in place to stay within the advised budgets
- Communication is the key, let developers begin working on that “one small change” then check in with them promptly to find out if there are any changes to the estimation
- If changes to the estimation occur, reassess the task priorities again
In summary, the key to remaining agile during this period is by managing your agility. Communication with your development team is vital more so now than it ever was before. Reduce the dynamic spending in your budget as much as possible. At least until the business can adjust to the new flow of revenue, and you receive a new budget.
We’re here to help you get through this, if you would like further advice, please reach out. We are more than happy to share our experiences to help you work through your situation. You can send me a message on LinkedIn or email the team on info@corbel.com.au