Have you ever thought what it could be always meeting customer expectations and one fine day you have an escalation of not meeting the deadline? Can’t think about it right or yes this can be possible and something that we have to live with it. Why delivering is important and crucial in the software development world? Why can’t be its just fine if we don’t meet customer expectation?
It’s a STRAIGHT NO!! YOU CANNOT MISS THE DEADLINE AND FAIL TO DELIVER.
Yes, you can’t and certainly there are reasons and assumption, exceptions, comments, logical conversation around it. There are people who are earning their bread and butter if you only deliver. It’s basically a chain of supplies, one meets the end and therefore we must deliver.
Have we ever imagined what goes into delivering and meeting clients need? Exactly many of us know and many would agree with me that this whole process carries a lot of pressure, a lot of fear and a lot of ambiguity. At times irrespective of delivering phases in the most appropriate way and meeting the exact customer needs, you might fail, you might fail when it reaches your actual end users, you might fail when your user actually starts using them in their day to day activity, now that’s where lies a problem.
Many of us as delivery acknowledged at times are only bothered to push the product and services from our door, the heads of the organization just need to know the dates, when is it meeting their strategic goals, many are just happy to bring into their customer notice, but how many among us step into the end user’s shoes to make their life better, make them feel is what you are spending is actually worth.
Delivering is Herculean task. It doesn’t end while just pushing the things out of one range.
Let me tell you a small story. Gita and team were asked to deliver an application. The product team started managing, gathering, confirming the requirement. The sales team took the pitch and started figuring out what their customer need. The management started building high hopes and the customers were informed that the delivery is on the way.
Everything was evaluated, confirmed, Sprint, Iteration, Agile mindset, best heads got into to get the delivery executed. All went well, development team was asked to raise their bars, quality check interrogated with the right mindset. All in the air was the release talks. It took 2 months to deliver and when it was ready and suppose to hit the market, customers change, market change, need change, the plan changed and today that lies in the corner of dusty box as a mere piece of code, which had been of value to the many knowledgeable mind, is now worth nothing.
Well, what next, what went wrong, what didn’t work, what is not right…? I will leave this open to the readers.