- Today’s rapidly scaling and increasingly complex products create mounting pressure on delivery teams to release new features and changes quickly and with sufficient quality.
- Many organizations lack the critical capabilities and resources needed to satisfy their growing backlog, jeopardizing product success.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Delivery quality and throughput go hand in hand. Focus on meeting minimum process and product quality standards first. Improved throughput will eventually follow.
- Business integration is not optional. The business must be involved in guiding delivery efforts, and ongoing validation and verification product changes.
- The software development lifecycle (SDLC) must deliver more than software. Business value is generated through the products and services delivered by your SDLC. Teams must provide the required product support and stakeholders must be willing to participate in the product’s delivery.
Impact and Result
- Standardize your definition of a successful product. Come to an organizational agreement of what defines a high-quality and successful product. Accommodate both business and IT perspectives in your definition.
- Clarify the roles, processes, and tools to support business value delivery and satisfy stakeholder expectations. Indicate where and how key roles are involved throughout product delivery to validate and verify work items and artifacts. Describe how specific techniques and tools are employed to meet stakeholder requirements.
- Focus optimization efforts on most affected stages. Reveal the health of your SDLC from the value delivery, business and technical practice quality standards, discipline, throughput, and governance perspectives with a diagnostic. Identify and roadmap the solutions to overcome the root causes of your diagnostic results.
Modernize Your SDLC Research & Tools
Start here – read the Executive Brief
Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should modernize your SDLC, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:
- Modernize Your SDLC – Phases 1-3
1. Set your SDLC context
State the success criteria of your SDLC practice through the definition of product quality and organizational priorities. Define your SDLC current state.
- Modernize Your SDLC – Phase 1: Set Your SDLC Context
- SDLC Strategy Template
2. Diagnose your SDLC
Build your SDLC diagnostic framework based on your practice’s product and process objectives. Root cause your improvement opportunities.
- Modernize Your SDLC – Phase 2: Diagnose Your SDLC
- SDLC Diagnostic Tool
3. Modernize your SDLC
Learn of today’s good SDLC practices and use them to address the root causes revealed in your SDLC diagnostic results.
- Modernize Your SDLC – Phase 3: Modernize Your SDLC
Workshop: Modernize Your SDLC
Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
1 Set Your SDLC Context
The Purpose
Discuss your quality and product definitions and how quality is interpreted from both business and IT perspectives.
Review your case for strengthening your SDLC practice.
Review the current state of your roles, processes, and tools in your organization.
Key Benefits Achieved
Grounded understanding of products and quality that is accepted across the organization.
Clear business and IT objectives and metrics that dictate your SDLC practice’s success.
Defined SDLC current state people, process, and technologies.
Activities
1.1 Define your products and quality.
1.2 Define your SDLC objectives.
1.3 Measure your SDLC effectiveness.
1.4 Define your current SDLC state.
Outputs
Product and quality definitions.
SDLC business and technical objectives and vision.
SDLC metrics.
SDLC capabilities, processes, roles and responsibilities, resourcing model, and tools and technologies.
2 Diagnose Your SDLC
The Purpose
Discuss the components of your diagnostic framework.
Review the results of your SDLC diagnostic.
Key Benefits Achieved
SDLC diagnostic framework tied to your SDLC objectives and definitions.
Root causes to your SDLC issues and optimization opportunities.
Activities
2.1 Build your diagnostic framework.
2.2 Diagnose your SDLC.
Outputs
SDLC diagnostic framework.
Root causes to SDLC issues and optimization opportunities.
3 Modernize Your SDLC
The Purpose
Discuss the SDLC practices used in the industry.
Review the scope and achievability of your SDLC optimization initiatives.
Key Benefits Achieved
Knowledge of good practices that can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your SDLC.
Realistic and achievable SDLC optimization roadmap.
Activities
3.1 Learn and adopt SDLC good practices.
3.2 Build your optimization roadmap.
Outputs
Optimization initiatives and target state SDLC practice.
SDLC optimization roadmap, risks and mitigations, and stakeholder communication flow.