You Want IT When?

Why does it take so long to deliver software products? Many stakeholders ask this question during the course of a software development project.  It’s interesting when the developers ask this question because they know what it takes to implement the functionality in software, but in asking that question, some in the organization often fail to appreciate what it takes to deliver a commercial product to market.  From one perspective, they are correct; it shouldn’t take so long, but from a different perspective, the long duration is understandable — even if undesirable.  I’d like to explore the perspectives that explain these differences using a hypothetical delivery.

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I often wonder why software teams always seem to be committing to unrealistic schedules.  You know when the sales team signed a contract with a customer to deliver functionality on a date without ever asking the engineering team whether it were possible. Never mind the roadmaps identify an entirely different set of functionality than what was committed. And guess what?  The product roadmaps can’t change either; the sales team has signed contracts on that functionality too.

It’s not just the sales organizations though; the software organizations are all too happy to over commit without any help from outsiders.  You probably have one of those programmers on your team that when you ask him for an estimate, he says a week and three months later he’s still working on it.  When you ask him what happened, his answer is well it was a bit more complicated than I thought.  Does he learn from it? No way. Ask for an estimate on the next project, and he’ll still quote a week.

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