Discover how to help a big enterprise with innovations
We’ll look at just one aspect of the topic question. According to our experience in IT-product development for big enterprise clients, we’ve discovered how to implement successful IT-products, what obstacles they are usually faced with and which tips are preferred to solve problems.
We’ve spent the last 4 years working with big enterprise companies as an external IT development team and IT-consultants. Most of our clients are from e-commerce or retail businesses, but I’m sure the following problems and solutions fit for other industries.
Innovations are often incurred but barely finished
Big companies such as giant e-commerce and financial companies often have their own IT, design and marketing departments. It looks like they have all the necessary things and resources to develop the best ever software for market conquest.
Indeed, they have problems in implementing internal IT innovations or bringing new IT-products to the market. It was interesting to discover why this happens.
Our typical client:
2000+ employees, hundreds of branches.
30+ projects or products are run simultaneously.
Dozens of Product Owners, stakeholders, and some guys who make the decisions.
Result of Retrospectives
After a project, we usually conduct a Retrospective. We asked clients:
- Why they couldn’t find the necessary energy and resources to develop an IT-product inside the company?
- Why previous attempts to develop IT-product failed?
- Why did they choose our company to produce IT-products?
Indeed, clients, who belong to various business areas, such as eCommerce, logistics and advertisement companies, have the same troubles and obstacles on the way to innovations. Here is a summary of our discovery:
- It’s hard to calculate the final budget of internal development processes — a budget consists of employee salaries, software and hardware costs, advertisement costs and other things. You need to summarize all of the costs and get a total price for the project. In reality, companies change project prioritization and people between projects unbelievably frequently. Therefor, they can not calculate how much money they spend on internal projects. This is one of the reason for over-budgeting.
- Internal projects that change prioritization frequently — it’s fine if you change project priority because business is changeable. But we found situations when unfinished projects were halted because a CEO or an investor found a new ‘cool’ idea and directed everybody to the new project. They do it too often and they don’t care about losses because of the previous point — they can’t calculate how much money have invested already.
- Development teams are unstable as they have to borrow employees from other departments inside the company — the company thinks about employees as though they are robots with a list of characteristics. They call them ‘resources’. Consequently, a big company can mix up developers between projects and split a working day into a few projects. It hearts the developer’s motivation and hinders deep learning of business domains.
- Shortage of necessary staff and competencies — if you are not an IT-company, I have sad news for you — your HR department is in an unequal battle with IT companies that specialized in IT services only. Talented developers have great offers from IT-only-companies and they don’t want to work with one of the departments in a big enterprise.
- Bureaucracy creates obstacles along the project path — this is the disease of almost all big companies. If people work together just a few months, they can develop overgrown by relations and commitments that interfere with business evolution.
Solutions
Our company acts as an external IT-team for big enterprise companies. We either develop the whole IT-product on our own or empower a client’s development team with our engineers. From our view we suggest the following solutions:
- If you have an external team, it is very simple to calculate the total cost. All the risks for over-budgeting are taken by an outsource/outstaff service company.
- If you know how much money you’ve spent on the project, as CEO, you have to spend some time analyzing projects and making decisions about priorities.
- You don’t worry about motivation and hiring employees because this is a risk for the outsource/outstaff service company.
- If you use an outsource company, they are an IT-company so, they know how to find talented developers.
- A small outsource company doesn’t have annoying bureaucracy.
Practices that help
We always use concrete practices to achieve client goals. The top three of them are:
- Impact Mapping, Customer Journey Mapping and User Story Mapping.
- Changing the culture of a big enterprise company.
- Use an external brick team. I’ll explain this in the next post. In a short period of time, clients realize they can use us as a competitor for their IT-teams.