The measure of success in today's evolving business world goes beyond meeting deadlines and staying within budget constraints—it boils down to a crucial question for both leaders and teams—are we delivering what truly matters?
This question highlights the importance of Value-Driven Delivery (VDD), a methodology that focuses on delivering key features that have a significant business impact early and consistently during the development process.
Plan-Driven vs. Value-Driven Delivery: What is the Difference?
| Aspect | Plan-Driven Delivery | Value-Driven Delivery |
|---|---|---|
| Driver | Schedule and adhere strictly to a predefined plan | Feedback and continuous learning |
| Approach | Upfront, exhaustive planning to coordinate and control activities | Incremental planning, with findings evaluated at each stage to allow course correction |
| Success Criteria | Achieving predefined milestones within the timeline and budget | Solving customer problems while delivering value early |
Elementally, while plan-driven focuses on execution, VDD values flexibility, making it well-suited for constantly evolving projects.
Why Embrace VDD?
- Accelerated ROI: Organizations can realize benefits sooner by delivering high-value features early.
- Reduced Risk: Incremental delivery helps identify and mitigate potential risks before they turn into issues.
- Better Alignment: Regular feedback loops align teams with customer needs and business goals.
- Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: Delivering value consistently fosters trust and satisfaction among stakeholders.
How to Identify and Deliver Value?
Organizations must adopt a systematic approach to defining and delivering value to make VDD successful.
- Identify Customer Needs: Understand what truly matters to your customers by engaging them early and often.
- Define Measurable Value: Articulate the benefits that your project will deliver, such as improved efficiency, cost reduction, or customer growth.
- Prioritize Features: Use prioritization frameworks like MoSCoW, WSJF, and RICE to focus on high-impact features that align with customer needs and business goals.
- Deliver in Increments: Break the project into smaller, manageable chunks to ensure rapid delivery and continuous improvement.
- Gather Feedback: Solicit feedback throughout the delivery cycle to maintain alignment with evolving customer needs.
Real-world Application of Value-Driven Delivery
When partnering with a public sector client, DevIQ successfully applied the principles of Value-Driven Delivery (VDD) to update its legacy system within tight time and budget constraints. The project's primary value driver was the swift migration to a modern, cloud-based platform, ensuring uninterrupted business operations.
Leveraging the MoSCoW prioritization technique, stakeholders could easily distinguish between immediate deliverables and future enhancements. This approach optimized the project backlog and reassured the team that core functionality was being delivered first, providing a clear roadmap for the project's progression.
By following incremental delivery, the project achieved significant cost savings by eliminating licensing fees, modernizing the client's technical infrastructure for enhanced agility, and automating critical state-mandated processes, providing immediate and long-term value to the client.
How to Quantify Value Delivered?
So, how do we measure the amount of value delivered? The process can involve a combination of qualitative and quantitative metrics.
- Customer Satisfaction & Feedback: Net Promoter Score (NPS).
- Business Outcomes: Return on Investment, Cost Reduction, Operational Efficiency.
- Product or Service Metrics: Adoption Rate, Feature Usage.
Conclusion
It is not always about creating features and releasing them into the market to bring value addition. It means developing solutions that are effective to customers and organizations. In today's world, where organizations are increasingly aiming to enhance their competitiveness, the transition from a plan-driven to a value-driven approach is no longer a choice but a necessity. VDD helps us shift our thinking by asking, "What should we build?" instead of "What can we build?" to ensure that value is always the key focus area.
