Reduce Lead Time
Software Management CTO Series
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12 Things to Shorten Your Lead Time
Stephan Schmidt
Software Management CTO Series
You may distribute this eBook freely, and/or bundle it as a free bonus with other products, as long as it is left completely intact, unaltered and delivered via this PDF file. You may also republish excerpts as long as they are accompanied by an attribution link back to http://www.codemonkeyism.com
Stephan Schmidt
Page 2 of 18
Software Management CTO Series
This eBook will give you insights into how to reduce the lead time of your software development process. In many companies the perception is as follows: why are we so slow? Marketing probably asks you why you have lead times of several months as an IT-department, from their ideas to seeing the feature live. Many companies have large lead times, often unnecessarily large. The good news is: You can shorten them, sometimes by several hundred percent!
Why shortening lead time?
4/4 Development [weeks] Buffer [weeks] Money/ Feature/ Week [EUR] Sum [EUR] / year 4 4 $10.000,00 $2.640.000,00 100,00% 2/0 2 0 $10.000,00 $6.500.000,00 246,21%
Shortening lead time is possible, but not easy. So why should you do it? There are many reasons to shorten your lead time. The sooner you get a feature live on your platform, the sooner it will generate money for you (see Table 1). Shortening the lead time from three months to one month means, the feature will earn two additional months of sales. This is the case for every feature that goes live earlier. More money earlier means more money to invest -more investment means a larger market share sooner. Short lead times might mean the difference between being a first mover or not. There are lots of first mover advantages, if you're faster than your competition, your customers will perceive you as the market and innovation leader, not the copy cat. Short lead times differentiate the good from the great. When going short, you will need a lot of
h
12 Things to Shorten Your Lead Time
Stephan Schmidt
Software Management CTO Series
You may distribute this eBook freely, and/or bundle it as a free bonus with other products, as long as it is left completely intact, unaltered and delivered via this PDF file. You may also republish excerpts as long as they are accompanied by an attribution link back to http://www.codemonkeyism.com
Stephan Schmidt
Page 2 of 18
Software Management CTO Series
This eBook will give you insights into how to reduce the lead time of your software development process. In many companies the perception is as follows: why are we so slow? Marketing probably asks you why you have lead times of several months as an IT-department, from their ideas to seeing the feature live. Many companies have large lead times, often unnecessarily large. The good news is: You can shorten them, sometimes by several hundred percent!
Why shortening lead time?
4/4 Development [weeks] Buffer [weeks] Money/ Feature/ Week [EUR] Sum [EUR] / year 4 4 $10.000,00 $2.640.000,00 100,00% 2/0 2 0 $10.000,00 $6.500.000,00 246,21%
Shortening lead time is possible, but not easy. So why should you do it? There are many reasons to shorten your lead time. The sooner you get a feature live on your platform, the sooner it will generate money for you (see Table 1). Shortening the lead time from three months to one month means, the feature will earn two additional months of sales. This is the case for every feature that goes live earlier. More money earlier means more money to invest -more investment means a larger market share sooner. Short lead times might mean the difference between being a first mover or not. There are lots of first mover advantages, if you're faster than your competition, your customers will perceive you as the market and innovation leader, not the copy cat. Short lead times differentiate the good from the great. When going short, you will need a lot of