Partnerships can accelerate technological innovation in agile, devops, and data science. Just make sure you start with a strong foundation in place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.\u201d \u2014The\u00a0Agile Manifesto<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n This principle was needed in 2001, when the Agile Manifesto was written, because most employees worked in cubicles, and many projects were managed as tasks and handoffs from one team to another. Waterfall-style project management methodologies had a high failure rate, which led a growing number of organizations to shift to scrum, Kanban, and other agile methodologies.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Organizations that adopted agile development often chose to collocate their development teams. In some organizations, this move to collocation created a preference to staff agile development teams with full-time employees. Subsequently, there was backlash on distributing teams, using external service providers, and relying on freelancers. It was easy to blame outsourcing for poor project delivery or a marketing agency for developing unsupportable code.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today, collocation is not as much a priority. About\u00a058 percent of companies support hybrid work<\/a>, and most agile organizations use tools to manage backlogs, increase asynchronous communications, and simplify documentation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, there is a general preference for hiring employees rather than contracting with third parties or seeking outside partnerships. I believe it is important for organizations to reflect on the opportunities and risks involved in changing that model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Businesses face significant pressure to improve customer experiences, modernize applications, and experiment with emerging technologies.\u00a0Gartner reports<\/a>\u00a0that over half of digital initiatives lag CEO and executive expectations, and\u00a0many tech skills are in high demand<\/a>. The implication is that CIOs and other technology leaders need more options to scale development beyond hiring and training employees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That likely means that agile development teams, devops organizations, and data science groups include a mix of employees, contractors from service providers, startup partnerships, design work from agencies, and engineering from small development shops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To meet organizational goals, organizations must move beyond \u201cus versus them\u201d and even \u201cus and them\u201d mindsets regarding partnerships. Instead, the need is for an \u201cus with them\u201d\u00a0co-creation model<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Co-creation is a collaborative and program management approach that removes employer, employment status, and organization hierarchy from how teams self-organize. The approach focuses, instead, on people working on defined objectives with agreed-upon methodologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Co-creation is about how people collaborate<\/a>, and is not a legal designation around intellectual property, nor does it imply a formal joint development agreement. When signing up partners, the organization\u2019s procurement, legal, and business stakeholders must specify these contractual considerations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There isn\u2019t a fixed rulebook for co-creation, so organizations must provide context and definition. Below are some recommended best practices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before partnering and defining a co-creation model, it\u2019s important to understand a partner\u2019s strengths and where they can contribute value to your organization\u2019s priorities. For example, one partner may provide cloud architecture expertise, a second will develop data integrations, and a third will design and test user experiences. Understanding and setting expectations up front ensures the whole team aligns on roles and responsibilities.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n You may be a part of this dialog if invited into reviews of potential partners, and if not, leaders should communicate the goals and objectives in selecting the partner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe key to successful co-creation is ensuring your partner is not just doing their job, but acting as a true strategic asset and advisor in support of your company\u2019s bottom line,\u201d says Mark Bishopp, head of embedded payments\/finance and partnerships at\u00a0Fortis<\/a>. \u201cThis begins with asking probing questions during the prospective stage to ensure they truly understand, through years of experience on both sides of the table, the unique nuances of the industries you\u2019re working in.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Beyond asking questions about skills and capabilities, evaluate the partner\u2019s mindset, risk tolerance, approach to quality, and other areas that require alignment with your organization\u2019s business practices and culture. \u201cWhen selecting a co-creation partner, it\u2019s vital to evaluate the quality of the partner\u2019s team culture,\u201d says David DeRemer, CEO of\u00a0Very Good Ventures<\/a>. \u201cOften, the impact of a partner\u2019s culture on your own team can yield even greater long-term rewards than the scope of work that\u2019s delivered.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most agile teams use product visions to align product manager goals and roadmaps with a delivery team\u2019s architecture and development practices.\u00a0Product visions<\/a>\u00a0define customer and end-user personas, value propositions, success criteria, strategic goals, and other criteria all team participants must understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cCo-creation is about aligning first on a desired outcome and then leveraging individual superpowers to achieve that outcome in a new, improved way,\u201d says Fred Schonenberg, founder of\u00a0VentureFuel<\/a>. \u201cCrucially, you must understand the value of your collaboration to both parties and why it\u2019s a tangible improvement to the tried-and-true.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This last point is important because the best-performing partnerships provide value and learning opportunities to all participating parties. When people inside the organization can answer, \u201cWhat\u2019s in it for the partner,\u201d that alignment helps fuel more energy into attaining the business\u2019s objectives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Assemble the scrum masters, devops engineers, and data scientists from multiple organizations into a room, and you may need a Rosetta Stone to unpack each person\u2019s view of agile best practices, how to implement deployment pipelines, or what naming conventions to use in databases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Organizations should define their standard development methodologies, collaboration practices, and compliance requirements to set clear upfront expectations. On the other hand, it\u2019s important to walk into co-creation programs with open ears, as partners are likely to have some best practices ahead of the organization\u2019s methodologies, which are potential process improvements.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHaving a playbook is fundamental whenever co-creation is involved,\u201d says Marko Anastasov, co-founder of\u00a0Semaphore CI\/CD<\/a>. \u201cThe playbook is essential because it levels the ground for everyone and creates a unified interface that eases collaboration. For the playbook to be practical, it must be constantly improved and updated as processes change.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n To eradicate the us-versus-them mentality, consider shifting to more open, feedback-driven, and transparent practices wherever feasible and compliant. Share information on performance issues and outages, have everyone participate in retrospectives, review customer complaints openly, and disclose the most challenging data quality issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anastasov takes the openness mindset one step further. \u201cThe most powerful approach to co-creating a new product is building it publicly,\u201d he says. By embracing transparency and involving your audience, you foster trust, gain valuable feedback, and accelerate the path to success.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The one caveat to openness practices and transparency concerns data security and system access rights. Most organizations follow\u00a0separation of duty principles<\/a>, require\u00a0data masking<\/a>\u00a0of all datasets with personally identifiable information, and define strict access policies to customer data and other confidential information sources. These compliance factors are important when signing up and working with partners in a co-creation model.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Agile teams aim to define “done” with acceptance criteria, so there\u2019s a shared understanding of when a\u00a0user story meets requirements<\/a>. Teams also try their best to meet sprint commitments and deliver on customer expectations when deploying new capabilities. But things don\u2019t always go as planned, and many teams use\u00a0sprint retrospectives<\/a>\u00a0and adopt\u00a0blameless postmortems<\/a>\u00a0to ensure people focus on improvements and avoid finger-pointing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These are key practices for teams to survive the pressures of meeting delivery dates and customer expectations. Organization leaders should extend these approaches to co-creation teams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But organizations should also hold their partners accountable for non-negotiables by documenting required behaviors, quality specifications, service level minimums, and other expectations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The bottom line is that organizations that can\u2019t find ways to partner and collaborate with third parties will struggle to keep up with the pace of transformation. Adopting a co-creation model can offer significant advantages compared to a fully in-house or a completely outsourced approach, but it requires a commitment from everyone on the team to collaborate on goals and methodologies.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n By InfoWorld | https:\/\/www.infoworld.com\/article\/3697131\/5-best-practices-for-software-development-partnerships.html <\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":13281,"template":"","class_list":["post-13280","in_the_media","type-in_the_media","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fortispay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/in_the_media\/13280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fortispay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/in_the_media"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fortispay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/in_the_media"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fortispay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fortispay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Partnerships accelerate transformation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Co-creation restructures organizations<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
1.\u00a0Understand where partners provide a value add<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
2.\u00a0Document product vision and goals<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
3. Define your organization\u2019s expectations<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
4.\u00a0Shift to openness and transparency, but secure critical data<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
5.\u00a0Learn from experiments, but hold each other accountable<\/h2>\n\n\n\n