Three arguments to keep investing on Change Request

Miguel Angel Coll
Jul 28, 2017 · 2 min read

Some days ago I was on a meeting where a top business man and a top IT man working on the same company just agree on one thing: Change Request are Devil.

The rationale behind this, is that all the Business areas include many smalls changes on CR that finally costs lot of money but never improve the Business numbers in the expected amount. Also by adding this smalls changes we get on to a more complex platform with thousands lines of code that are useless but to introduce bugs.

All this arguments are True. Even that, I still think that CR are better than projects by far and I’ll try to explain why.

1. CR are agile suitable

When you try to be agile you need to split work on small pieces. Talking about projects there is lot of work that have to be done in order to create epics, stories,etc. to finally get to the task. CR are smaller and then the overhead on splitting on to tasks is easier. Also if you have moved to product organization with smalls teams a CR probably will affect only one team and therefore require less coordination efforts.

2. Small evolution or adaptation is always needed

We are on a such competitive world that most of the time little differences make big results. Being able to adapt fast to this little improvements could give you the possibility to sign a big contract or include a new profitable provider.

3. Easy to stop and/or rollback

This is one of the possibilities that sometimes is forgiven but could make a big difference on a healthy company. When you put in place a big project you have a lot of Sponsors, Projects Managers and Stakeholders that have bet on that project and therefore wants it to success whatever it means. Sometimes the results never come, but people are so concentrated keeping the project rolling that makes impossible to stop or rollback the project. Then, you end up wasting double the money with half the functionality and you also have introduced a lot of more complexity on the platform.

There are more, but just this 3 key advantages made CR the best solution to run experiments on production, that is one of the main drivers of a Lean Enterprise. If you think CR is a waste of money, try to do nothing while your competitors do.

Ilustration: https://www.flickr.com/photos/davegray/6261268977/in/photostream/

Miguel Angel Coll

Written by

Technology passionate, vocational manager, Technology Architect @ Hotelbeds Group.

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