We all know businesses must be competitive to sell their goods and services in the marketplace. Competitiveness is an important factor in whether the business succeeds, just gets by or fails. When we talk about building software we often talk about helping a business compete in different ways and key amongst these are Price, Quality, Product Differentiation, Flexibility or Time.
When we analyse a business from a software building perspective we look at it’s Mission, Current Strategies and Tactics looking at how these work from an operations, time-based or new strategy perspective.
From experience we know that helping leaders establish or work within frameworks promoting continuous improvement through standardisation is a good start – as what can be standardised can often be made more lean with the introduction of technology.
Helping leaders understand where they are on a product life cycle also helps focus the mind. Different reoccurring strategies come about at different times based on demand and whether a business/product is in its incubation, growth, maturity, saturation or decline cycle.