Coping with volatility: don't panic; seek truth; release frequently

Photo credit: Max van den Oetelaaria via Unsplash

If you’re in the last stages of a multi-year digital delivery programme, then you probably feel frazzled. That’s the normal condition of late stage programme teams.

If your programme has coincided with the last five years (five year digital delivery programmes are still a thing) then you must feel frazzled to a historic degree.

Imagine launching a programme at the beginning of 2020. You would probably anticipate all the usual challenges: unrealistic plans, stretched budgets, partners that let you down, unclear needs and unreasonable expectations. So far, so programme-typical. What you would not anticipate was that you would need to work out how to keep your programme running and your team safe in the middle of a global pandemic, that the cyber threat environment would shift to become so much more hostile, that abundant computing capacity would become scarce, that trends in technology prices would reverse direction, or that an AI driven wave of new capabilities would sweep the world.

And even if you did navigate all of those challenges, keep your teams together, deal with changes in the market and protect your services, then your plans have been challenged again in recent weeks by rapid shifts in the AI market.

In technology, we frequently claim that disruption is the norm, and that we have an aptitude for adaptation. But that aptitude has been tested in recent years - and it seems that we will have to get used to an ever higher rate of disruption. The exponential curve of technology change gets ever steeper, and the peaks and troughs of the hype cycle get ever higher and deeper. How do we keep up, and make delivery sustainable in such a volatile environment?

I think that we can try to do three things - all difficult.

Don’t Panic

Panic is often a tempting emotion in the world of enterprise technology, whether at an industry level (Another disruptive technology was just announced!) a strategic level (Our ambitions outreach our resources - again!) or at the level of service delivery (It’s 3 am, our services are down, and no-one knows how to bring them back again!).

Panic is especially tempting when it is visibly apparent in leaders, in the press and in our colleagues: it is contagious. However, I think that one of the most important attributes of technologists is the ability to resist the temptation to panic, to understand that disruption, strategic stretch and service failure are all fundamental to our profession, that we have seen them before and survived them before, and that calm is the best response. Perhaps we can even make our calm contagious. And if we have trouble finding calm then we should remember to . . .

Seek Truth

Truth can be hard to discern in the world of technology. It is obscured by marketing (Our product is not just better than their product, it’s a fundamentally new paradigm of computing!), complexity (This service runs on any cloud, but also runs on its own cloud, or you could install it on-premise: we offer you flexibility - but no opinions!) and ignorance (Tell me again why I need to pay for resilience? Can’t you just code it to work properly all the time?).

Fortunately, the truth is always there, as long as we are prepared to take the time and trouble to discover it - and have the courage to believe what it tells us. It often turns out that disruption is rather less disruptive and that revolutions are rather less revolutionary than we were led to believe - and that sometimes, the opposite is true: an obscure and unheralded technology development creates more opportunity than we imagined.

I think that we must remember that we are in a truth seeking profession - and that we have an obligation to share the truth with others. If it feels hard to find the truth, though, we should remember that it can be found through action as well as research, and that we should . . .

Release Often

Paradoxically, the volatile nature of the technology landscape can tempt us to stand still. How can we stick to a plan when the world keeps changing? If we make choices, how do we know that they won’t be invalidated within months or even weeks? What’s the point in moving forward if it turns out that we’re going in the wrong direction?

When tempted to stay static in the middle of the maelstrom, I think we should remember that our job is to put reliable capabilities in the hands of our users, and that we can’t do that if we are favour changing direction over making releases. At the same time, this does not mean that we should stick rigidly to a plan which grows increasingly disconnected from reality. It means that we must release, and learn, and think, and change, and release again, and learn, and think, and change . . . forever.

We have known for a long while that release frequency (along with reliability) is one of the fundamental measures of digital performance. It is also a measure of our ability to stay stable, to find the truth and to make good choices.

In the world of technology, volatility is a feature, not a bug. We have known that since the first articulation of Moore’s law. There is always more volatility to come - and always reason to avoid panic, seek truth and release frequently.