How many people struggle with juggling Business as usual (BAU) operations as well as delivering products to customers as well as investing in innovation? The push to deliver more features to users often means we take short cuts, take on tech debt and reduce time spent maintaining the system. Some organisations just create a BAU team and toss the work over the fence once development ends, others allocate a percentage of time, whilst others continually deprioritise the work for a short term gain or deliverable.
Some teams even use their BAU workload as a reason that they can’t go agile? In a product based model where "you built it, you fix it" is the mantra, what do we need to do differently with BAU (business as usual) activities?
BAU activities means many things to many people, KTLO, Maintenance, Enablers, sustainment and DevOps. Recently we have seen a perception that BAU is less important. Some teams balance this by capturing BAU work as enabling features and stories in their backlog, however, new build work is seen as more interesting and more likely to be prioritized higher by business as they show direct value to users. Whilst Product owners may recognize that BAU activity is important, they may not necessarily understand the consequences of prioritizing new capability over BAU and shouldn't be placed in a position to choose.
I was working with a Large organization who had finished a big project 2 years ago. They had project based metrics and controls and used a “Plan Build Run” approach. The “Build” part was “Agile”. With the project finished everything was now about support, sustain and maintain. They were essentially “Run” teams building and tweaking stuff. Planning was reactive, everything was seen as a critical incident and there was no product roadmap or plan for evolving the product as it moved through its lifecycle. The Business was unhappy that they couldn’t get enhancements and customers were unhappy with quality and performance. Essentially, product development had stalled.
I have found that using metrics such as the Innovation index is a good way to see the balance in an organization between operational excellence and innovation. We wanted to get the balance right as BAU is critical product support and pushing to much the other way may lead to feature factory mentality churning out features that aren't wanted or used as well as tech debt when short cuts were made. We knew that if BAU is neglected, over time, the cost to maintain and support the systems greatly increases and ability to deliver new features slows.
We reviewed our mix of business operations, innovation and business change and benchmarked against the data of average ICT CIO investment over the past 10 years. What we found was our time spent on BAU work was approx. 80% with 35% being reactive. We were capacity planning but found we were fighting fires more than we were developing products. As a product manager, I didn’t want to spend investment here. We were just keeping the lights on, however we needed to turn on new lights.
Focus on BAU just solves yesterday’s problem. To keep pace with tech advances and customer expectations we need to be able to solve tomorrow’s problems by innovating today. BAU is critical to keep our systems, however the focus needs to be on the customer as the number one priority is ensuring customers satisfaction when it comes to our Products. So we focused on getting the balance right between innovation and operations.
Whole of Business Innovates
The majority of CIO's are struggling to balance innovation and operational excellence. Aging infrastructure affects service quality, poor performance creates negative customer sentiment and ultimately stalls Digital Transformation agenda.
Gartner has suggested that failure to invest in innovation is the second most common driver of “stall” product development.
Fail to respond to emerging [needs] from emerging markets and changing customer preferences
Breakdown in innovation management accounted for 75% of all stalls in 2023
Destroys organisation’s value
Destroys Business trust in ICT to deliver
Innovation is as much about processes and ways of working as it building leading edge capabilities. Technology is essential to core business so we need to develop products to solve problems that help reduce the customer satisfaction gap.
To ensure we evolved in a responsive way that was aligned to business strategy (over being reactive) we invested each Sprint in innovation. This investment in automation, DevOps and a product vs project management approach, allowed us to ensure we were focused on ensuring we continued to invest in product development, product discovery and product innovation, whilst ensuring our operations were robust, scalable and enhanced to support emerging opportunities and embrace emerging technology that would help improve time to market and ability to innovate.
Our results over a 12 month period showed our investment in innovation helping us to reduce BAU reactivity and allowed us to focus on more product development to work towards building customer satisfaction.
By embracing a culture of learning and innovation through continuous engagement with customers and stakeholders, we were able to focus on their needs to close the customer satisfaction gap and minimised development risk by ensuring we were building the right solutions. This allowed us to adapt rapidly to changes to environments, pivot as needed, and maintain a strategic focus, while delivering high value to our customers.