Funding products, not projects
In Chapter 1, Architecting for Innovation, we identified that traditional budgeting and planning practices increase lead times. These practices aim to control risk, but in reality, they increase the risk of delivering the wrong solution or delivering too late to be effective. The problem is that they focus on projects instead of products. They assume that we can define all the requirements upfront and provide realistic estimates. But we can’t.
TIP
Have a look at these books for more information: https://www.infoq.com/minibooks/noprojects-value-culture and https://www.amazon.com/Delicate-Art-Bureaucracy-Transformation-Wrestler-ebook/dp/B086XM4WCK.
The bottom line is that we need to know how much money we are going to spend. Businesses need predictable cash flow. And we need to show that we are producing value and that the business is getting its money’s worth. But it is hard to justify large multi-year budgets when...