The Gap of Slackness

Figure 3.9 shows the Gap of Slackness. The vertical axis represents the typical challenges for product vendors. These include, for example, more complexity, less time to market, reduced costs, and perfect quality. You could certainly list more of them for your domain:

Figure 3.9: The Gap of Slackness

The product curve along the time axis always increases and reflects the steadily increasing demand for improvements. Globalization and the accompanying global dynamics change the linear slope of the curve to an exponential slope. More competitors with different backgrounds are making the markets tougher for vendors (see Globalization).

We need methods and tools to develop those products, and they must also improve over time. The challenging factors are slightly different from the factors for products. For simplicity, we borrow the same axis from the products for the methods and tools. The methods and tools curve is a little bit below the product curve. The distance...