What are the genuinely difficult aspects of transforming your software function?

It seems everybody intuitively understands what brings speed and short time to market, and how that in turn automatically allows for better innovation. Also people seem to get that in the current stale market, with fast enough delivery you could even forego smarts and just brute force innovation launching new concepts and tweaks until profits go up and then declare a win as if you knew what you were doing that whole time. Secretly people also know that although you could rinse and repeat doing the naïve approach until retirement, optionally you could exert minimum effort and measure a bit better so that you know what you are doing so that you can focus your efforts.

So why aren’t everyone moving on this?

When you get a bunch of people in the same organisation you want to achieve some economies of scale and solve common problems once rather than once per team.

This means you delegate some functions into separate teams. Undoing this, or at least mitigating this, is difficult politically. Some people – with some cause – fear for their jobs when reorgs happen.

Sudden unexpected cost runaway is the biggest recurring nightmare of middle managers. Controls are therefore in place to prevent developer cloud spend to balloon.

Taken together however, this means teams are prevented from innovating independently as they cannot construct the virtual infrastructure as needed because of cost not being authorised, and they cannot play with new pieces of virtual infrastructure because they haven’t been approved by the central tech authority yet.