How do you balance Enterprise Software Maintenance and Support with innovation and new development?

Assessing the current state of your enterprise software involves three main aspects: 1. Technical Quality: - Measure defect rates and code coverage. - Evaluate technical debt. 2. Business Value: - Analyze business outcomes and usage statistics. - Assess alignment with business goals. 3. Customer Satisfaction: - Collect feedback through surveys and direct customer input. - Identify gaps and areas for improvement based on customer expectations. By using these metrics and tools, you can pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of your software, uncover risks and opportunities for enhancement, and better understand customer needs and expectations.

Prioritizing your backlog involves aligning tasks with strategic goals, customer needs, and stakeholder expectations. Key steps include: 1. Frameworks and Methods: - Use frameworks like value versus effort, MoSCoW, RICE, or Kano. - Evaluate each task based on urgency, impact, and dependencies. 2. Focus on High-Value Tasks: - Prioritize tasks that offer the most significant business value and customer satisfaction. - Avoid spending time on low-priority or irrelevant tasks. By prioritizing effectively, you ensure that your team focuses on tasks that drive the most value and align with overall strategic objectives.

Adopting CI/CD may not be easy when the estate is replete with COTS products of various sizes and forms. This is why many institutions who have been around for more than 15-20 years are still finding it difficult to realize the wonderland of CI/CD

Adopting agile and DevOps practices involves streamlining your software delivery process through collaboration, automation, feedback, and continuous improvement. Key points include: 1. Agile Practices: - Implement Scrum, Kanban, sprints, and user stories to manage workflows. 2. DevOps Practices: - Use test automation, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and monitoring to enhance efficiency and quality. 3. Benefits: - Reduce maintenance overhead. - Accelerate innovation cycles. - Respond faster to changing requirements. By adopting these practices, you can improve the speed, quality, and efficiency of your software delivery.

Allocating your resources between maintenance and innovation involves balancing team size, skill set, and workload. Key points include: 1. Models and Methods: - Use models like the 80/20 rule, core/edge model, innovation funnel, or three horizons model. 2. Considerations: - Assess trade-offs, risks, and benefits of each allocation option. 3. Goals: - Optimize productivity, performance, and profitability. By effectively allocating resources, you ensure a balance between maintaining existing systems and driving innovation, ultimately enhancing your software's value and effectiveness.

Communicating your value to stakeholders involves demonstrating how your maintenance and innovation efforts contribute to organizational success. Key points include: 1. Channels and Formats: - Use reports, dashboards, demos, newsletters, and blogs. 2. Communication Style: - Employ clear, concise, and compelling language. 3. Goals: - Build trust, credibility, and support. By effectively communicating your value, you can highlight the impact of your efforts, fostering stakeholder trust and gaining support for your software initiatives.

Build purpose and value in each activity with your team, transparent and integrative communication where each collaborator knows their role, the value of their demands and what the positive effect of their deliveries will be. People who work with purpose do much more than you imagine.

Depending on the size of the institution, one may choose to buy an off the shelf solution or build a custom software to meet the business need. The decision to enhance an existing software or build/buy a new solution will be based on various factors like stability of existing software, amount of customization needed etc. If you are custom building an application, moving to micro services based architecture can help a lot to balance stability with new releases.