New production methods under the business management of I.T. feature one dominant similarity: the pursuit of greater speed. Older methods prominently involving standards, pre-planning and optimization seem threatened with becoming obsolete; but the new world of speed, if successful, is no less careful, only differently so.

1. The Need For Speed
Making Fast, Better

2. Archestra notebooks compile and organize decades of in-the-field
empirical findings, to offer explanations of why things happened or
can happen in certain ways or to certain effects. The descriptions
are determined mainly from the perspective of strategy and
architecture, to comment on and navigate between the motives and
potentials that predetermine the decisions and shapes of activity as
discussed in the notes. All notebooks are subject to change.
©2016 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Research

3. Speed: Who Cares
What most terrifies businesses today is the way that the pace of change threatens to catch
them unprepared.
Change itself is not the problem; if it was both foreseeable and slow in coming, the
attentive organization would have adequate opportunity to manage for it.
Instead, the threat is from not being fast enough to recognize, adapt to, and exploit the
diversity of changes at the currently consistent high velocity of exposures to it. The
penalties: being left behind, locked out, or even shut down.
Consequently, as business values, the key notions of agility – including versatility, flexibility,
resilience, and feasibility – are all critically dependent on speed.
In order to act successfully with speed, the organization must be correctly built for speed.

4. Problem: right thing, but wrong way?
The relative value of speed is, of course, to get there sooner. In competition, the purpose
of speed is to capture opportunity before it morphs into other conditions not yet
accounted for.
“Opportunity Capture strategies”, including First mover, Innovation, Repositioning, and
Growth, effectively classify several types of competitive importance. As such, these are
goals that often are the drivers of the “need” for speed.
But speed is not a simple, positive cause.
Plenty of production organizations pursue and get speed from automation that results
from newer or more expert engineering of tools and processes.
But even with that, organizations can fail to get needed speed because they don’t prevent
or eliminate things that inhibit speed from being effectively realized and maintained.
Meanwhile, the danger is that rushing to get the right thing made or done in time for the
target moment can too easily mean making it badly, regardless of being a “justified” effort.

5. Problem: right time, but wrong thing?
In other words, the basic problem of speed is that it pits “product” relevance against “production”
reliability.
In producing business deliverables, timing hugely affects relevance, while predictability
predetermines the reliability (i.e., level of risk accepted) in meeting the timing.
In a market, relevance must be created as much as discovered, by using a proactively influential
roadmap to manage expectations about value to be delivered.
And reliability must be realized through a systemically capable method of producing for adequate
levels of the demand for the value expected to be supplied.
Speed typically distresses methods that are not already built for it. Distress introduces
abnormalities, which in turn reduces predictability, thus compromising reliability.
So instead, speed must be an effect of methods, as an underlying effort to synchronize production
execution. That effort must consider how methods address construction, constraints and
contingencies.

6. Speed is an outcome, not an input, of method
?
Production methodology dictates
the probability of “delivering” at all
on any expectation created by the
roadmap. Methodology is
responsible for meeting the
requirements defining the product.
NOW
LATER
“Timeliness” is a result of efforts
to assure that delivery is not
inhibited by poor efficiency or
poor planning (including
foresight). Inhibitors are most
often in the form of interruptions
and unpredicted changes of
priority that require attention.
Careless reactions to inhibitors
reduce the reliability of the
production.
The more time that passes
before production completion,
the more likely there will be
interruptions and priority
changes. Meanwhile, other
newer conditions, including the
eventual availability of viable
alternatives, can change the
previous level of need for the
intended deliverable.
Continuing and newer business events
The relevance of a deliverable is
based on the presumed need for
its utility. The “window of
opportunity” for being
competitively relevant is
preserved mainly by the
reliability of production to fit
within it. A deliverable on a
roadmap must represent the
likelihood that known types of
production can create types of
value that are relevant in the
indicated timeframe.

7. METHOD of production is responsible for
Availability vs. Encouraged Demand
Presumed
benefit is:
Customer demand is time and origin sensitive
Committed
Product Requirements are packaged for release
Production design must include latitude for other
production outputs, not only the target Intended
Business must use the value actually developed
A value framework shows logic of benefits:
i.e., why a difference is good
Allowed
Quality is a prerequisite of value but is specific to
the type of value
Risks to quality must be classified and
under policy control
Architectures constrain all business production Possible
Roadmaps are presented to forecast what people are “going to get”, while production Methods are tightly focused to give it to
them. As a pair they mean to be more productive than either can be alone. And when one is compromised, its relationship to the
other is compromised as well. Each can be compromised by inadequate attention to critical underlying issues. Finally, while the
roadmap may presume to direct production, the business must deal constructively with actual production results regardless of
their adherence to the roadmap. Predictability through production methods creates the reliability of the roadmap.
Validation
is:
ROADMAP of expectations should
account for Delivery vs. Desired Supply
Actual
Provided
Time lapse to value received
Prioritization and scopes of offers
Disposition of non-deliverables
(backlogs, loose ends, incompletes)
Actual
Supported
Delivery capacity and heterogeneity
Target users and user stories
Adoption vs. incumbents
Actual
Obtained
Test Scopes
Sourcing
©2016 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Research

8. Validation
is:
ROADMAP of expectations should account
for Delivery vs. Desired Supply
Business sense of “Speed” means… Potential speed brakes
Actual
Provided
Time lapse to value received Gained sooner not later User acceptance
Prioritization and scopes of offers First in line for attention Compensation
Disposition of non-deliverables
(backlogs, loose ends, incompletes)
Less wasted effort Completeness
Actual
Supported
Delivery capacity and heterogeneity Already in stock Approvals
Target users and user stories Meant for me Custom vs. standard
Adoption vs. incumbents Ready to use Change risks
Actual
Obtained
Test Scopes Pre-qualified Credibility
Sourcing Can be included now Costs
ROADMAPS of deliverables evolve; revisions can request greater speed from production, which generally means “produce
deliverables sooner”. But speed means different specific things to different aspects of the delivery effort. Each major deliverable
in a roadmap is subject to the underlying bottom-up realities of obtaining, supporting and providing a probability of the expected
item’s relevant value. The question is whether the higher-level value factors can be real and sustained “at speed” if the lower
level ones are not. For any aspect of speed not getting realized, there is a cause that should be identified and resolved, and
further prevented if possible, by a known, regularly usable management method.
©2016 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Research

9. METHODS of Production are responsible for managing the realization of actual receivables. Speed means that things may be
developed and delivered sooner, but Speed is not a method. When it does exist, it has influences that can be negative as well.
Because of that, methods that support more speed must proactively consider and manage its potential side effects, even as the
methods focus on creating the expected receivables.
The presumed
benefit is:
METHOD of production is responsible for
Availability vs. Encouraged Demand
Potential side effects of Speed raise these issues
Committed
Customer demand is time and origin sensitive
Does the new offering support the value of the next
one to follow?
Product Requirements are packaged for release Are there unavoidable critical omissions?
Intended
Production design must include latitude for other
production outputs, not only the target
What collateral effects are useful or harmful?
Business must use the value actually developed Is the actual receivable a “net benefit”?
Allowed
A value framework shows the logic of benefits:
i.e., why a difference is good
What accepted significance has been defined and
requested from new outputs?
Quality is a prerequisite of value but is specific to
the type of value
For the defined value intended, is the production
protected from deficiencies?
Risks to quality must be classified and
under policy control
What operational latitude is tolerated to get results?
Possible Architectures constrain all business production
Is the construction logically sustainable under the
expected pressure of ongoing usage?
©2016 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Research

10. DevOps
Complexity of
the reliability
Agile
Scope of
timed value
Open
Capacity of
valued
resources
Lean
Efficiency of
effort at scope
Design
Relevance of
the features
Architecture
Logic of the
construction
(Feasibility)
Systemic production
Like cost and quality, speed is an
outcome of practices.
Most practices directly affect, and/or
are affected by, one or more other
practices.
Methodical practices raise the
accountability of the practice
responsibilities for business value.
Methods that prevent waste of
available time, and avoid unplanned
necessary time, directly increase the
probability of realizing speed.
Analytic intelligence identifies
optimal procedures that encode
high-benefit practices in models and
automation that actually generate
significant outputs faster.
Methods should synchronize
practices, not silo them. In synch, the
available total throughput is speed.
©2016 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Research

11. ©2016 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Research
www.archestra.com
mryder@archestra.com