By Jason English
Since COVID-19 took hold as a global pandemic, we have seen a lot of focus in the United States on improving our healthcare supply chain, by eliminating barriers to coordination among the many parties needed to source, build, transport and sell pharmaceuticals and equipment that medical professionals need.
There’s no simple fix available here. Supplier relationships must be renegotiated or replaced, and existing facilities repurposed or built over from scratch, at great cost. Money and expertise may not be readily available to coordinate the changes needed.
In the software industry, we tend to think of constraints in project management terms: with productivity or features delivered, as governed by a budget function of time and resources, minus failures. Feed plans and component ‘designs and materials’ in one end of the software factory, and depending on how many skilled developers and testers are working together over time, excellent software ‘products’ roll out the other end.
Valuable innovation has never been achieved by treating the development shop like such a factory. This is why Agile methodologies were born, and the DevOps movement later took hold, to enable greater collaboration and buy-in, higher levels of customer-centricity and quality, and an automation mindset that accelerates delivery.
