5 Effects of Shippable Product Every 30 Days

“What do you think the impact will be on an organization of having a potentially shippable product increment at least every 30 days?”

This is one of the hardest feats to accomplish, but a critical component in highly successful Scrum.

Here are my top 5 advantages of a Shippable Product Every Month:

1. Customer/ stakeholder engagement -By demonstrating that the team can be responsive to their needs you will find that your stakeholders will become more engaged because the process becomes more rewarding for them. If you do not deliver something for 6 months they will lose interest.
2. Team satisfaction/ accomplishment – The team morale will increase and this will increase productivity as the team gets validation that they are delivering value to the organization on a frequent basis.
3. Predictability – If all tasks are fully completed on a monthly basis this allows for better predictability as everything is complete compared to a process where there are x number of cleanup tasks to be done some months later. Or x number of defects remain open with an inaccurate estimate of when they will be completed.
4. Remove the notion of the development team as a bottleneck – In many organizations the software development team is viewed as the bottleneck. After requirements are defined the project sits in development for months. By increasing the “flow” through development they will move the bottleneck to somewhere else in the organization. Then attention can focus on improving the efficiency in that department.
5. Quicker ROI – If you can deliver 1/6th the project in the first month and get it in production you are accelerating the return on investment and shortening the payback period.