For those of you involved with pursuing a competitive digital transformation who are not familiar with the two terms “Continuous Delivery” and “Continuous Integration” there is a nice pot of gold that awaits you. These are two operational components that have spread like wildfire within the IT development community. If you plan to build upon digital assets that bring in newer business and higher levels of customer delight, you will want to read on. When integrated into a business strategy, these two components can give a powerful competitive edge in the market place. This is especially true when it created end-to-end with a digital management stack consisting of: Voice of Customer, Take-Away-Selling, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Integration, Applications, and DevOps. These are key ingredients in achieving agility with today's digital assets. Later on, you are going to be taken through an example that has opened eyes on how Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration transforms a sales team's ability to book new business. Something amazing, but yet not well known.
The Geek Speak
At a glance Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration (CD/CI) may appear to be an engineering approach. In fact, here are the popular definitions:
“Continuous delivery (CD) is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time. It aims at building, testing, and releasing software faster and more frequently.” – Wikipedia
“Continuous integration (CI) is a development practice that requires developers to integrate code into a shared repository several times a day. Each check-in is then verified by an automated build, allowing teams to detect problems early." -- ThoughtWorks
While these definitions are on point, they are not much more different than saying an Intel processor is nothing more than a grain of silica sand. In other words, we need to think bigger about what we can do with this for business development and digital assets. There are several way this can be used as a competitive edge in the market place. In fact, we are going to walk through a real life example in a moment. One that you could perhaps use today.
Don't step on that paradigm landmine
Yes, there are many organizations still on the learning curve of what CD/CI is all about. The popular mistake I have witnessed first hand with CI/CD in senior management, is the mere mention of it being associated with Agile delivery, which leads to: “Oh, this is just something that is a part of Agile development. I am already familiar with that.” Not so fast folks! Let's say if CD/CI was a toolbox, then Agile development would be merely just one tool in it. The CD/CI toolbox has many tools, with each tool bringing a different solution. With the right business mindset this can be a real strength for your business.
Your Opportunity...the one you will like.
The original book, "Continuous Delivery," by Jez Humble and David Farley states, “The most important problem that we face as software professionals is this: If somebody thinks of a good idea, how do we deliver it to users as quickly as possible?” They recognized that the traditional waterfall technique of software development is quite inadequate to get anywhere close to that goal. We need to show customers something now. Today. Not wait for you to come back three or four months later after your team waterfalls requirements, design, build, QA,...etc. With a CD/CI architecture in place, it is not uncommon to get something turned around in 24hrs for a sales team to present to the customer. Let's look at one example of how you can leverage CD/CI to further your customer account penetration.
EXAMPLE: How to use Take-Away-Selling with CD/CI
First, think about these two principles:
Principle 1: Curiosity - In general, when a customer is curious, they cannot be pushing away at the same time.
Principle 2: Want - The things that customers want the most, are the things they cannot easily have.
These two principles are the foundation of Take-Away-Selling (or sometimes called Take-Away-Closing) referred to by master marketer and sales trainer Dan Kennedy. When we show a software feature concept to a customer, and they become very curious about it, or they simply want it, do we just hand it over to them? No way. This is now our leverage. It now gives our sales team the ability to work the account. We have converted a customer from pushing away, to somebody that is reaching out for more. However, what did we just show the customer? It was a software “feature concept” as was stated earlier. It is running on a live sever. It was something developed, but not released to production. How did this come into being? Did somebody in the development team go rogue and break deployment protocol? No. The sales team is leveraging CD/CI with the development team. In Agile terms, they are doing demo sprints and performing a software build to show a customer. Their development team has a demo channel configured one of their servers (not a sandbox) for accessibility in the field. The sales team is not handing over full access to the customer. They are merely showing it. Something working. Something building curiosity in the customer's mind. Sales and development control it. It is not a production release. It did not go through QA or UAT (*gasp*, it could crash!). That is fine, because this demo code, although published, is not headed to the final production server immediately. This is merely a working concept or minimum value product (MVP) to build upon Principle 1 curiosity and Principle 2 want. The Development team is empowering their sales engine with their CD/CI technology stack:
Demo sprints (JIRA, Rally...etc.)
Version control (GIT, Sub-Version, TFS,...etc.)
Automated builds (Jenkins, Bamboo,...etc.)
Source code management (FishEye, Crucible, Sonar,...etc.)
Automated testing (Selenium,...etc.)
Automated repository management (Nexus, ANT, Maven,...etc)
Build scripting (Gradle, Groovy,...etc)
Application server (demo channel)
...etc.
...etc.
To keep the demo sprints moving with Principle 1 curiosity and Principle 2 want, the sales team comes back with more things (requirements) desired from the customer every couple days. The Development team continues to turn the crank on their CD/CI. At any point, a project for a final production version could be given the go ahead with a statement of work coming from the customer.
Finally...
In the previous example, this is just one particular way CD/CI can be accomplished to drive further into customer accounts. The example I have cited can particularly ring true for B2B sites where you have a specific customer looking for a specific feature. The CD/CI toolbox has much more to offer. Hopefully, this gives an idea of how this can work to drive new business.
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About The Author:
Brad Beiermann is a nationally recognized technology executive, author, and speaker with specialization in e-commerce, Agile, mobile, and start-ups such as Cimstrat.com, ProfessorString.com, HienoteDirectory.com, and others. He has considerable experience as a digital technology management consultant with Fortune 500 companies and the entrepreneurial community. He can be reached at bradb at cimstrat dot com.
