With the continued growth and transition to microservices it’s important to ensure modern, cloud-based solutions are at the forefront of your organization’s goals. In this multi-part series, we’ll look at all the different components and considerations that must be taken when modernizing to microservices. 

In this blog, we’ll look at creating space for innovation.

Reserve Capacity for Innovation

Value-driven delivery is a core pillar of agile practices. When organizations put extreme pressure on feature delivery, they typically have fewer opportunities to improve the mode of operation, reducing innovation and future efficiencies. Even the most up-to-date team will fall behind on best practices and technologies if not given the capacity to experiment and adjust. This is even more critical when the team is not yet at the innovation stage and still catching up from a legacy application.

One way to set aside capacity for improvements is by scheduling regular innovation sprints dedicated to non-delivery outcomes. One caveat is that this dedicated time is typically the first casualty to ensure that the delivery commitments are met. And that places the team in a dilemma: by internally scaling down the innovation efforts, its members can meet goals that the team committed to and be perceived as functioning well. In the long term, however, it decreases the team’s efficiency. When this happens infrequently, this is not an issue; if it happens regularly, it must be evaluated.

Another recommended approach is to not treat innovation and paying down technical debt as activities scheduled in their dedicated sprints. Instead, slightly reduce the team’s capacity to make innovation an ongoing activity. That way, it will not be perceived as a buffer at the end of a few sprints.

Previously, we looked at the importance of starting with the team, defining ownership, and process management and production capacity.

Ready to modernize your organization’s microservices? Oteemo is a leader in cloud-native application development. Learn more: https://oteemo.com/cloud-native-application-development/