How to Fix Software Product Delivery
The Way I Approach Software Delivery When There Are Signs of Issues
I've yet to see a company that is entirely happy with its pace of software delivery. In scaled organizations, delivery bottlenecks often emerge, slowing down releases, frustrating teams, and impacting business outcomes. Many companies attempt quick fixes—throwing more resources at the problem, increasing deadlines, or tweaking processes—but often, these do not address the root cause of delivery issues.
A more structured approach is needed to diagnose problems in software delivery. One of the most comprehensive studies on this topic comes from Delft University, conducted for ING. Their research identifies key factors influencing on-time delivery in large-scale Agile software development. In this article, I'll walk through how I approach analyzing delivery issues in scaled product and software development organizations, using insights from this research and my own experience.
Analyze First: Identifying Root Causes of Delivery Issues
Before jumping to solutions, it's critical to analyze the root causes of delivery slowdowns. My approach involves a multi-dimensional analysis based on structured data collection, conversations, and self-assessments.
The Dimensions of Root Cause Analysis
From my experience, the most effective root cause analysis covers a wide range of factors. The Delft University study categorizes these into five key dimensions:
- Organizational Factors – Alignment, executive support, and company-wide priorities.
- Process Factors – Agile maturity, workflow efficiency, and backlog management.
- Project Factors – Dependencies, complexity, and security requirements.
- People Factors – Team stability, experience, and communication effectiveness.
- Technical Factors – Code quality, test automation, and deployment pipeline robustness.
Each of these dimensions can significantly impact delivery timelines, and analyzing them holistically provides a clearer picture of what is slowing down releases.
How to Gather Insights
To conduct a root cause analysis effectively, I typically use a combination of methods:
- Surveys – Collecting structured responses from engineers, product managers, and other stakeholders.
- One-on-One Conversations – Speaking directly with team members to understand the practical challenges they face.
- Self-Assessments – Encouraging teams to score themselves across key delivery criteria.
- Data Analysis – Reviewing historical delivery performance, cycle times, and dependency graphs.
Scoring and Benchmarking
Each of these criteria is evaluated using a scoring system. This provides an objective way to compare different teams, projects, and areas of improvement. It also helps identify systemic issues rather than treating every delivery problem as an isolated case.
Next Steps: Prioritizing and Addressing the Root Causes
Once you’ve identified the key bottlenecks, the next step is to prioritize and address them systematically. In my next post, I’ll discuss how to design interventions that lead to sustained improvements in software and product delivery performance.
By taking a data-driven and structured approach, organizations can move beyond gut feelings and knee-jerk reactions, creating a more predictable and efficient software delivery process.
Full criteria catalog
| Organization | Organizational alignment across departments |
|---|---|
| Dealing with geographic distribution | |
| Organizational politics | |
| Executive support | |
| Stability of the organization | |
| Process | Refinement of requirements |
| Agile Maturity | |
| Regular Software delivery | |
| Management of work in progress | |
| User / customer involvement | |
| Project | Project newness |
| Project Size | |
| Task dependencies | |
| Project security or regulatory constraints | |
| People | Communication |
| Team familiarity | |
| Team commitment | |
| Team stability | |
| Skills and knowledge | |
| Technical | Infrastructure reliability |
| Code documentation | |
| Technical dependencies | |
| Bug or incident handling | |
| Code quality | |
| Testing |
Reference
This article is based on the research conducted by Delft University for ING:
Kula, E., Greuter, E., van Deursen, A., & Gousios, G. (2022). Factors Affecting On-Time Delivery in Large-Scale Agile Software Development. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 48(9), 3573-3586. DOI: 10.1109/TSE.2021.3101192