Organisational anchoring in the company
Commissioning predevelopment
One approach I have seen at one of our customers in the machine construction sector resembles "two-speed IT“. The responsibility for the IoT or digitalisation project moves to the predevelopment stage, with the aim of rapid implementation.
This approach worked quite well, especially in the beginning: the project gained momentum in a short time, the team developed its own ideas for finding solutions, and the first results were delivered quickly. In the medium term, however, there were downsides to this approach: non-functional requirements were neglected (which had a strong impact on the architecture), operational issues were omitted (which required extensive rework), back-end IT systems were not integrated (which required additional budget and caused the deadline to be exceeded significantly). Predevelopment went its own way, which undermined orderly product development, making it difficult to integrate the two aspects.
But not everything was bad in this example. In my view, the procedure is in fact well suited to quickly verifying initial ideas and to building an initial proof of concept (PoC). In the next phase, however, customers and all other stakeholders should be involved at an early stage in order to counteract the project risks identified above.