Over the past few years, writers have peppered LinkedIn with posts about how businesses have transformed themselves by “failing fast and breaking things”. As a cynical Brit, I’ve always found that phrase slightly uncomfortable – particularly when you’re responsible for building software that is key to customers’ operational success. In the context of a media supply chain, breaking things means disruption to deadlines, unhappy customers, and ultimately, missed revenue.
However, as an underlying concept, it’s not entirely wrong. Real value comes from a process that allows development teams to learn quickly, respond to feedback, and continuously improve the product, delivering customers the features they need when they’re needed. For SDVI’s business, that’s where an agile approach with a regular, 2-week release cycle has proven invaluable. Rather than stockpiling features and fixes – and making customers wait for large, monolithic releases – we can deliver improvements steadily and predictably.
There’s also an operational advantage to an agile process that sometimes gets overlooked: smaller, more frequent, “rhythmical” releases are typically less disruptive than large, infrequent ones. Each release contains a manageable set of changes, making them easier to test and deploy safely, and you can better understand the impact they may have in a production environment. This approach also encourages a more agile, “DevOps” mindset and is a key driver in helping SDVI customers think of their media supply chain as a constantly-evolving entity, rather than a “one and done” deployment. The Rally platform sits at the center of a complex crossroads, between multiple stakeholders and a host of 3rd party tools – so operational resiliency really is key.
The result: our customers get the features and fixes they need quickly, and we maintain an open channel of communication between customers and the product team. This gives SDVI valuable insights from real-world media operations teams, and we’re able to respond quickly, delivering better functionality in a matter of weeks. This means that our platform evolves in a way that’s more closely aligned with how people actually work, generating carefully curated, useful features that work the way users do, not the way we tell them to.
Over time, that rhythm of listening, building, and releasing keeps SDVI and our customers aligned both tactically and strategically, and it ensures our platform supports the fast-moving demands of the modern media supply chain – without breaking things.
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Want to learn about how Rally can give your organization more agility, efficiency, and intelligence? Contact us to start the conversation.
