Every small business, entrepreneur, startup, or even big organization is wary of taking risks especially when you have to plunge headway into it. Progressive delivery has, however, come to the rescue as the new way, the best way.
Though progressive delivery was designed for software delivery by leveraging the validation stage to provide feedback through beta testing or early access programs, the lessons learned can also be applied to wholesome marketing. Progressive delivery could be viewed as another form of experiential marketing albeit with reforms.
While experiential marketing campaign is targeted at the potential customer for the purpose of leads conversion, progressive delivery is targeted at quality assurance for the purpose of reducing loss thereby, increasing ROI just the same way experiential marketing does. Since the cycle will start at the validation stage, you may be limited to just minor changes but you will be maximizing customers’ values at the end.
The satisfaction you derive from applying the progressive delivery model comes by the way of getting your desired feedback and incorporating that into making minor course corrections on your journey towards the big picture.
By incorporating the customers into your business you stand out to gain comprehensive customers’ views on information they give you, enabling you to craft your marketing and sales incentives based on their specific needs, pain points, and desires. You also gain their trust and loyalty.
You will succeed in making them believe they are essential to the well being of the business. They end up as brand ambassadors as well as voluntary influencers without you expending funds in that direction.
Progressive Delivery is a transformative cultural shift that ensures your team spends more time in the creation of value rather than deploying their time to manage risk. You are able to push changes and updates out as soon as they are ready instead of compiling them with the aim to make corrections in your next product release.
According to Forbes, 50% of technology projects need reworking by the time they’re finished. If you have to wait until you have finished a project before finding out you need to make corrections, you may have ended up wasting large resources.
The following three advantages bring to the front burner why progressive delivery is a new way, the best way.
1. Planning for and accommodating Failure
Business comes with its good and bad moments and as such, you should always be ready for failures. What, however, distinguishes a successful businessman from a novice, is the ability to plan for and accommodate failures.
A progressive delivery model provides you an additional level of control through the use of feature flags. This could be a very necessary tool for businesses if you take into consideration the report of the Project Management Institute which says that 9.9% of every dollar invested is wasted due to poor project planning, also, the Standish Group Chaos Report reveals that only 29% of IT projects end up in success while 19% fail woefully.
This is an indicator of the colossal amount of resources that businesses lose and a pointer to why there should be very serious planning, with strong efforts to accommodate these levels of failures. The only feasible thing to do is to input a correctional strategy that does not have to wait until the very end.
You must not wait to discover the problems very late in the implementation phase, you don’t have to lose all that money, time, and effort.
2. Good opportunity for getting feedback
One good thing you get from progressive delivery is the opportunity to carry out this kind of sampling among a small group and this is known as canary tests. You are then able to make the necessary and relevant improvements based on the feedback you have gathered from these small groups before rolling changes out to everyone.
The feedback you get also affords you the opportunity to quality-control new features in a production environment.
3. Releasing features to users on a just-in-time basis
A progressive delivery model is a nice means for marketing and sales to release features on a just-in-time (JIT) basis. The JIT strategy ensures that businesses increase efficiency and prevents wastage due to the production of defective products since the output at every stage of production is inspected before passing on to the next stage.
You are also saved from unnecessary expenses as materials are purchased and goods produced only as required, rather than to build up stocks for future use. You won’t be needing space for holding products and materials.
This results in less time wasted waiting for large amounts of materials and products. The fact that you are only producing small lots of product only as required, demands a faster set up of machinery, resulting in more efficiency and reduced costs.
With progressive delivery and JIT, you end up having higher quality raw materials and finished products.
