What s Next?

What's Next?

In the final analysis, DFTS technology is about building and honing your competitive capability. This gets done only when committed and competent leadership drives it relentlessly and passionately. DFTS technology, when learned, implemented, and internalized effectively into your corporate genes, creates a formidable competitive advantage. The essence of DFTS lies in its framework of organization-wide learning. The significance of rigorous learning can hardly be overstated. As Peter Senge emphasized in his remarkable work The Fifth Discipline, "the organizations that will truly excel in the future will be the organizations that discover how to tap people's commitment and capacity to learn at all levels."^[17]

The next step in the DFTS process is to expand it further into all subsequent software development projects. Every new development must benefit from the learning in previous projects. This should roll on a continual basis. The learning and enrichment that come from ongoing review, appraisal, and learning about the DFTS deployment must become a way of life. These two suites of activitiesexpansion and continual appraisal and enrichmentmust be institutionalized. Along the way you will develop new tools and techniques or come up with a new delivery model or breakthrough software technology, but all effective processes will entail constancy of customer-centricity and continual learning and enrichment. The real learning starts not by reading this book, but by launching the initiative. As Jack Welch says, "(we) launch and learn."^[18]