Dealing with external departments when changing to continous delivery / smaller feature scope

Question

I'm an engineer on a small engineering team at a small business-to-business company. We're looking to transition from a "big bang" release model to a more iterative release style with smaller changes going out in more frequent batches.

There is some concern that this could have a negative impact on other departments such as Customer Support, Sales, and Marketing because it would require more frequent updates to their documentation etc.

How can we make sure that a more iterative development process does not harm (or maybe helps) departments such as Customer Support, Sales, and Marketing?

Answer 1

By making sure you have cross functional teams. If there are sales or marketing actions that need to happen before release, then you need representatives on the team to make sure they happen on the right cadence.

Make a list of all the things that need to occur in order to release a feature. This is your “definition of done”. Do you have all the people and skills on the team to get them all done? If you don’t, you really need to work to bring those skills on board.

This is in direct opposition to how companies are traditionally organized, but it really is easier to ship product increments sooner if you can organize teams around products instead of by role function. The hierarchy doesn’t have to change, just what makes up a team.