Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean (O'Reilly))

by Jez Humble

When organizations begin customizing, it’s hard to stop — but customizations of COTS packages are extremely expensive to build and maintain over time. Once you get beyond a certain amount of customization, the original vendor will often no longer support the package. Upgrading customized packages is incredibly painful, and it’s hard to make changes quickly and safely to a customized COTS system. Instead, make changes to your business processes to match what the COTS packages can do out of the box. Any time you choose a solution based on COTS, you’ll have a list of features to implement or bugs to fix. These should always be treated as the input to a business process change management activity. Business process changes are much cheaper and more effective than changing COTS packages to match an existing process. If you have gone down the road of customization, take the next major release of your COTS package as an opportunity to migrate to a new, uncustomized version of the package, as Telstra (Australia’s biggest telco) did when it moved from a heavily customized install of Remedy to a completely vanilla one.