Products, Processes, People and Technology

"Design for Change" refers to a collection of concepts, methods, processes and technologies focused on one overriding fact:

Everything is bound to change.

This must be understood at a very fundamental level and seen as an essential understanding for everyone on the problem solving team. Everything about the problem at hand being solved will change. The customer needs, the technology supporting the solution, the regulatory environment, the user expectations -- all of these things will change in ways that cannot be anticipated (and many that can). Since these changes cannot be known in advance you have to plan for building the ability to adapt into the problem solution. Timely, quality, reasonably priced adaptation must be built into every solution from the start.

This implies another, corollary concept:

The first requirement of every requirements document, whether it's written down or not, is:

All other requirements are subject to change.

The result of this argument is that flexibility and adaptability are the core values for a problem solving organization and key attributes when evaluating a technology or a design.

People often claim building in this much flexibility is fine for "other" projects but the costs in terms of money and time (another word for money) are just too great on our project. We just need to get it done. We will do these fancy things next time.

The problem with this argument is that every product I have ever seen taken to market is built several times before it is ever released. The creation of the first version may be slowed a bit by considering and building in all of this flexibility. But if what you actually release is the second (or third or fourth) iteration of a product, and it almost always is, then this minor extra effort is paid back many fold in the creation of the first release of the solution you are building.

Flexibility cannot be put into a product after the fact. It has to be a part of the conceptual design of any non-trivial solution. It has to be a core value or it will just be an afterthought, if that.