#160 – The Alignment Trap

In the article Avoiding the Alignment Trap in IT published in the MIT Sloan Management Review back in 2007, the authors surveyed more than 500 business and technology executives from the whole world. In it, they showed that companies that were highly aligned with the business needs, but didn’t prioritize enabler-like work to become effective, on average, spent 13% more on IT and had a 14% lower than average growth rate over three years.

Despite being written 15 years ago, the points made are still valid today; invest in building-in quality in your features or explicitly have enablers for the foundational, NFR-oriented, architectural or Technical Debt-related work—so your product doesn’t end up looking like the ship on the following page.