First Mover Advantage : IT Consulting Perspective

In the business world, there is this thing you call the "First Mover Advantage". It is an interesting situation wherein you are first to enter in the given market segment. If the conditions are right, you can capture a large chunk of the market and succeed.

This happened, case in point with C2 of uncle John G. The bottled drinks market in the Philippines prior to C2's launch is dominated by sodas/carbonated drinks and only a paltry percentage belongs to the other types of products like zesto,etc. There was no other company that produced bottled green tea drinks at that time. And with the right situation created, the low price of C2, healthy appeal and and alternative factor for sodas, C2 made a killing. First mover Advantage.

In the IT consulting perspective, first mover or early mover in terms of business requirements and software specification is also a huge advantage. As business analysts, we are the first movers. We gather advanced information and cover all the grounds needed by the software engineers to build quality, usable and scalable software. In this business(IT Consulting) having a first mover advantage in a software development project is really important as we have learned during our sprint retrospective earlier today. We(the team) concluded that it is vital for us BA's to look 2 sprints ahead for every iteration. By doing this we can improve our productivity and our velocity in developing the software. By looking ahead(First Mover) we can gain the advantage, minimize the risks and succeed.

First, by looking ahead(business rules and implementation strategy) we can have an accurate estimate on how complex the functionality are. By having accurate estimates, we can make informed decisions and be more agile in terms of software development. Second, by having clear and defined business rules and software specification on hand, we can mitigate or minimize the uncertainty and manage the change brought by evolving business rules/proponents. Third, with complete and well defined information on hand, the engineers can work faster and have better output with less refactoring.