This sounds common-sensical, but of course in practice it's almost impossibly hard to tell if any reasonable course of action really will make money, save money, or save time.
Will refactoring help? How about a continuous integration system? A better bug tracker?
In fact will fixing bugs make/save money/time at all? Customers seem to put up with them, and it's always easier/cheaper not to bother.
Will customers leave if our product is shit? Often they won't. Sometimes they will, because a competitor's product eats our lunch.
So what's the best course of action?
One problem with Agile - and all management fads - is exactly this lack of prescience. Future outcomes are unknowable. They can sometimes be estimated, but given a huge field of possible actions, making optimal choices is incredibly hard, and there's always a trade-off between long-term and short-term rewards.
The bigger problem is that corporations and businesses are very rarely primarily dedicated to making money. Internally, the true function of business processes is to highlight and maintain a political hierarchy which supports resource concentration for senior management and shareholders. Senior management and shareholders may know what's best for themselves, and that may well not be what's best for the long-term survival of the company - not even in terms of an apparently simple metric like "Does this make money?"
Because you can't answer that question without also asking "For whom?" And it's not that unusual for senior management to choose actions that protect their status over actions that increase income.
Will refactoring help? How about a continuous integration system? A better bug tracker?
In fact will fixing bugs make/save money/time at all? Customers seem to put up with them, and it's always easier/cheaper not to bother.
Will customers leave if our product is shit? Often they won't. Sometimes they will, because a competitor's product eats our lunch.
So what's the best course of action?
One problem with Agile - and all management fads - is exactly this lack of prescience. Future outcomes are unknowable. They can sometimes be estimated, but given a huge field of possible actions, making optimal choices is incredibly hard, and there's always a trade-off between long-term and short-term rewards.
The bigger problem is that corporations and businesses are very rarely primarily dedicated to making money. Internally, the true function of business processes is to highlight and maintain a political hierarchy which supports resource concentration for senior management and shareholders. Senior management and shareholders may know what's best for themselves, and that may well not be what's best for the long-term survival of the company - not even in terms of an apparently simple metric like "Does this make money?"
Because you can't answer that question without also asking "For whom?" And it's not that unusual for senior management to choose actions that protect their status over actions that increase income.