Anyone who has lived through a banking change cycle knows the joke: the smaller the change, the longer it takes.
The anatomy of a "small" change
- Policy authoring: 2 days.
- Translation to a technical spec: 1 week.
- Engineering implementation: 2 weeks.
- Test environment scheduling: 3 weeks.
- Regression testing: 2 weeks.
- Deployment window: 1 week.
What you actually save by removing the translation
It is not the engineering time. It is the calendar time. Removing one layer of translation routinely cuts the whole cycle in half — sometimes more.