When I started my IT Career I heard this joke about developers…,

…A team of IT experts/developers are sitting together in a room bragging to each other about their skills.  Then the phone rings.  The head developer picks up the phone and talks for a few minutes.  Then hangs up the phone and says to the group, “That was the boss; he has a new software project for us.  You guys start coding; I’ll run upstairs to see what he wants.”

At least I thought it was a joke.  Too often working with software development teams, IT experts and even for managers this is the exact scenario I run into over and over again.  There’s this idea that we need to start getting something done before we know where we are at or where we are going.  What happens a year later we hear the lament,

“If I knew now what I knew then, I would have done it completely differently, but now it’s too late.”

Long before there was a PMP certification, Agile or Scrum we were developing strategies for avoiding these types of “cart before the horse” problems.  I’ve found that the first successful step is a strategic Assessment.  I outline this in my planning process on my site.

I like to think of a project like a walk through a dark crowded forest.  (I probably read the Hobbit at too young and age and it has affected how I think about these things.) If you had a map of the forest you would need to identify two things before you find a path.  You must understand “Where you are at” and “Where you want to go”.  The strategic assessment identifies where you are at today.

I’ve noticed that lots of developers prefer to start over from scratch.  Especially when working on a website.  I know that building a Network for the first time is similar for the infrastructure expert.  I think this is because when there is nothing, we know where we are at today.  We are at ground zero.  We have to build something from scratch.  As the business grows and the network grows, networks become convoluted.  So without a good change control process, most IT groups have no idea where they are starting from.   When looking at a map, it’s obvious that in order to create a path from point A to point B, you must know where point A is.  Yet IT experts seldom know where Point A is.  So when trying to get to Point B, they miss steps.  These steps become problems that haunt the IT department for years.  Unfortunately if the IT department has no idea where they are at today, they have to admit this to management.  Admitting this to anyone means admitting to fallibility in the minds of some IT experts.  Instead these experts start “coding” like our experts in the joke.  This gives the impression that they know what they are doing.

Just as important as knowing where you are going on a project is knowing where you are starting from.  “Winging it” means that you really don’t know where you are starting from.  For the client this is going to be wasteful of the time and resources while the IT team tries to figure out where they are going.  The strategic assessment becomes the tool for identifying where you are at today.  Consultants like me, work with IT departments who have never done a strategic assessment.  It often puts us at odds with IT departments.  I would recommend to any IT expert, to develop an IT assessment process.  This way when the IT consultant is brought in, it’s only a verification that you do know where you are at

In any network architecture project there is a triple constraint: Scope, Time and resources.   If a project is failing then probably one or more of these three variables are out of balance.   Saving a project means putting all three variables in some type of balance.  It’s ironic that as a project fails more and more energy is put into the wrong variable.  Almost like pumping water into the hold of a sinking ship.  How many project leaders are sinking their project by focusing on only one of the three variables?

I’ve noticed that the technologies that are profitable for the company also reduce the cost of doing business.  These technologies change the balance between these variable in a positive way.   For example: reducing production (time) always affects either scope or resources.   Ford realized that by focusing resources (money and employee time) on the assembly line and reducing scope (painting the Model-t “… any color as long as it was black”) he could increase the number of cars built each minute.  Through a combination of technology and business process the assembly line increased the number of cars built per hour at a cost that did not significantly increase the cost to produce each car.  At that time the only limit on company profitability was the number of cars that could be produced.

All technological innovation is like this.  Lewis and Clark took 13 months to walk across the country.  Add technology, like rail lines and locomotives and time is shortened.  Why walk when there are trains?  Who would ride a train, when planes are faster and more comfortable?  An interesting thing to notice is that as a technology matures it also becomes more efficient.  In the Lewis and Clark example, a new technology ended the need for walking and cut down the trip by more than half.   Now new transportation technology has replaced trains and changes travel time from months to hours.     Profitable technologies allow the exploitation of time, scope and/or resources. 

Triple Constraint Variables

Time: Time is a measurement of “Now” versus when the project is to be completed.  Milestones are associated with a measurement of time between now and completion.  Each milestone is associated with the tasks that make up the project.  The timing is successful when the tasks are completed at the predicted milestone.

Scope: Scope is associated with what is to be accomplished.  What will be accomplished is broken down into smaller and smaller increments called tasks.  Tasks have a predictable order, priority and milestone associated with them.  Successful tasks are matched with time milestones. 

Resources: Resources boil down to costs.  What will it cost to have a task completed?  This is complicated by time.  It’s not enough to calculate the cost of performing the task, but completing the task on time.  Success occurs when the actual cost associated with the task matches the predicted cost and time associated with that task.

The changing of any one variable will always affect the other two.  Increase the timing of the project and either scope can increase or the cost of resources can decrease.  Increase resources and either time can be reduced or scope can be increased.  Finally increase scope and either time must increase or resources must increase.  The company makes money when technology is architected such that the cost of using the technology has a positive reduction in time or resources. 

Henry ford spent more resources on assembly line technology and men to run the assembly line.  Yet In the process reduced costs and produced more automobiles.  The problem is that the other competitors soon recognized that they needed assembly lines to compete.  Soon the competitive advantage was lost.  Unless Ford built further competitive advantages, before his competitors caught up, Ford would fall behind.  In Ford’s day the assembly line was far less efficient than it is today.   100 years later, when the production lines run at full speed they are efficient, but produce far more product than can ever be sold.  Spending money to make assembly lines faster will no longer improve the bottom line for individual car manufacturers.

Today technology is the same way.  For our clients to be more competitive means these advantages must be architected into the design.  The purpose of change is to save the company money or make the company more productive.   Replacing technology with more efficient technology, just isn’t enough anymore.  If we look at network architecture now we are seeing waves of technology bringing in new change.  Yet most of those waves are replacing less efficient systems that do the same thing.  As an Example: When designing a network that includes cell phone access is that really new technology?  How much different is cell phone access to a network from an analog modem connections 40 years ago?  The only difference is now we can do in minutes what may have taken hours before.  True innovation doesn’t mean making the assembly line faster.  It means replacing the need for an assembly line.  Until we can do that, we need to remember that change affects the triple constraint in either positive or negative ways.

When evaluating new technologies ask the question, which variables will change?  Time, scope or resources…