I’m David Knott. I’ve been working in enterprise technology for over forty years and I’m still learning. This blog is based on mistakes, failures, lessons and some things I find interesting:
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What are you optimising for?
Recently, one of the teams I am lucky to work with showed me a tool they had built to help plan and manage Cloud adoption. It captured system data, project data, dependencies between applications and platform capabilities, and the roadmap for launch and enablement of those capabilities. Such a tool is helpful for any Cloud adoption programme, but what really stuck with me was the goal that the team had set for themselves.
The team wanted to answer two questions. First, what were they optimising for? And, second, what would they do differently depending on the answer to the first question? If they were optimising for cost, then one set of dependencies mattered more than another set. If they were optimising for agility, then they would give one set of tasks more priority than another set. If they were optimising for risk, then they would build their plan this way rather than that way.