Jananas

I believe in building for the long term. In business, this means planning for 10, 25, or even 50 years into the future. Except that I work in an era where corporate focus is on short term gains. From shareholders, investment bankers, and a market focused on making a quick buck to executives and middle managers whose bonuses are based on revenue gains or costs cut today, the entire industry is saying ‘now, now, now’.

There are short term gains to be made. Those shouldn’t be ignored. But when they are the sole focus of a business, new products are rushed to market and short cuts are taken. In the back end, operational issues pile up and band aids are applied liberally to make things work (for now).

Each week cut from a testing plan, each product launched before its ready, each band aid applied means more work in the future. It means that five years down the road testing plans will be twice as long. Why? Because each band aid is a separate set of testing conditions. The more you apply, the more conditions you’ll have to test. The more opportunity there is for things to go wrong.

That’s just taking the basic systems into account. You can just as easily layer on a human factor. As staff turns over, the history and knowledge about each band aid (its reason for being implemented, how it worked, what it impacted) is more than likely lost – if only because they were applied in such a hurry that they weren’t properly documented. It was crunch time, there was pressure from above to get the fix in today, now, five minutes ago! Your operations department probably no sooner had this particular solution in place and there the next middle manager was breathing down their necks about why this other issue hadn’t been fixed.

The staff who put a fix into place might remember what they were thinking when they did it. Staff who came onboard later likely has no idea. And if they do, its because they put the time and effort into figuring it out – time and effort that could have been spent accomplishing something for the future instead of research past mistakes in order to be able to fix them.

Over time, this problem gains momentum and gets bigger. Until one day its big enough that it begins to hinder your ability to grow or to make revenue or to get to market.

So what do you do differently? Take a step back and think about how a decision today will show up in the system five or ten years from now. You take an extra week testing it out. You pay more attention to business requirements so that you don’t need (as many) band aids. And you know what? You listen to your operations staff. Give them time (and the space) to spend fixing the system every day so that its maintained.

I have a story about a company who had more product managers (the people coming up with the ideas and campaigns and work) than they did operations staff (the people actually implementing the work, testing it, and responsible for the overall state of the system). That isn’t feasible in the long term. And if you’re not around in the long term, then you aren’t really much of a business are you.

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