Cold Butter IT Solutions

June 9, 2014 1 By Eric Shanks

The other day I was making a grilled cheese sandwich for my son and it got me thinking. The process of making one of these delicious morsels was similar to some of the IT solutions that I had worked with in the past. Let me explain.

First and foremost, lets define the objective. The goal was to have a tasty grilled cheese sandwich for lunch. This is not a difficult process and the steps are also fairly straight forward.

Ok, I’ve got my task list ready to go, lets move forward with the service delivery of this cheesy bread goody. I grab the butter out of the fridge and a couple of slices of fresh bread from the pantry. I go to spread the butter on the bread and find that my relatively straight forward task list just got a bit more challenging. You see the butter is very cold so it doesn’t spread easily, and since the bread is fresh, it tears easily.

Needless to say the first attempt at deploying this toasted cheese was a failure and I needed to go back to the drawing board. Lets face it, if my son has asked me to provide him with Grilled Cheese as a Service (GCaaS) he doesn’t want a poorly constructed product. So, this time I take my time and take smaller chucks of butter and able to spread the butter more evenly across the bread without tearing it, but will admit that I had to take extra time and be very careful with it as I’m going through the deployment process.

I finally finished the sandwich and my son seems satisfied with the end result so everyone is happy, but perhaps the next time I build a grilled cheese sandwich I’ll wait for the butter to warm up a little bit before I go through with the service delivery.

Can you see how this relates to IT solutions? How many times have you tried to deploy a solution that may work, and the customer may be happy with it in the end, but you had to massage the product into production? It’s my belief that if there are many complicated steps that must be done in a specific order and have many dependencies, and the installers aren’t managing this process, then the product might not be fully ready to be deployed.

A good solution should be easily deployed without a lot of manual effort from the person installing it. If this isn’t the case then the results of that product may be inconsistent and ultimately hurt the reputation of the product itself.