Victim of its own success

Wednesday this week, I believe four different people from different companies and departments told me that they are victim of their own successes. Coincident? Maybe, maybe not. It had me thinking over for few days now, why and how to avoid it?

I did some research and trying to understand what does it mean? Those companies have in common growth pain, being successful in business areas also lead to to debt in other area. Another common denominator is IT and cloud centric, as a part of problem or the solution.

Many companies suffer from unpredicted IT complexity. Systems and integrations tend to be function focused. Creative developers and system integrators can come up some really “wow or wtf” solutions. Some people believe documentation is the best solution. I believe focus on simplify the complicity and make system standard or KISS. Most of us are not that special snowflake and all those special variants won’t add up in the end. Imagine services are interconnected to each other to complete a business activity. Every one-off hack/deviant will increase fail rate for your next business changes.

IT landscape is like your home. It needs maintain and housekeeping. When your business is going strong, you might just purchases new furnitures/systems or maybe even a new house to satisfy your need. How ever your walls, water pipes and kitchen drain are like infrastructure services and should always work. You might drop your cloth / data here and there, but sooner or later, someone has to organize it. Finding the balance between housekeeping and growth is not always trivial. I'd rather do regular small/medium housekeeping than some serious renovation. This includes keep a right amount of tech debt. Risk assessment can help the organization to find how they are doing.

Last not least is people struggle over the process and position they are hired for. Not the mission and vision that they can contribute or capable. Bigger organizations usually have better processes but lack of personal responsibility to the matter. Smaller organizations are enthusiastic, but usually lack of efficient processes. Kaizen is one of many ways to improve that. Vision and mission need become measurable.

To avoid become victim of its own success. Keep it simple, balance growth and housekeeping, continues improvement over metrics, bring in people who want to be responsible for success, not the position. Be a hero of its own success!