Two Steps

I often wonder as to what an aspiring practice within an organization should do first. Create a sales storm or be ready with the delivery confidence. This is especially true when you are trying to consider delivering value over a long haul.

With little experience that I have I must confess that in a service industry, especially in the IT industry, the delivery capabilities must be two steps ahead of the sales pipeline. It’s quite challenging to argue this point in an organization that tends to think of improving top-line and bottom-line quarter over quarter. The long term fiber of the organization is always sacrificed to achieve short term victory. This causes an unending struggle of forming a solid delivery organization to cater to any sales forecast.

While it’s important for the sales engine to crank to create the buzz in the market it’s doubly important to have a robust delivery organization to meet the heightened expectations. Most of the times this means an explicit investment in people and process and demonstrated ability to carry this investment for a certain period of time. My two (steps) cents - May be that’s the difference between a successful organizations and the rest.

Cytokinesis

A few days back I was reading with my daughter about human cells. As we all know human cells divide themselves and keeps on increasing their number. However, I was amazed to find the precision and the planning from mother nature that goes into a cell division.

A human liver cell for example, divides itself in around 22 hours.

-The first stage is called interphase that takes around 21 hours. During this phase the cell grows (9 hours), then copies the DNA (10 hours) and finally prepares for the division (2 hours)
-The second stage is the Mitosis that takes 1 hour during which the cell divides.
-The third stage is the Cytokinesis that completes the cell division

I was wondering when nature takes so much time to plan before executing the plan (in this case around 21 hours to plan and 1 hour to execute), why we cannot take a lesson and provide the importance to plan during the typical software project development. Just imagine billions of cells in the human body continuously takes around 96% of the time in planning and 4% time in executing the plan with practically zero error rate.

Most of the time the important stakeholders in a project spends exactly the opposite % of time in planning and executing the project as compared to mother nature. May be that's the answer to more than 96% failed project in terms of meeting their original needs