Growth is good, right?
Posted on March 12, 2007
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When delivering customer-facing software there is always a tradeoff between business drivers such as time to market, the product’s feature set, etc. and basic software properties such as its quality and integrity. Customers make demands on IT that far exceeds its capacity to deliver in a timely fashion and still preserve the internal quality of its software. Either the IT department pushes back or the software starts to rot from within. This is never going to change and as software professionals we know and accept code rot must be continually addressed. That is why software engineering continues to innovate and be creative in the ways it builds and ships customer products.
Now, consider a service based company. A key indicator for success is growth. Growth is good. So let’s grow – FAST! However, a company that is growing at a prolific rate is really hurting inside. Anyone who tells you otherwise is being a little careful with the truth.
As part of a growing company you plan for tomorrow but things are changing so quickly. It’s like basic 101 for wannabe duck hunters - don’t shoot the duck, shoot where you think the duck will be, or you’ll miss! So back to growing our empire… get me new software licences, damn these existing licenses need to be renewed, our servers need more memory, more hard disk space, the datacentre must expand, scotty we need more power, double the bandwidth, bigger desktop machines, new phones (with flashy lights), more office space, crap we’ve just lost another meeting room, bigger tables, dear office manager more cups, get me more chairs, not enough stationnary, ahhhh….we’re growing! It’s all good.
Constant growth, brings constant change. The internal structure of the company is in flux. In fact, for a company that is growing at pace, the view on the inside is not all good news. However, so long as the company acknowledges and addresses these needs upfront and continually adapts, a fluid working environment is a challenge, not a hinderance.
I approach growth like any other engineerng problem, inspect and adapt, based upon the facts you have to hand. And do it a frequently as possible, or it will become a problem…
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