RE: standards
- From: "Mark W. Farnham" <mwf@xxxxxxxx>
- To: <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2004 11:24:13 -0400
Short and sweet: Realize and stop doing the stupidest things you are doing
(unless you're just having too much fun doing them.)
More long winded: The marginal improvement for an organization is much
greater moving from a 20 percentile practice to an 80 percentile
practice than from moving from an 80 percentile practice to a 99 percentile
practice, and the cost of the improvement is usually less. Unless a given
practical area is very critical to success, a pretty good process is
probably good enough, and just as with bottleneck analysis for performance,
where it does no good at all to speed something up that is gated on both
ends by slower processes, improving your "good enough" processes closer to
"best practices" is unlikely to improve the overall company if some "very
bad" practice keeps it from mattering whether you marginally improve an
already good practice.
For most things in life and business, something akin to the 80/20 rule
applies.
Conversely, some practices are absolutely essential, and even if the
marginal cost for improvement is high. Getting on the first page of a google
search for internet mass marketers comes to mind, or upgrading from Carl
Lewis to Michael Jordan for marketing your shoes. But with notable
exceptions (which should be obvious to each individual organization),
improving your own worst practices is usually the most effective application
of effort.
mwf
-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of bill thater
Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2004 9:07 AM
To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: standards
> Anyway, Cary's point was (I think) to focus on worst practices instead
> of best practices. When you constantly look for best practices you will
> always be falling behind reality, and there will be no impetus for
> moving the bar up. If you look for worst practices (things not to do),
> then you'll learn and grow and become smarter and you can steadily add
> to the list... or just move the bar up, up and away.
so then what we need are worst practices papers and not best pratices ones?
oh good i can do that, i've done LOTS of worst practices.;-)
now if i've learned from them is another question entirely.;-)
--
Bill "Shrek" Thater ORACLE DBA
shrek@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
"I'm going to work my ticket if I can..." -- Gilwell song
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I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine (Song of
Solomon 6:3)
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