My favourite OSS saying

My favourite OSS saying – “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”

OSS are amazing things. They’re designed to gather, process and compile all sorts of information from all sorts of sources. I like to claim that OSS/BSS are the puppet masters of any significant network operator because they assist in every corner of the business. They assist with the processes carried out by almost every business unit.

They can be (and have been) adapted to fulfill all sorts of weird and wonderful requirements. That’s the great thing about software. It can be *easily* modified to do almost anything you want. But just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

In many cases, we have looked at a problem from a technical perspective and determined that our OSS can (and did) solve it. But if the same problem were also looked at from business and/or operational perspectives, would it make sense for our OSS to solve it?

Some time back, I was involved in a micro project that added 1 new field to an existing report. Sounds simple. Unfortunately by the time all the rigorous deploy and transition processes were followed, to get the update into PROD, the support bill from our team alone ran into tens of thousands of dollars. Months later, I found out that the business unit that had requested the additional field had a bug in their code and wasn’t even picking up the extra field. Nobody had even noticed until a secondary bug prompted another developer to ask how the original code was functioning.

It wasn’t deemed important enough to fix. Many tens of thousands of dollars were wasted because we didn’t think to ask up the design tree why the functionality was (wasn’t) important to the business.

Other examples are when we use the OSS to solve a problem by expensive customisation / integration when manual processes can do the job more cash efficiently.

Another example was a client that had developed hundreds of customisations to resolve annoying / cumbersome, but incredibly rare tasks. The efficiency of removing those tasks didn’t come close to compensating for the expense of building the automations / tools. Just one sample of those tools was a $1000 efficiency improvement for a ~$200,000 project cost… on a task that had only been run twice in the preceding 5 years.

 

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