“Skills multiply labors by two, five, 10, 50, 100 times. You can chop a tree down with a hammer, but it takes about 30 days. That’s called labor. But if you trade the hammer in for an ax, you can chop the tree down in about 30 minutes. What’s the difference in 30 days and 30 minutes? Skills—skills make the difference.”
Jim Rohn, here.
OSS can be great labour multipliers. They can deliver baked-in “skills” that multiply labors by two, five, 10, 50, 100 times. They can be not just a hammer, not just an axe, but a turbo-charged chainsaw.
The more pertinent question to understand with our OSS though is, “Why are we chopping this tree down?” Is it the right tree to achieve a useful outcome? Do the benefits outweigh the cost of the hammer / axe / chainsaw?
What if our really clever OSS engineers come up with a brilliant design that can reduce a task from 30 days to 30 minutes…. but it takes us 35 days to design/build/test/deploy the customisation for a once-off use? We’re clearly cutting down the wrong tree.
What if instead we could reduce this same task from 30 days to 1 day with just a quick analysis and process change? It’s nowhere near as sexy or challenging for us OSS engineers though. The very clever 30 minute solution is another case of “just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.”
Have you ever had an OSS or BSS project that’s impacted by poor data quality? The problem of data integrity gets raised on almost every
“One of my favorite things about designing software is designing the defaults. The defaults define the experience for everyone out of the box. And, therefore,
Have you ever been tasked with mapping out the processes for the telco you work for? Either as a way of documenting current state, or
In the last week alone, I’ve had two potent reminders that the world of OSS is simply (pun intended) too complex. This manifests in many
Here at Passionate About OSS, we are exactly that – Passionate About OSS (Operational Support Systems). We’re also passionate about BSS, NMS, or any other names you call the tools that help to operationalise your network.
