“Smart people are a dime a dozen. What matters is the ability to think different… to think out of the box.”
Walter Isaacson.
I love the “out of the box” terminology that some OSS sales people use, implying that their toolsets are fully functional straight after installation, analogous to a spreadsheet or word processing application.
What “out of the box” really means is that the box arrives and the fifty person project team jumps out of it. The project team consists of:
- Project managers to coordinate the efforts of the other members of the team (including customer and related stakeholders)
- Business analysts to understand the customer’s processes and map them to the OSS
- Configuration experts to model the customer’s environment in the OSS
- Data migration experts to populate the OSS with a base level of data that makes it operational
- Infrastructure experts to build the IT systems on which the OSS resides
- Trainers
- Testers
- Developers
- etc.