“The best ideas have most of these traits: They are simple, core messages; they are unexpected; they are concrete, credible, and emotional, and they are stories.”
Chip and Dan Heath in Made to Stick
It’s no coincidence that in the millenia before writing was invented the most important parables were passed down through generations via stories because they, rather than facts or figures, are the mechanism via which information remains most vividly within our memories. An example is the stories of the Dreamtime passed down by Australian Aboriginals.
The recent acceptance of defining user stories as a method for capturing business requirements seems to work well in the world of OSS. They also help to build the message of what the end-to-end user experience will look like and how processes should flow.
This makes me wonder whether there is an opportunity to build a similar framework for Operational Stories that are used to build up an easily indexable catalogue of experiences that operators hand down from one generation to the next, or store in an adjunct OSS tool.
What methods do your operational teams use to propagate learning from past situations?
The Heaths also state, “The hardest part of using stories effectively is make sure they’re SIMPLE—that they reflect your core message. It’s not enough to tell a great story; the story has to reflect your agenda” in the same book.
Standing out in a highly saturated and fragmented OSS market can be really difficult. We’re regularly involved in bake-offs where we see dozens of OSS
One of the things I love about my job is all the vendor demos I get to see. Product demos are one of the four
Have you read the book, “The 4-hour work week” by Tim Ferris? It was one of those relatively rare books that inspired a complete mindset
Over the years, we’ve been involved in many OSS procurement events and have seen a variety of different pricing models proposed by vendors. Being software,
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.
