It Works If You Work It

To grow a plant into a flourishing tree, you need to make sure you water the plant and manure it on time. You need to parent your child in order to help them grow into better human beings. The point I am trying to reach is - "To make things work, you need to work on them"

Its the same with organizations. Just by working for an organization, you are not going to grow it. You will have to work on it, work on building the organizational values, constantly supporting the changing environment, and looking for break through opportunities ...

But is that sufficient?

Not really, isn't it! You need to articulate what you are planning for the orgination to its customers, key stakeholders and employees. You need to monitor the progress against the planned goals, as that's the only way you can get to know if you are heading in the right direction and making real progress. Monitor costs, achievements, failures and KPIs. And publish/ communicate the results, and cover the following in the communication -

• Scope
• Progress Update
• Pending Items/ Next steps
• Issues

Remember, if you want to be understood of what you are working on, make sure that it is marketed and plan/progress is communicated. And work towards achieving the stated goals with credibility.

Software Reuse

There has been tons and tons of books/articles on software re-use...But even then we still end my writing the software from scared when we can get similar modules (if not same) for much less effort and cost.

Reusing software would mean, you decide what are the key functionalities required, and what good to have can be compromised.

Best places to look for software reuse is your organization software factory or the open source software components. Open source not only provides with the basic key functionalities that brings up the whole software development on much faster grounds.

Also remember that if you can get an off the shelf software or component, which meets 90% of your requirement, then its worthy to buy it and ignore the other 10% of the requirement. Yes ofcourse it depends upon how critical the other 10% is!