I was super stoked to order the gen4 iPhone today!  But... Apple's web site was having issues all day.  And it's easy enough to cut slack to lots of shops that have issues from time to time, but Apple?  These are uber geeks with truckloads of cash!  This is simply not an impossible problem to solve for a company with that kind of resources.  Anyway, here's hoping this won't foreshadow my gen4 experience.  :|

My pal Peter sent over an interesting short article last week, perhaps a corollary to my previous post.  In short it said if you had too many applications, it was harder to do a good job with them.  And if you kept your application portfolio mean and lean, you could more easily achieve focus and keep quality high.  And I'm buying this concept all the way.

What an interesting notion!  They even threw in a ratio of applications to users which I found novel from an empirical point of view (I need to make that calculation for my own company -- how fun!).

Anyway, it's always tempting to add new apps to do X Y and Z, and I've always thought that the decision makers don't fully (or in some cases partially) understand the back-end cost to those decisions.  Perhaps this is a nice metric for a balanced scorecard?

Also makes you think about the benefit of retiring low-value apps.  What do you think?

Today I read a great article by Martin Atherton, who suggested that following a formal quality methodology such as ITIL (or Six Sigma or TQM or CMMI) might not generate ROI for mid-to-small organizations, having less than 200 people.  And I have to say, having started my career in 2 giant organizations (Accenture and AT&T), where process was king or at least queen, and now at a startup (well it was a startup when I started, anyway), I at least partially agree.  My current company has 60 people, we don't have a lot of extra resources, and when it comes right down to it, we have to get stuff done.

So we use some light process, and we improvise.  I'm a big fan of what my wife calls 'right-sized' processes in all parts of an organization, not just IT.  Having the right amount of process/methodology in an area can help us to achieve a consistent result with different players without slowing things down too much.  Why is it so often that the organzations we work in tend to the extremes, too much or too little process?  Maybe because it's right-sized when it starts out, but fails to evolve with the organization.  Or maybe because, to the people creating the process (employees or consultants), all they have is a hammer and everything starts to look like a nail (thanks Mike, ps-it's less fun being the wood than the hammer), and they start to get crazy with over-process-izing everything.  Maybe because it's emotionally easier to do process work than to address human performance issues (Jim Collins says above all else get the right people on the bus, and while that can be less than fun to do I can't agree more how important it is).  Not sure.

Of course smaller organizations have benefits as well, such as shortened lines of communication, fewer people to educate, and fairly homogenous products to work on, which makes it easier to achieve focus.  I think that's why some companies keep subdividing (e.g. Microsoft, which is really a large number of related work units under a giant umbrella), to stay focused and efficient.  Might be sort of a corollary to Dunbar's number.

Anywho Martin, I think you're right - one size does not fit all.  You have to pick and choose the recipes that will work best for you and your organization, and only cook up enough for the people you're inviting to dinner.