Maintenance and Operations... and Evolution
Have you ever had a yard? They can be a blessing and a curse. At their best they strike a balance between suiting our needs and being easy to maintain. Kind of like software systems!
I have a yard. When we moved in, the yard was beautiful, with a great variety of trees, shrubs, flowers, and grasses.
The yard met our requirements: shade, privacy, and beauty. And it was normal maintenance: mow weekly, prune seasonally, blow out sprinklers for the winter, repeat.
But over time the yard got to be kind of a pain. The aspens started growing shoots all over the yard, tree roots messed with the sprinkler system, and our needs changed to entertain adults more than children. Mowing, pruning, and blowing wasn’t enough.
In that way, business software systems are kind of like yards. “Implementing” them can be a lot of work, but when that initial work is done, we tend to see them as simply a “maintenance and operations” problem. The trouble is if we only focus on mowing, pruning, and watering, that yard will get out from under us, and eventually stop meeting our needs.
Have you ever worked with or on a software system that didn’t keep up with the change around it?
My family learned that the best “M&O” for our yard should consider that both our needs, and the yard itself, will change. If we can make managing that change a core part of how we treat the yard as part of our “M&O” work, our satisfaction with the yard, the benefit it gives us, will outweigh the cost of managing that change.
But if we treat the yard and our needs as unchanging, eventually we’ll be faced with a very large, costly change, and in some cases the best solution might be to dig the whole thing up and start again.
