Squeaky Wheel?
There are far enough problems and inefficiencies in any IT shop that you can spend an inordinate amount of money and time fixing them. There are at least two constraints to keep you from spending the gross national product on process improvement. The first is that you don’t have the budget and probably never will. An open checkbook is the holy grail for any project and the chances of finding limitless cash for process improvement is slim to none. Second, the discussion of budget aside, it is hard to predict the impact of most improvements. These constraints lead us to a discussion of focusing on what is critical versus important or interesting.
How do you discern whether something is vital versus urgent or whether what is complained about is actually important or just in the spotlight? Can an issue be vital at one point in time, important at another time and meaningless at some other point? Developing a process to discern the difference between what is vital and urgent suggests a needed to continually challenge and evaluate the status quo.
An example of how circumstances can change something from a background concern to something that is vital is exemplified by how potable water can change in importance when backpacking. Water is merely important if you either have it or have access to easily secure it. It is a commodity at this point. Things change and water becomes vital when sources dry up or it becomes harder to find. Scarcity transforms a commodity into a high value product. When you don’t know where more water will come from it becomes vital. When scarcity is removed true urgency recedes into the background. Funding for process improvement follows the same course. I would suggest that scarcity is actually important because when funding is scarce, only those problems that are vital get addressed.
