It Gets the Job Done
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@DustinB3403 said:
@scottalanmiller the trouble with the examples is that they are clear examples of someone (lawyer,accountant and planner) clearly choosing to do the simplest job they could, regardless of what the customer wanted.
But that is exactly the comparison I am trying to make.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Oh yeah, that is a bit weird.
Sometimes I feel a need to drop out of a discussion (such as this one), and forget to discard.
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@DustinB3403 said:
The customer wanted "Top Notch Service" with specifics regarding what they considered top notch service, A get out of jail free card, a huge tax return, and a awesome wedding.
Other than a crazy owner who doesn't care about making money or having their company grow, which I acknowledge does exist and while that is still bad business it is their prerogative, of course, when would someone hiring IT and/or business managers not want "top notch service?" Who hired IT but hopes that they don't do a good job? Who hires a CEO and hopes that they "don't make much money?"
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@scottalanmiller said:
But that is exactly the comparison I am trying to make.
I think a better comparison would be:
- You wanted someone to take pictures of your wedding. You just wanted pictures.
- The photographer did the pictures, but they weren't nearly as good as other pictures you later saw of other weddings.
- You are OK, but in reality all you wanted was pictures, and you didn't want to pay for the bells and whistles of the better photographer.
Now, if there was a 50/50 chance this photographer might burn down the wedding hall and kill all your guests, then perhaps you might be better off going elsewhere. Unless they gave a realllllllllllly good discount.
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@DustinB3403 said:
The job of the company is to make money, not to email people. Unless their are an email marketer
FTFY
Nope, not even then. Never. Email might be loosely tied or closely tied to making money, but never is the goal of the business to send emails, it is always to make money.
Go ask any email marketing firm and as the shareholders if they would prefer to make money without sending emails or if they would prefer to not make money and just send out emails because they love sending emails?
It's a rhetorical question - the goal of all for-profit business is both logically and legally to make money. Sending email might be how the plan to make the money, but it is not the goal, it is a means on the way to the end.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Other than a crazy owner who doesn't care about making money or having their company grow, which I acknowledge does exist and while that is still bad business it is their prerogative, of course, when would someone hiring IT and/or business managers not want "top notch service?" Who hired IT but hopes that they don't do a good job? Who hires a CEO and hopes that they "don't make much money?"
These are decisions we make every day.
Sure, my wife and I wanted the top notch Saturday night top shelf wedding, but we made do with the Saturday afternoon budget option.
There is a different between negligence and always buying the top option.
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@BRRABill said:
- You wanted someone to take pictures of your wedding. You just wanted pictures.
- The photographer did the pictures, but they weren't nearly as good as other pictures you later saw of other weddings.
- You are OK, but in reality all you wanted was pictures, and you didn't want to pay for the bells and whistles of the better photographer.
Well there is an important aspect to my examples that I included intentionally.... in the case of the wedding planner you can reasonable do it yourself without the professional (I know this for a fact because we planned our own wedding without a wedding planner.) Lots of people do this. Taking your own pictures, while technically possible, isn't reasonably possible.
In the case of business decisions in this case, I tried to point out that part of the assumption was that the base level of "it gets the job done" could be accomplished by pretty much anyone. In the wedding planning example, the wedding planner needs to specifically "significantly outperform what you could have done yourself." In the case of IT, we assume that IT pros need to "significantly outperform someone without IT training or focused time could have done."
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@BRRABill said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Other than a crazy owner who doesn't care about making money or having their company grow, which I acknowledge does exist and while that is still bad business it is their prerogative, of course, when would someone hiring IT and/or business managers not want "top notch service?" Who hired IT but hopes that they don't do a good job? Who hires a CEO and hopes that they "don't make much money?"
These are decisions we make every day.
Sure, my wife and I wanted the top notch Saturday night top shelf wedding, but we made do with the Saturday afternoon budget option.
There is a different between negligence and always buying the top option.
You are separating out cost and value and treating "best" as something that exists irrespective of the cost. While that might be a theory in weddings, this concept never applies in a business setting. All decisions are made with profit as a factor, all.
High cost, high quality products vs. low cost, low quality is a reasonable tradeoff to consider in a business. The job of IT and the business is to evaluate the relationship to determine which makes sense for the specific business. Nothing here suggests that the high cost option is the "best" one for the business or that the "free" one is better.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@BRRABill said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Other than a crazy owner who doesn't care about making money or having their company grow, which I acknowledge does exist and while that is still bad business it is their prerogative, of course, when would someone hiring IT and/or business managers not want "top notch service?" Who hired IT but hopes that they don't do a good job? Who hires a CEO and hopes that they "don't make much money?"
These are decisions we make every day.
Sure, my wife and I wanted the top notch Saturday night top shelf wedding, but we made do with the Saturday afternoon budget option.
There is a different between negligence and always buying the top option.
You are separating out cost and value and treating "best" as something that exists irrespective of the cost. While that might be a theory in weddings, this concept never applies in a business setting. All decisions are made with profit as a factor, all.
High cost, high quality products vs. low cost, low quality is a reasonable tradeoff to consider in a business. The job of IT and the business is to evaluate the relationship to determine which makes sense for the specific business. Nothing here suggests that the high cost option is the "best" one for the business or that the "free" one is better.
I think what @BRRABill is trying to say is that you have to find the balance for your business as to what is the best value. It doesn't matter that the product costs $100,000 or $1,000,000 and it is the best on the market. If your business cannot afford the product, it has no value to your business. You have to come back and find one that your business can afford that works for most of what you need, in order for it to be of any value.
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@dafyre said:
I think what @BRRABill is trying to say is that you have to find the balance for your business as to what is the best value. It doesn't matter that the product costs $100,000 or $1,000,000 and it is the best on the market. If your business cannot afford the product, it has no value to your business. You have to come back and find one that your business can afford that works for most of what you need, in order for it to be of any value.
That's exactly what I am trying to say.
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Roughly speaking, I would note that there is no need to strive to increase the capitalization of your business as much as possible, but to improve the quality of the product at reasonable costs.
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So this topic is quite old, but still a decent topic to have.
Let use a different business idea, instead of the wedding planner etc that has been discussed.
Let's discuss wireless presentation technologies. The goals being "I" need to present wirelessly, and need something that is Operating System agnostic.
So I purchase a lot of hardware that cost more than the competition because it's what I can readily find due to fervent marketing. Have I done the job? Sure. Could I have spent a bit more time and trialed the competition and seen if it was better, comparable or worse? Of course. Would it save the business money, maybe or maybe not.
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@DustinB3403 said in It Gets the Job Done:
So I purchase a lot of hardware that cost more than the competition because it's what I can readily find due to fervent marketing. Have I done the job? Sure. Could I have spent a bit more time and trialed the competition and seen if it was better, comparable or worse? Of course. Would it save the business money, maybe or maybe not.
That depends. Is the "job" to meet a minimum threshold, or to do the job "well"? I know very few companies that believe that they are hiring people to meet minimum thresholds without adding value. Mostly, because in this example, if meeting a minimum threshold was the objective, the role of the IT person is valueless. Any one, even a robot, can call a reseller and ask them to handle it without evaluating need or price. Every reseller will jump at that. That's all that is happening here, except paying an IT person to be "in the way".
The IT role exists, in this case, solely to improve upon the minimum.
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@scottalanmiller said in It Gets the Job Done:
@DustinB3403 said in It Gets the Job Done:
So I purchase a lot of hardware that cost more than the competition because it's what I can readily find due to fervent marketing. Have I done the job? Sure. Could I have spent a bit more time and trialed the competition and seen if it was better, comparable or worse? Of course. Would it save the business money, maybe or maybe not.
That depends. Is the "job" to meet a minimum threshold, or to do the job "well"? I know very few companies that believe that they are hiring people to meet minimum thresholds without adding value. Mostly, because in this example, if meeting a minimum threshold was the objective, the role of the IT person is valueless. Any one, even a robot, can call a reseller and ask them to handle it without evaluating need or price. Every reseller will jump at that. That's all that is happening here, except paying an IT person to be "in the way".
The IT role exists, in this case, solely to improve upon the minimum.
And that's my point, is my job to do better than a robot mass purchasing equipment? I think it is. I think my employer would also agree.
So how much better do we have to do, 100% better 15% better?
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@DustinB3403 said in It Gets the Job Done:
@scottalanmiller said in It Gets the Job Done:
@DustinB3403 said in It Gets the Job Done:
So I purchase a lot of hardware that cost more than the competition because it's what I can readily find due to fervent marketing. Have I done the job? Sure. Could I have spent a bit more time and trialed the competition and seen if it was better, comparable or worse? Of course. Would it save the business money, maybe or maybe not.
That depends. Is the "job" to meet a minimum threshold, or to do the job "well"? I know very few companies that believe that they are hiring people to meet minimum thresholds without adding value. Mostly, because in this example, if meeting a minimum threshold was the objective, the role of the IT person is valueless. Any one, even a robot, can call a reseller and ask them to handle it without evaluating need or price. Every reseller will jump at that. That's all that is happening here, except paying an IT person to be "in the way".
The IT role exists, in this case, solely to improve upon the minimum.
And that's my point, is my job to do better than a robot mass purchasing equipment? I think it is. I think my employer would also agree.
So how much better do we have to do, 100% better 15% better?
Thats subjective. But there is a 0% that we know is wrong. How much better is what "good looks like" is subjective. But not doing the job at all is objective. The job was simply skipped in most of the examples.
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"It gets the job done" could easily fit the bill in the scenario I provided.
All solutions work, and are OS agnostic. Barco Clickshare, AirTame, Mersive Solstice, ChromeCast etc etc.
They all work and meet the requirements, some are more expensive than others. But all work and meet the requirements. How much better do "I" have to do than just using "whatever everyone else uses and bought" (no one was ever fired for buying ibm) as the saying goes.
Right?
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@DustinB3403 said in It Gets the Job Done:
"It gets the job done" could easily fit the bill in the scenario I provided.
All solutions work, and are OS agnostic. Barco Clickshare, AirTame, Mersive Solstice, ChromeCast etc etc.
They all work and meet the requirements, some are more expensive than others. But all work and meet the requirements. How much better do "I" have to do than just using "whatever everyone else uses and bought" (no one was ever fired for buying ibm) as the saying goes.
Right?
That's my point - that you are defining "working" incorrectly. There are two ways to do it. Does it "meet the minimum" or is it "at least attempted to be done well?"
No one, outside of IT, ever accepts "doing nothing" as working. It's unique to IT to accept zero evaluation as a guideline for success. If we use normal standards, we'd evaluate if the solution was acceptable based on it being good relative to other options, not evaluated in a vacuum.
Imagine a chef getting "pass/fail" on making a hamburger in school. Sure, it was uncooked and unedible, but technically ground meat made it onto a piece of bread. No one, ever, would accept that as "getting the job done" of being a chef. He might not manage to make the best burger, but he'd be expected to try and do better than just slapping meat on bread. If he didn't, it would be considered a fail.
