The Network Garden

One, early in my career, our VP of Engineering posed the following question.

“Do you ever wonder what had to go wrong for NASA to call off the Space Shuttle launch at ‘T-minus three’?”

He went on,”But that’s the wrong way to look at it, because there were more like 10-15 concurrent sprints going on, all with the same deadline towards the same goal.”

No one wants to be the reason for failure to launch, but sometimes, the line between success and failure is that thin.

The ‘T-minus three’ dynamic is a reminder of the importance of aligning people, process and project scope in executing highly orchestrated efforts.

Two, I think back to a conversation that I had a few years back with a client, who was lamenting the bugginess of a new automation set of capabilities that we’d recently launched.

“I can’t understand why you can’t just make it ALWAYS work,” he grumbled, and he was right.

But, I was also honest with him in saying, “It amazes me that it EVER works.”

This is the nature of launching new types of systems that are built around the “day in the life” all of the different stakeholders in terms of their processes, workflows and sources of truth.

There is just no substitute to actually DO-ing, and making the actual idea work.

Crawl. Walk. Run.

So it will be with AI.