Enterprisey Versus Productive
I think Tim Bray hits this one on the head, talking about the difference between typical small shop/open source efforts and their enterprise cousins:
It's like this: The time between having an idea and its public launch is measured in days not months, weeks not years. Same for each subsequent release cycle. Teams are small. Progress is iterative. No oceans are boiled, no monster requirements documents written.
I've seen this up close with website launches. I watched a project take over 2 years to go from initial concept to deployment once. Ten days ago, I decided to launch this blog and just did it. Now, this blog is hardly akin to an enterprise system, but, take it back to when I launched my Cincom blog in 2002 - that was 4 classes sitting on an underpowered server. The output was pretty ugly, and it didn't scale worth a darn, but - and here's the crucial point - it was live.
I didn't ask for (or get) permission, I just went ahead and ran. Over time, I had to make changes, but I did those iteratively as they were needed. I'm still doing that; I patched a bug in this blog and the corporate one just this morning. The key, I think, is to take the Nike line seriously: just do it.
Technorati Tags: enterprisey, productivity
