RE: standards

Short and sweet: Realize and stop doing the stupidest things you are doing (unless you're just having too much fun doing them.)

More long winded: The marginal improvement for an organization is much greater moving from a 20 percentile practice to an 80 percentile practice than from moving from an 80 percentile practice to a 99 percentile practice, and the cost of the improvement is usually less. Unless a given practical area is very critical to success, a pretty good process is probably good enough, and just as with bottleneck analysis for performance, where it does no good at all to speed something up that is gated on both ends by slower processes, improving your "good enough" processes closer to "best practices" is unlikely to improve the overall company if some "very bad" practice keeps it from mattering whether you marginally improve an already good practice.

For most things in life and business, something akin to the 80/20 rule applies.

Conversely, some practices are absolutely essential, and even if the marginal cost for improvement is high. Getting on the first page of a google search for internet mass marketers comes to mind, or upgrading from Carl Lewis to Michael Jordan for marketing your shoes. But with notable exceptions (which should be obvious to each individual organization), improving your own worst practices is usually the most effective application of effort.

mwf

-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org]On Behalf Of bill thater Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2004 9:07 AM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Re: standards

> Anyway, Cary's point was (I think) to focus on worst practices instead
> of best practices. When you constantly look for best practices you will
> always be falling behind reality, and there will be no impetus for
> moving the bar up. If you look for worst practices (things not to do),
> then you'll learn and grow and become smarter and you can steadily add
> to the list... or just move the bar up, up and away.

so then what we need are worst practices papers and not best pratices ones?

oh good i can do that, i've done LOTS of worst practices.;-)

now if i've learned from them is another question entirely.;-)

--
Bill "Shrek" Thater     ORACLE DBA
       shrek_at_consulant.com
"I'm going to work my ticket if I can..." -- Gilwell song

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