Sell-an-Elephant-to-your-Boss-HOWTO by Aurimas Mikalauskas.
From the post:
Spoiler alert: If your boss does not need an elephant, he is definitely NOT going to buy one from you. If he will, he will regret it and eventually you will too.
I must appologize to the reader who was expecting to find an advice on selling useless goods to his boss. While I do use a similar technique to get a quarterly raise (no, I don’t), this article is actually about convincing your team, your manager or anyone else who has influence over project’s priorities, that pending system performance optimizations are a priority (assuming, they indeed are). However this headline was not very catchy and way too long, so I decided to go with the elephant instead.
System performance optimization is what I do day to day here at Percona. Looking back at the duration of an optimization project, I find that with bigger companies (bigger here means it’s not a one-man show) it’s not the identification of performance problems that takes most of the time. Nor it is looking for the right solution. Biggest bottleneck in the optimization project is where solution gets approved and prioritized appropriately inside the company that came for performance optimization in the first place. Sometimes I would follow-up with the customer after a few weeks or a month just to find that nothing was done to implement suggested changes. When I would ask why, most of the time the answer is someting along those lines: my manager didn’t schedule/approve it yet.
I don’t want to say that all performance improvements are a priority and should be done right away, not at all. I want to suggest that you can check if optimizations at hand should be prioritized and if so – how to make it happen if you’re not the one who sets priorities.
Steps to follow:
- Estimate harm being done
- Estimate the cost of the solution
- Make it a short and clear statement
- Show the method
- The main problem
- The solution
- Overcome any obsticles
- Kick it off
I like number one (1) in particular.
If your client doesn’t feel a need, no amount of selling is going to make a project happen.
All steps to follow in any IT/semantic project.