I am struggling a lot of times to find the right balance between Planing and FastDeployment. In IT you often have very ambitious projects that have to be finished ASAP. I can not recall how many times I have heard the words: “As soon as Possible” in a project meeting. Most of the times the IT people have to finish their work first , so that the rest of the company or organisation can start to use the IT infrastructure. No matter if it is a new Datacenter, Office Location or technology there will be some planing involved. Some task can be automated, but also for that automation infrastructure is planing needed. In Germany we say this is the point where the cat is biting in his own tail. It is time consuming to do a solid planing. So it happens that something will be half baked brought to production. Here I have seen many outages. People have to fire fight and doing over-hours in these situation to create a workaround that than becomes obviously a permanent solution. Years after that somebody will ask: who has planed this… Or sometimes everything worked as planed but the plan was shit. There must be the right balance between planing and deployment. Make for your self some standards that you always have in your workflow like Documentation, security hardening , stick to standards, monitoring etc.
And sometimes you spend a lot of time to make something work with the tools that you know and find out after the project was finished that there is a better tool/solution out there. The other tool/solution would have safed a lot of work-hours and budget, but you haven´t been aware of it at this point of time. When the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer than everything becomes a nail. So it looks to be more time consuming to spent more time in research and building up a new solution but on the long run this looks to me the better option. It is harder to accomplish something that is replacing the old workflow and way of thinking, for sure. But a great feeling when the new solution is up and running and you can achieve a task that was before taking hours,days or weeks with one klick. That is the essence why all the new technology’s like cloud, SDN and fabrics have changed the IT recently so dramatically.
Your career is a marathon and not a sprint!
