Constraints and Trade-offs
Hey there! Welcome to another week of random musings from me. I hope you had a great weekend.
It's always hard to keep a weekly schedule, and I want to get better at being ahead of schedule to catch up on a week.
I'm still trying to find a better workflow, but we'll see. I'm trying methods to see how to be ahead of my writing. Something about being close to deadlines makes me sit down and write.
If you have any tips, let me know!
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Over the last few weeks, I've had to determine a "good" solution to a problem that we have in our organization.
It has been lingering on my ToDo list for a few months now. It is that sort of issue that is hard to prioritize with the rest of the work because it happens infrequently, but it needs to be solved.
During one of my latest attempts to solve it, I arrived at something like a "build vs buy" decision, but it was hard to go either way.
So, I started going back in history (slack, wiki, etc) and figured out past attempts at solving the issue. Came across similar thoughts as mine, as well as similar conclusions. So what was going on?
Constraints
Constraint: limitation or restriction.
In general, we need to create a scope or more constraints to make analyzing the different options to solve the problem easier.
Without these "limits" to the problem, all options were very similar at a high level and provided virtually the same outcome. People in the past arrived at the same conclusion I had and then couldn't figure a way out, and due to being lower in priority, the solution kept going back to the backlog.
With constraints, trade-offs are easy to weigh in one way or another.
Trade-offs
A trade-off (or trade-off) is a situational decision that involves diminishing or losing one quality, quantity, or property of a set or design in return for gains in other aspects. —Wikipedia
It's easier to assess the trade-offs with the constraints and think about what we care about now and in the next few years (e.g., five years). Any trade-off in any direction of the build vs. buy decision would have less weight than we think.
Even the time constraint affects the immediacy of our decision, and not having it makes it seem the trade-off of doing it later is less critical than we think.
Once we delimited the problem space, I worked through the build vs. buy options trade-offs with my manager and other stakeholders; we concluded that we could pursue both opportunities for some time, see which one yielded better results, and stick with that for the long term.
Your turn!
How do you deal with problems that have an unbound scope? How do you deal when all solutions appear good enough, with no clear winner? Let me know by replying to this email!
Happy coding!
Things I discovered in the past week
- It is a podcast episode of one of my favorite topics, with two prominent people in the space.
- X (Twitter?) Thread on, taking opportunities instead of focusing on what could happen or things that won't happen for some time.
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