Here’s a little detour from theory into real life. What do you do in a fortune 500 company when a major software deployment is getting ready to go spiraling down the drain? Forget all of the issues around contingency planning, release management, and the other management buzz-words executive like to use. What do you do when the release is going nation wide in 24 hours and has to be installed and fully operational in 10,000 locations 48 hours after that?

Call on open source.

I was tasked with planning and staffing a war-room / command center to go live in conjunction with the release. Our requirements:

• Create infrastructure that could track issues to resolution
• Plan for communications that would enable a dispersed team to share timely information
• Be ready for round the clock operations in as little as twelve hours (worst case) or 18 hour operations in twenty-four hours (best case)

Now, I had seen this coming and laid some ground work, but I was able to install Trac running on Apache2 using Subversion and mod_python to have a web application up and running in three hours.

This was with no IT or desktop support resources assigned; no contracts to be negotiated or signed, no bureaucratic red-tape or politics.

Open Source…It just works.

In my last post, I began describing a technique that is based on the military estimate or appreciation process for developing strategy and operational plans.In a nutshell, when faced with any series of alternative actions that you or the opposition may take, you should look at three key alternatives:

• The worst thing that the opponent (or you) could do, 
• The best thing that they could do, and 
• The most probable thing they could do.

This is a classic method of forcing people to “think outside the box”.How many business people really consider the worst thing that could happen while they are planning?How many of them account for that eventuality in their plans?I’ve been in many too many meetings where the dissenting voice is quickly pushed aside with a terse “that won’t ever happen” when there are real possibilities lurking within the act of just thinking “what if”.So, when faced with alternative actions, force yourself to think of at least three alternatives, and make one of them the worst alternative for you. If your plans protect against that, you can at least be assured you won’t be defeated outright.

So strategy is hard. Anything complex usually is. And as the old adage about eating elephants goes, “we have to do it one bite at a time.”So the first bite is understanding what your competitors are capable of and what they intend to do. (I’m assuming at this point you have at least a good idea about who your competition is.)Capabilities should speak to a “perfect world” threat assessment. You may not think that it is realistic for your competitor to corner the market on software patents but if they are pursuing expansion of their patent portfolio, they are capable of causing problems.So what capabilities to you focus on?You have to assume your competitor is rationale, i.e. they are not going to suddenly start giving everything away to inconvenience you. They might give things away for the short term to gain market share; they might give things away that they can then charge for related services, but they will have a rational reason for their action.This is where intentions come to the fore. You have categorized what they have the technical capability to achieve, now you probe the likely actions they will take.This is the art of strategy. You have to understand your competitors well enough to figure out which capabilities they will exploit to their advantage. Obviously, there will be a range of these intentions.To help frame these capabilities and intentions, you should focus on three general scenarios:

• Best Case – What would be the best case for you that your competitor could pursue. In other words, assume your competitor is incompetent and wanted to help you achive your strategic aims.

 

• Worst Case – What would be the worst thing for you that your competitor could do? Assume they have perfect knowledge of what your aim is, and they want nothing more than to thwart you.

 

• Most Likely Case – Given everything you know, what is the most likely course your competitor is likely to pursue? Assume they are rational. What would you do in their shoes? Obviously (I hope) you can’t just look at one case in this situation. You have to look at a whole spectrum of options and decide what really is most likely. Don’t pull punches. Your competitor won’t.

 

Once you have these views into your opponents courses of action, your strategy work is greatly simplified. But we’ll get to that next…