{"id":122,"date":"2023-01-31T19:51:39","date_gmt":"2023-01-31T19:51:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leverage.mobi\/blog\/?p=122"},"modified":"2023-02-06T15:27:06","modified_gmt":"2023-02-06T15:27:06","slug":"it-doesnt-have-to-be-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leverage.mobi\/blog\/2023\/01\/31\/it-doesnt-have-to-be-good\/","title":{"rendered":"It doesn&#8217;t have to be good&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cHave no fear of perfection &#8211; you&#8217;ll never reach it.\u201d &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Let me tell you the story of the best client I&#8217;ve ever worked with&#8230; <\/p>\n<p>Just to protect the innocent, I&#8217;ll not mention their name, but they were a major retailer, covering 10+ countries, with a massive market-share in their chosen markets, an enviable share price, and a more impressive PE ratio.  They were (and are) a serious business.<\/p>\n<p>We started the project with some incredibly tight deadlines &#8211; months to deliver when other customers would have settled for years.<\/p>\n<h2>And&#8230; the team delivered&#8230;<\/h2>\n<p>I&#8217;d been intimately involved with the customer, every day, and couldn&#8217;t believe:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Their ability to prioritise requirements<\/li>\n<li>Their flexibility <\/li>\n<li>Their negotiation skills. &#8220;OK &#8211; if we do X, we get Y.  What do we get if we select Z?&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><\/p>\n<h2>We go live on time (dammit&#8230; slightly over budget&#8230;10%.. who is counting&#8230;)<\/h2>\n<p>Later, I have the most amazing meeting with the HR Director, who has been hugely involved with the project &#8211; meeting with us daily; prioritising; negotiating; haggling; managing.<\/p>\n<p>And I say to him: &#8220;You&#8217;ve been the most amazing client ever.  As a partnership, we&#8217;ve moved faster, with more clarity, with the highest risk tolerance, than I&#8217;ve ever experienced.  How did you do this?<\/p>\n<h2>And his answer?<\/h2>\n<p>&#8220;As a company, our philosophy is <em>it doesn&#8217;t have to be good.  It has to be good enough<\/em>&#8220;<\/p>\n<h2>Take a minute to breathe that in&#8230;<\/h2>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"800\" height=\"363\" src=\"https:\/\/leverage.mobi\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Good-enough.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-123\" srcset=\"https:\/\/leverage.mobi\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Good-enough.jpg 800w, https:\/\/leverage.mobi\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Good-enough-300x136.jpg 300w, https:\/\/leverage.mobi\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Good-enough-768x348.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\"><\/figure>\n<p>What&#8217;s your goal?  Good?  Great?  Or good enough?<\/p>\n<p>We often worship at the altar of excellence.  Sometimes, excellence is good enough.<\/p>\n<p>But&#8230; a  lot of the time&#8230; good enough is good enough.<\/p>\n<h2>Final thoughts&#8230;<\/h2>\n<p>What this HR Director taught me was this:  Have a clear picture of what your MVP is &#8211; and chase that down.  If you understand that, you&#8217;ve hit the 80\/20 principle &#8211; 80% of the work will take 20% of the time; the final 20% will take 80% of the time.<\/p>\n<p>And&#8230;the final 20%&#8230; is still only 20% of the value.<\/p>\n<h2>It doesn&#8217;t have to be good.  It has to be good enough&#8230;.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p>Dammit&#8230; let&#8217;s make this more practical&#8230;.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As a retailer, what they understood is that no store would ever be perfect.  The perfect store has free coffee, super-trained staff, no queues (ever), 100% stock.  But if you aim for that, you&#8217;ll never open the store, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Instead, you say &#8220;what&#8217;s the acceptable product we can offer &#8211; with the intent of satisfying our customers?&#8221; Which might be 80% stock; queues of 3 people; no coffeee; and OK staff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But&#8230; that&#8217;s OK -right?  Because &#8211; if you worship at the altar of excellence, you&#8217;ll never be open for business, and you&#8217;ll never achieve anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Sometimes&#8230; you stand at the precipice&#8230; and jump&#8230; and gravity forgives you&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Takeaway if you&#8217;re on a project&#8230;<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Please&#8230; I beg you&#8230; don&#8217;t forget your reason for existence.  You&#8217;re here to fix A problem.  Not ALL problems&#8230; Don&#8217;t let perfect be the enemy of good!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The tale of the client who delivered faster, got more value out of software, and focused on the greatest value.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":127,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[34,4,30],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leverage.mobi\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leverage.mobi\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leverage.mobi\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leverage.mobi\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leverage.mobi\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/leverage.mobi\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":133,"href":"https:\/\/leverage.mobi\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122\/revisions\/133"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leverage.mobi\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leverage.mobi\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leverage.mobi\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leverage.mobi\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}