[Sigia-l] Exhibit A

[Adrian Howard]

On 26 Nov 2006, at 17:57, Jared M. Spool wrote:
[snip]
> I've never been a fan of the idea of "Best Practices", though it's
> one of the things our clients clamor for constantly. The premise
> behind best practices is you copy what they did because it obviously
> worked so well.
>
> But, most of the time, what they *actually* did was less important
> than the context in which they did it. And, unless you duplicate the
> context (which is usually impossible), the practice itself will not
> return the desired results.
[snip]

Amen. The number of times I've had to bite my tongue to prevent  
myself saying something uncouth when a client says something like  
"but Amazon does recommendations".

Yes - Amazon does do recommendations. But they have millions of  
customers who buy products, and you have dozens of customers who buy  
subscriptions to a number of distinct services in different domains  
so it make NO BLOODY SENSE to cross sell them.

Grrr....

> I think we need to encourage teams to put more measures into place so
> they can tell what works and what doesn't for them, in their own
> context. Yet that plays into what you were saying the other day (with
> the Joel on Software piece about measuring performance -- I blogged
> about it here: http://tinyurl.com/y7uldw ). In my opinion, we need to
> do some serious research on what those measures should be.

Money. Metrics related to profit. I'm liking those more and more as  
the years go by.

Cheers,

Adrian