Tools of the Trade

Every day, in and out of work, we make dozens of small (often implicit) decisions about how best to go about our lives. Over time, these decisions can have a significant impact on our ability to effectively achieve goals.

I want to talk about a few in particular, W, E and Z.

It’s 2016 and the ubiquitous Microsoft Office lingers, entrenched in the enterprise like a corporate comfort blanket.

If your aim is too produce (in isolation) a good quality, single use artefact that is a medium to large sized document or low complexity piece of analysis then Word or Excel are acceptable tools to use.

If however, you are looking to publish, distribute, and collaborate on your artefact, they most certainly are not.

At first glance, this might sound like a trivial or even petty complaint but, in my view, it’s a significant barrier to the adoption of more effective delivery within organisations.

Here are a few examples (based on my own experiences in recent years)...

Bad	Good
E-mail a Zip file containing Java code for review	Approve a Pull Request
Word Document to Deploy Application	Automated Deployment Pipelines
Excel for Test Script Design and Execution	Automated Testing (and Reporting)
100+ Requirements Documents in Word	Team Collaboration Software

I’m sure that you have your own examples. Please share them in the comments below...

Companies that offer products in this not-so-new-anymore space (e.g. Atlasssian) are thriving and while it’s easy to blame Enterprise Architecture for problems, I believe that everyone should lead by example and always be mindful of chasing the best tool for the job.