It Gets the Job Done
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@scottalanmiller said:
No, this is a completely disconnected leap. You've taken a discussion about "clear decision making" and are trying to say "MS Office is bad." I don't agree that it is bad and see zero connection to the discussion. If you want to talk about MS Office being a product so bad that no honest business person would purchase it, that deserve a thread to discuss. But it doesn't relate here.
There is nothing in this conversation that should trigger a thought like this.
You don't think there are members here who think it is foolish to use MS Windows or MS Office when there are viable free alternatives out there? And that decision, considering the cost of both Windows and Office, could be a sabotage to the business?
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@scottalanmiller said:
This isn't the place for MS Office bashing, start about thread and we can discuss its merits or lack thereof there.
I am saying the opposite.
I'm saying that as long as MS Office "gets the job done" (what most people are looking for it to do ... e-mailing, letters, spreadsheets) it still has value. You don't have to move to OpenOffice just because it saves the company a few dollars.
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@JaredBusch said:
I completely skipped this entire thread after the examples. The examples are completely not what "It gets the job done" means. Those examples were all 100% deliberately sabotaged jobs.
"It gets the job done" does not mean sabotaging the job. It means that the product does the job it is needed to do. It does certainly leave room for a job to be done better.
@scottalanmiller if you want to start this over and be willing to have an intelligent conversation based on real examples, I will participate.
I picked these because they are exactly alike. How are they different?
We constantly see IT pros doing "whatever other people do" and providing zero guidance of their own - literally not doing their job at all. Many try to do a good job but get it all wrong like the wedding planner.
These are, I feel, incredibly close examples. If you have better examples, please share. But these were chosen because of how close they are. Based off of the example of ignoring the needs of the business goals and just using a proximate "success" metric that does not support the business goals directly and using it to excuse either IT or the business managers of not doing their jobs either on purpose, accidentally or just doing it poorly.
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@BRRABill said:
@scottalanmiller said:
No, this is a completely disconnected leap. You've taken a discussion about "clear decision making" and are trying to say "MS Office is bad." I don't agree that it is bad and see zero connection to the discussion. If you want to talk about MS Office being a product so bad that no honest business person would purchase it, that deserve a thread to discuss. But it doesn't relate here.
There is nothing in this conversation that should trigger a thought like this.
You don't think there are members here who think it is foolish to use MS Windows or MS Office when there are viable free alternatives out there? And that decision, considering the cost of both Windows and Office, could be a sabotage to the business?
Okay, maybe, but I'm not aware of any. PLEASE take this to another thread. It has no place here at all.
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@BRRABill said:
@scottalanmiller said:
This isn't the place for MS Office bashing, start about thread and we can discuss its merits or lack thereof there.
I am saying the opposite.
I'm saying that as long as MS Office "gets the job done" (what most people are looking for it to do ... e-mailing, letters, spreadsheets) it still has value. You don't have to move to OpenOffice just because it saves the company a few dollars.
If OpenOffice really does save money, why would you intentionally not move to it? I'm going off of your assumption that it will save money instead of it might save money in some cases. I don't agree with your assumption even though I am a huge LibreOffice fan - I think that MS Office has extremely viable use cases and might be the best product maybe even most of the time, at least much of the time.
But using your assumption that MS Office is always bad, then it is always bad. If you know this, why would you ever implement it knowing that doing so would sabotage the business?
How are you defining "getting the job done" if the job isn't for the business to be successful?
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@BRRABill said:
I'm saying that as long as MS Office "gets the job done" (what most people are looking for it to do ... e-mailing, letters, spreadsheets)
All people in business have one goal - to make the business money. ANY skewing from this is bad. Not that proximate goals are not needed to achieve the bigger goal, but confusing proximate goals with ultimate goals is very bad and that's how bad decision making starts to happen.
The job of the company is to make money, not to email people.
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@BRRABill said:
Have we ever officially established QB is so imminently disastrous?
This is not an appropriate thread to mention products. This is about goals and decision making. There is a thread for discussing individual products.
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@BRRABill said:
But to try and get an established QB company to move just because ... there are better options which might save them a few bucks? I'm not sure that's a fair argument.
Let me rephrase this statement as we would present it at the annual shareholder's meeting:
We found a better option that would lower our risk and make you, the shareholders, more profit but we didn't feel like doing it so we didn't.
That's how a shareholder would hear that statement.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@BRRABill said:
I'm saying that as long as MS Office "gets the job done" (what most people are looking for it to do ... e-mailing, letters, spreadsheets)
All people in business have one goal - to make the business money. ANY skewing from this is bad. Not that proximate goals are not needed to achieve the bigger goal, but confusing proximate goals with ultimate goals is very bad and that's how bad decision making starts to happen.
The job of the company is to make money, not to email people. Unless their are an email marketer
FTFY
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LOL, sorry for that last post.
I keep forgetting if you post, then decide not to, and move to a different thread, it still thinks you are on the other thread.
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@scottalanmiller the trouble with the examples is that they are clear examples of someone (lawyer,accountant and planner) clearly choosing to do the simplest job they could, regardless of what the customer wanted.
The customer wanted "Top Notch Service" with specifics regarding what they considered top notch service, A get out of jail free card, a huge tax return, and a awesome wedding.
But in every example, they simply didn't perform at their best, unless their best really is as in the examples. In which case the customers hired the wrong people.
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@BRRABill said:
LOL, sorry for that last post.
I keep forgetting if you post, then decide not to, and move to a different thread, it still thinks you are on the other thread.
Oh yeah, that is a bit weird.
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@DustinB3403 said:
@scottalanmiller the trouble with the examples is that they are clear examples of someone (lawyer,accountant and planner) clearly choosing to do the simplest job they could, regardless of what the customer wanted.
But that is exactly the comparison I am trying to make.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Oh yeah, that is a bit weird.
Sometimes I feel a need to drop out of a discussion (such as this one), and forget to discard.
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@DustinB3403 said:
The customer wanted "Top Notch Service" with specifics regarding what they considered top notch service, A get out of jail free card, a huge tax return, and a awesome wedding.
Other than a crazy owner who doesn't care about making money or having their company grow, which I acknowledge does exist and while that is still bad business it is their prerogative, of course, when would someone hiring IT and/or business managers not want "top notch service?" Who hired IT but hopes that they don't do a good job? Who hires a CEO and hopes that they "don't make much money?"
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@scottalanmiller said:
But that is exactly the comparison I am trying to make.
I think a better comparison would be:
- You wanted someone to take pictures of your wedding. You just wanted pictures.
- The photographer did the pictures, but they weren't nearly as good as other pictures you later saw of other weddings.
- You are OK, but in reality all you wanted was pictures, and you didn't want to pay for the bells and whistles of the better photographer.
Now, if there was a 50/50 chance this photographer might burn down the wedding hall and kill all your guests, then perhaps you might be better off going elsewhere. Unless they gave a realllllllllllly good discount.
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@DustinB3403 said:
The job of the company is to make money, not to email people. Unless their are an email marketer
FTFY
Nope, not even then. Never. Email might be loosely tied or closely tied to making money, but never is the goal of the business to send emails, it is always to make money.
Go ask any email marketing firm and as the shareholders if they would prefer to make money without sending emails or if they would prefer to not make money and just send out emails because they love sending emails?
It's a rhetorical question - the goal of all for-profit business is both logically and legally to make money. Sending email might be how the plan to make the money, but it is not the goal, it is a means on the way to the end.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Other than a crazy owner who doesn't care about making money or having their company grow, which I acknowledge does exist and while that is still bad business it is their prerogative, of course, when would someone hiring IT and/or business managers not want "top notch service?" Who hired IT but hopes that they don't do a good job? Who hires a CEO and hopes that they "don't make much money?"
These are decisions we make every day.
Sure, my wife and I wanted the top notch Saturday night top shelf wedding, but we made do with the Saturday afternoon budget option.
There is a different between negligence and always buying the top option.
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@BRRABill said:
- You wanted someone to take pictures of your wedding. You just wanted pictures.
- The photographer did the pictures, but they weren't nearly as good as other pictures you later saw of other weddings.
- You are OK, but in reality all you wanted was pictures, and you didn't want to pay for the bells and whistles of the better photographer.
Well there is an important aspect to my examples that I included intentionally.... in the case of the wedding planner you can reasonable do it yourself without the professional (I know this for a fact because we planned our own wedding without a wedding planner.) Lots of people do this. Taking your own pictures, while technically possible, isn't reasonably possible.
In the case of business decisions in this case, I tried to point out that part of the assumption was that the base level of "it gets the job done" could be accomplished by pretty much anyone. In the wedding planning example, the wedding planner needs to specifically "significantly outperform what you could have done yourself." In the case of IT, we assume that IT pros need to "significantly outperform someone without IT training or focused time could have done."
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@BRRABill said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Other than a crazy owner who doesn't care about making money or having their company grow, which I acknowledge does exist and while that is still bad business it is their prerogative, of course, when would someone hiring IT and/or business managers not want "top notch service?" Who hired IT but hopes that they don't do a good job? Who hires a CEO and hopes that they "don't make much money?"
These are decisions we make every day.
Sure, my wife and I wanted the top notch Saturday night top shelf wedding, but we made do with the Saturday afternoon budget option.
There is a different between negligence and always buying the top option.
You are separating out cost and value and treating "best" as something that exists irrespective of the cost. While that might be a theory in weddings, this concept never applies in a business setting. All decisions are made with profit as a factor, all.
High cost, high quality products vs. low cost, low quality is a reasonable tradeoff to consider in a business. The job of IT and the business is to evaluate the relationship to determine which makes sense for the specific business. Nothing here suggests that the high cost option is the "best" one for the business or that the "free" one is better.
