The Fifth Ideal: Customer Focus

Hi,

“The VPN should not be operated by you [Sysadmins].”

After this sentence, I saw startled faces.

It slipped out of me. During the weekly Jour Fixe between the developers and admins.

It came to the question of what our priorities are.

It hit a nerve.

Probably not because the participants are emotionally attached to the VPN.

Probably not because the statement is wrong.

No - it’s more likely because it’s so unconventional for the team.

The team has done everything themselves for the last 15 years

The company is not an engineering company. Only recently has significant money been made with digital products.

For this reason, it was normal to do everything ourselves.

• We need a VCS? Then we’ll set up Gitlab.
• We want to automate our pipeline? Then we’ll set up Jenkins.
• We need to protect our internal data from external access? Then we’ll set up a VPN.

All these tasks are necessary and required.

But are the tasks important?

Yes.

And no.

We don’t make money with the VPN. But without it, we have a security risk. It could ruin the entire enterprise.

Geoffrey Moore distinguishes two types of work within a company.

Core and Context.

Core is what our customers are willing to pay for

It is our core product. What sets us apart from the market. What we do best.

That’s what we’re paid for.

Context includes all other tasks

These tasks are necessary to run our business. But they’re not the core product.

Our ERP. The HR software. Accounting. And our Gitlab, Jenkins, or VPN.

Without them, we can’t fulfill our task. But no customer will pay us for using Gitlab instead of Github, Jenkins instead of Teamcity, or OpenVPN instead of Cisco. It’s a necessity.

The Fifth Ideal: Customer Focus

When we develop software, we must focus on our core product. That must be where our focus lies. Context is important, but only as far as necessary. Any effort that we can minimize in the context is time saved.

Hence my statement. The VPN is important. It has to be there. Someone has to maintain it. The question is - should it be the same colleagues who could work on the core?

To quote Gene Kim : “Context should never kill core.”

Rule the Backend,

~ Marcus