The South East Asia SOA Weblog

I recently celebrated Chinese New Year with my relatives and I talked with some friends about how they celebrated their Chinese New Year with their relatives. The Chinese usually come together to meet at an elder’s house to pay respect to the elder and meet other members of the family. Frequent topic that comes out during the casual chit-chat is usually about how well one has been doing with one’s life so far. Some see this as an opportunity to show how their business has been going well for the past year, some brag about his new marriage is going very sweet and rewarding, some other talk about their children who recently get an award at school. Everybody wants to show how successful his life has been. Everybody needs to feel successful.

Somehow, I kinda reflect these things on an IT project. In a long-running IT project, it is important for the team to feel successful and feel that they are on the right track throughout the project, everybody needs to go home every once in a while with a smile and a peace of mind that he has accomplished his milestone for the day. This is more reason why I evangelize on iteration methodology, not only it helps the project to adapt the project’s trajectory often to accommodate any last-minute-but-extremely-important new business requirements, but these milestones also help the team to understand whether they are on track or not. If they are, they can feel more motivated knowing that they must have done the right thing, if not it gives them a chance to evaluate what’s wrong and rectify any problems they are facing.

The same applies in SOA. Many clients I talk with feel that embarking on an SOA journey is like sailing into the unknown with so many mysteries at sea and it will take a long time before they can see a new land. The manager feels like it’s a long and risky journey with his life (or in this case, his job) is at stake should he fails. The truth is, it doesn’t have to be like that. We can break down the projects into smaller bits, so it is easier for us to swallow. We don’t have to bit off more than we can chew. Take a couple of most critical (or easier, if you need some training ground) business processes and focus on automating those, conquer those before moving on to the next business processes. Integrate a couple or more of the systems required to support and automate the business processes then celebrate your first milestone of the project success. The key is to get started, so we can get the wheel rolling. The secret of getting ahead is getting started.

I would like to quote Zig Ziglar from his book “What I Learned on the Way to the Top":

“Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome”

Perhaps it’s time to change our way of thinking about long journeys (like implementing SOA in our company) and take the first step to make it happen. We don’t have to finish the big SOA project to automate the entire business processes in our company by the time the next Chinese New Year comes, but we can tell our relatives that we have helped automated the marketing and procurement business processes that save the company X amount of money, thus we are entitled to a promotion and we can drive in a new shiny sedan parked just outside. Now, that’s a success in motion.

And lastly, I would like to wish anyone in this blog a warm “Happy Chinese New Year"! May the New Year bring us all a lot of happiness, prosperity and joy. Gong Xi Fa Chai.