What Defines Success Here?

I've been doing a lot of fire-fighting in my consulting gigs lately. Someone comes in to the office, opens their email and discovers a message declaring that the sky is falling, that the building is burning down around us and that the 3rd Horseman of the Apocalypse has just been sighted. Or maybe it's just that the Monthly Widget Report has a subtotal error, but STILL.

That message immediately translates into a DEEP desire to do something. That desire to do something often results in whole teams of people leaping into action without asking the simple question: "What defines success here?"

That's nearly the first question I ask when faced with a small army of people itching to get the emergency behind them. You'd think that it's fairly obvious and yet I often get blank stares when I ask it. Yet, it can often mean the difference between jumping in and grabbing a fire extinguisher because you think that it's just the garbage can by the door on fire or figuring out that the living room, dining room, bedrooms and garage are already a blazing inferno, with the garbage can being merely the latest victim.

In the first case, grabbing the fire extinguisher isn't going to help and will likely result in more burning before you finally call 911. However, if you only have a single sheet of paper on fire in a metal garbage can, calling in the big red ladder truck is overkill.

Basically, when you say, "this emergency will be over when the garbage can is no longer on fire", you've defined success. When you say, "this emergency is over when the house is no longer burning and everyone is out safe and our photos are safe in the car", you've defined success.

In technology end of things, this can mean things like:

• When these 9 different reports bring up data for 2005, 2006 and 2007, we've fixed the reporting services problem.
• When all 4 production web servers bring up this list of 25 web sites, we're done with this emergency.
• When the "object reference not set to an instance of an object" exception is no longer being thrown, we're done with this particular problem.

It often means you need to make a grid of what exactly is broken. Then you can focus on clearing the "X" entries where there's a problem.

The thing that's powerful about this really simple thing is that how it really manages to help people focus and calm down. Next thing you know, the problems actually get solved more quickly, with fewer man-hours involved and everyone's stress level can drop back down to more normal levels.

And, every once in a while, you actually discover that there isn't really even a problem to be fixed.