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I stumbled on this article (again) and it got me thinking about how most of us don’t really want to change, we just want change to happen to us because it is too hard to do the actual changing.

A lot of times people will come to us looking for help with issues they are having with implementing development policies for things like rolling apps out into production. They see a demo for Build Manager and think, “WOW! Perfect! Just what we need!". Almost every time they are right, Build Manager would be perfect and could solve quite a few of their problems. The trick is, development policies are more human related, than technology. Tools don’t work if the users are not committed to the practice of using them. It’s not until we go out and start helping them implement Build Manager, or CIAO! or anything else that we (and they) realize that to really get the most (or any) benefit from the tool, there needs to be some fundamental changes to the way they work. Build Manager for example really needs you to think about signer IDs, segregated environments like dev, test, and production, template strategies, etc., before it’s even possible to use it. This wasn’t what the customer was really after though. They were looking for the ‘Best Practices’ pill. Something they could just install and poof – all their problems are gone, the fact that a lot of their problems simply came down to how they operated didn’t occur to them.

Best Practices take work and discipline, tools can help ease the interruption and sometimes even allow you to do things you didn’t think was even possible before. Don’t go looking for a ‘Best Practices’ pill, ‘IT Governance’ pill, or any other type of quick fix like that, rather look for things that can help support a healthy lifestyle, or development practices.