Review: The Last Link

posted Mon Apr 30 17:53:29 +0000 2007 - permalink

As I've mentioned before, it can be a great boon to your organization if the software development team leads have an understanding of the business. It helps when negotiating schedules, understanding the development cycle and maintenance requirements, and the actual needs of your customers. In an effort to better understand how to close my own personal business-speak gap, I turned to Gregg Crawford's The Last Link.

The book itself is decidedly meta. With subtitles like 'The way to close the gap between your corporate strategy and the results you seek is to execute effectively' (for chapter 3), I find some of the content a little hard to swallow. For example, how do you identify key 'decision makers' and the 'strategy to connect them'? I guess you just 'do' because the realities of the process are buried in an ever-murkier digression of marketing speak that would at best belong on the book's jacket rather than anywhere within the text itself.

For all of the professional programmer's loathing of market- speak, there are upsides. One very good chapter is chapter 4, which points out that we need to not only look at results but also at processes, including things like days it takes to close a sale and average number of days of each deal per stage. This also means that development teams will probably have to provide means for managers to report on these contexts, but it also validates a lot of what engineers do to close our own gaps in delivering useful software on time and under budget (for extra credit, sprinkle in some of the 6- sigma lingo about self-correcting-processes embedded deep into your processes). The best part, even if I was in sales, is at the end where he has little walkthroughs -- the only real illumination of the entire text.

If anything, this book actively demonstrates exactly what it purports to fix -- there is a distinct gap between the overall company strategy and the implementation and execution of that strategy. Ultimately, if you work on a software team that builds a company's internal tools, you understand where the tires hit the pavement and you need to make sure to provide input to the leadership team as to how best to implement, if not execute, the pieces of the strategy that require customized software and reporting. Coming to internal tools only after sales has attempted to rollout a new strategy only exacerbates the intracompany problems, and careens any hope of successful sales execution toward failure.