How to Make Things Faster

Chapter 14. The List

One of the most important attributes you can bring to a team is a sense of relevance. Relevance is the awareness of what matters and what doesn’t. An irrelevant action is like a hammer swing that misses the nail. The secret to keeping your performance work relevant is simple:

Always diagnose the business’s top-priority symptom first.

That prioritized list of symptoms is essential. Without it, it’s hard to be valuable.

For example, imagine that you’ve been invited to do a system health check. There’s no prioritized list of symptoms to work from. You’re just supposed to look at the system holistically and identify everything that looks suspicious about how it’s configured and how it’s running.

Let’s say you find something really interesting, like a missing index, an absurd parameter setting, a poorly connected controller board…something that smells indisputably important. And let’s say you fix it. OK, great. So now: how will you know whether your fix matters or not? Do you remember the answer?

They’re going to introduce you to Phyllis. She’s going to run some report you’ve never heard of, and it’s going to dawn on you that, ah, that list we never made: we’re making it now, and Phyllis’s report is apparently on it, along with who knows what else. And of course you’re nervous whether your fix will matter at all to her report, because you have no idea how that report spends its time.

So, what happens if your health check identifies dozens of potential cure opportunities? ...