Simple Systems Have Less Downtime

guest · Mar 7, 2020

Simple Systems Have Less Downtime
March 2, 2020
https://www.gkogan.co/blog/simple-systems/

The Maersk Triple-E Class container ship is 1,300 feet long, carries over 18,000 containers across 11,000 miles between Europe and Asia, and… Its entire crew can fit inside a passenger van.

As a former naval architect and a current marketing consultant to startups, I found that the same principle that lets a 13-person crew navigate the world’s largest container ship to a port halfway around the world without breaking down also applies to startups working towards aggressive growth goals:
Simple systems have less downtime.
Ships contain simple systems that are easy to operate and easy to understand, which makes them easy to fix, which means they have less downtime. An important quality, considering that “downtime” for a ship could mean being stranded thousands of miles from help.
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Why Simplicity Leads to Less Downtime
1. Proficiency takes less time.
If the person responsible for the system leaves, falls overboard, gets hit by a bus, or gets pulled into another project, another person can take over without much learning or training. That means more people are able to step in to troubleshoot and fix issues.
2. Troubleshooting takes less time.
In a system where the behavior of each component and its relationship to other comments is easily understood, ruling out issues and finding the broken component—the root cause—is more intuitive.
3. More alternative solutions.
When each part of the system has a clear function, alternatives are easier to find.

For example, imagine a Salesforce process that uses a mishmash of automation and third-party tools to score, filter, classify, and assign new sales leads. If that fails then there is no obvious replacement.
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