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Dynamics 365 Sales Solutions: Are You Doing It Right?

Admin, October 7, 2022 1034 Views

Let me ask you a question. I give you two options and ask you to choose. I will ask you to give the reason for your choice. Simple? Wait. Hear the options and you will realize just how sadistic I actually am. Give yourself some time to think and you will sympathize with me. You will actually see yourself in me. So, the choices? The great white shark or the red bellied piranha. See? It is a simple red and white choice.

Would you like to be devoured by a shark or a school of piranhas? Why am I asking this? That will become clear soon. But let me give some details of the choices first. Fun fact both shark and piranha mean sharp teeth.

The great white shark is possibly one, if not the deadliest predator to be created. It apparently has not evolved for a million years, which means that nature considers it to be the perfect predator. A shark can sense movement from a long distance. It can also detect blood and it drives the shark in a feeding frenzy, or so I have read. A shark will announce itself to you by showing you its fin as it swims towards you. It will circle you measuring how good a bite you are till eventually start feasting on you. And you will live long enough to feel the pain and horror.

The red bellied piranha is native to South America, particularly to the Amazon River. Its bite force is disturbingly big compared to its body. Its teeth are strong and sharp. A school of piranha can reduce an animal, any animal, to bones within minutes. A stretch of water will appear… not calm when it is claimed by the piranha. They will be jumping out of the water, demanding you feed yourself to them.

So, with a shark your death will be long and painful and with piranha it will be short and painful. Either way it will be painful.

Now why am I asking you this?

Imagine the shark to be that big, huge solution that became big, huge because it gobbled up 2-3 iterations.

You will fear a shark by noticing its fin some way off, you will fear a big solution by noticing the number of stories or iterations it has within its belly. The shark will torture you by circling you and the solution with torture you by making you realize the number of components, dependencies and data updates it will have within it.

Now imagine the large number of small solutions to be the school of piranha.

Just as the school of piranha will aggressively snap at you, the huge number of smaller solutions will make you sweat very aggressively, especially when you realize that they have not been deployed yet. The components shared between these stories and the fear of one change overwriting the other is going to be bigger, much bigger.

Either of these approaches will mean you will need at least 2 to 3 days to complete the deployment. 2 to 3 days you will spend sweating profusely, cursing loudly, deploying cautiously and in the very worst of cases, undoing everything when something goes wrong and redoing it all.

So, what would be the best option here? Medium sized solutions. Preferably, one solution per iteration. This will keep things manageable and consume less time and energy and keep stress levels low. You might even smile during deployment. With this approach, even the testing will be easier and faster, and all of this will keep the client contented if not outright happy. A strong point to be made here is that you need to make sure the size of the solution remains manageable. That means convincing the client to deploy the solution at the end of an iteration and insisting that they test and provide the necessary feedback before the heat death of the universe.

In this sense, this solution, this approach will not seem like selecting between shark or piranha. It will be like jumping in the water with the friendly bottle nosed dolphins, one of the most intelligent and friendly creatures on earth.

So, what do you think? I would really like to know your experiences because I am sure you would have dealt with both the shark and piranhas. Share your experiences in comments.

Hope this helps!

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