When I was in college i heard a story about one of my favorite cars, the Mako Shark corvette.  In particular how the paint job was finally agree upon.  You can see the story here  The jist of the story, Bill Mitchell the head of the team, wanted the car painted like the Shark he had on the wall, and the team tried.  Each time Bill would compare the fish to the paint job, and say it wasnt good enough.  At one point the team took the fish, painted the fish and the car the same.  When Bill went to compare the two, they were a perfect match, and he said “finally you got it…”

What does this mean, any time you are asked to compare two things, make sure you are changing the right thing.  Know your target, and sometimes you need to change your target.  One example was we once built a new system, and we were told that we need to compare it to the output of the old system.  For days we were struggling, but then we took a step back.  We looked at the code and calculations of the old system, and realized the calculation was wrong.  Getting the business to compare the old versus the new, would be useless when one is completely incorrect.   We finally were able to convince the business to start comparing it to what the answer should be, not the old data, and got back on track.

My world famous disclaimer…  so, this blog has nothing to do about my current employer.  I provide the information without warranty blah blah blah. I make no money from this blog, there is no advertising, or charges to anyone.  I do this as a brain dump, to leave something behind.  If you want to support me, instead of doing that support one of the charities i care about, the Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital and Hockey in Newark.  I do moderate all comments, and try to remove anything that is not in the spirit of the site.  Thanks for reading