Driving Technical Change

Pitfalls

First, this technique is predicated on a bunch of ifs. If you can find a pain point, if you can use your solution, if you can make it compelling, and if you can convince people to use it, this can be successful. So, some of this, like other techniques, depends on having the correct opportunities. But you need to be looking for them. Opportunities rarely gift wrap themselves.

Just because you tie your solution to something doesn’t mean a co-worker can’t untie that knot. In the previous Eclipse story, it’s just a bunch of Java code thrown into an Eclipse plug-in. You don’t have to be a genius to ask whether it could be pulled out. If that happens, you have a cool solution that doesn’t help you with your goal.

Also just because you get ...