Insist on an Accurate, Fact-Based Problem Statement

Stephen M. R. Covey, in his New York Times bestselling book, The Speed of Trust, says that trust comes down to two things: Competence Character

As trust grows, speed increases, and speed, as I like to say, equals profit. So how do you increase the speed by which you can reasonably and confidently give permission to your team? In the world of data, it comes down to two things that you must insist on with your team - two things, by the way, that DBI Software empowers your teams to provide every single time.

In this blog, I’ll focus on the first of the two: insist on an accurate, fact-based problem statement. Just presenting you with a hardware PO or alternate solution isn’t enough, if for no other reason than the discipline that is created for your team. They must find - and report - the right, real, root-cause problem. They must demonstrate knowledge of both the magnitude of the problem, and the impact of the problem.

When they’re reporting the problem, they should be communicating something like, “There’s a statement that is consuming 80% of the CPU, 75% of the I/O, with an average response time of 3.8 seconds, and across the entire database it is consuming 80% of the server’s resources.” Now you may not know what any of those things are - nor do you need to. All you need to know is that if your database is sick, your organization is unhealthy, your customers are unhappy, and your reputation suffers. And, since you may very well have been the one who authorized the purchase of the database system in the first place, you know that anything that’s chewing up 80% of its capacity and slowing down the entire company can’t be good.

Beyond that, because you have trained your team to come to you with a well-stated problem backed by a wealth of statistics, you can now approve the request with confidence. You can say “Yes, with all of these facts I can make a decision with confidence because I know that if I approve it, the DBA is telling me that this 80% cost is going to go away, and the statement that takes 3.8 seconds will be trimmed to sub-second speed.

In the next installment, I’ll talk about the second thing you must insist on with your team: the trust that comes from positive, repeated experiences.

What You Must Know

Trust = Speed = Profit

Success Stories by Industry Leaders Find real examples and insights from our Customer Success Stories with you on how leading companies within their industry are using faster data to increase profits, knowing that slower data results in business failure. Read Here.

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