The Customization Death Spiral The Customization Death Spiral is a termed penned by the upper management here at EDEN. The Customization Death Spiral refers to the never ending amount of customizations we must do to match our application to the customer's needs and desires. Constantly our technicians are always spending time working on these customizations which result in less time actually applied to the making improvements on the out of the box version of the software. The reason why it is dubbed a death spiral is simple. These customizations never end. One work order comes in and then another one comes in. Constantly there is more work that needs to get scheduled than there is currently in development. Recently several 100 hour work orders or greater have forced upper management to take a step back and re-evaluate exactly what it is that we should be focusing more time on. The Customization Death Spiral blocks up the schedule or many of our programmers which results in the applications not getting a much needed wash and dry through normal spin cycles that generally result in one major upgrade a year making the software ahead of the game and on track to destroy its competition. Which it does. One way in which we are attempting to alleviate this Customization Death Spiral is to start outsourcing many of the actual customization work to consulting firms. This will alleviate many of the internal technician's time so that we can focus. Customization Death Spiral is a problem we need to resolve and we are currently realigning the tracks several weeks down the line.
  ¶ 9/16/2003 12:23:00 PM