I’ve spent much of my career trying to find roadblocks to technical and organizational success. This passion leads me to great tools like TeamCity and of Chef. My success in leveraging tools for organizational success leads me to be opinionated about what tools we should be using and how we should be doing things in our organization.

It is so easily get locked into the right solution that would solve all of our problems. Early on that worked just fine for me, but over the years I’ve changed my approach.

As I’ve grown with our organization from a newly acquired startup to a mid-sized company to a large multinational, I’ve realized that doing the right thing without alignment with the key stakeholders is the wrong thing. It’s not enough to read a book and evaluate a tool like Chef to see that it will solve our problems. It’s not even enough to talk developers into using it and seeing its value. One must do serious work to analyze the state of the business, find the pain points that are either preventing revenue or creating unnecessary cost, and then set a strategy for addressing those things.

After that, one finds the right way. After that, one finds the tool that they’ll use to solve the problem.

Anyone claiming to be the right tool or solution before that analysis happens is likely wasting your time.