Lesson on The Martian

On January 26, 2016, in English, General, General | Discussion, My work, by Kok mING

I liked this movie. Not because of Matt Damon successfully plant potatoes on Mars. It makes me smile a lot, I know this isn’t a comedy.

Still, I smiled. For all the scenes that the Nasa wants to build the rescue spaceship quicker and try to shorten the time by “thinking out of the box”.

The spaceship construction team was asked to NOT do quality assurance (Testing) for the spaceship built because the boss didn’t see any spaceship gone wrong before so he thinks that was unnecessary to test!

I laughed and that point of time, I felt the pain in reality too. Many times, in my work, I been asked to skip “Testing” due to budget or time constraint. Of course, I don’t have a choice to say no due to “boss is always right!” . Well, put in this way, you can’t convince anyone until something happen. This is the reality. People like to learn it the hard way.

In the movie, the spaceship was not tested and launched… then it dissembled itself in the middle of the sky.

In reality, an software or system crash on the first day of launch. The boss definitely not going to be sacked. Instead, he turn his back to engineer and ask “why you no do Testing? Get me the QA, I need full report and updates every hour until this is fix!”. An incident like this might raise the awareness of importance of Quality Assurance, but time will wash it away. Repeat itself.

We must remember that most successes are built on the proven steps with necessary processes and procedures together with involvement of many parties to compliment each other. The moment you believe something / someone isn’t necessary, think twice, because some roles are meant to be there and not to contribute until something happen, so often their value / existence are being ignored.

I always remind myself, necessity is always important. But not all important thing/person is necessary.  🙂

Got it?

 

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