Managing a megaservice - Keep it simple!

January 15, 2006 from The Practical PM

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In a Conversation with Phil Smoot, product unit manager in Microsoft’s MSN division, Phil discusses large-scale megaservice Hotmail.

BF Here’s the ultimate open-ended question: If you were to talk to someone who was about to walk into a situation managing or operating and engineering a megaservice, or was thinking about creating such a service from scratch, what kind of advice would you give? What questions would you want this person to keep in mind?

PS I’d see if this person really wants to do it. Has he or she considered teaching? The best advice is just basically to keep everything as simple as possible—simple processes, simple SKUs, simple engineering. These systems get to be very big very fast. I don’t think there’s really any one particularly hard, gnarly problem, but when you add them all up, there are lots and lots of little problems. As long as you can keep each of those pieces simple, that seems to be the key. It’s more of a philosophy, I think, than anything else.
(emphasis mine).

I can't imagine a technical program manager who won't benefit from reading the interview.


This article is syndicated from The Practical PM . The original article is available here. Read more in Project Management News, The Practical PM .

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