Introduction
Some time ago I drew what I think about the approach of the organizations in general (governments, institutions, companies, departments) when there is a new demand/need/project.
In general, it can be applied in situations when a decision is needed.
Some people call it “politics” without being political… I call it now the RGB approach. Here is the draft:
As you see I wrote their countries and the major respective ideology the rules of the parties in those regions, but as I said before those approaches, let’s imagine that there is a need to build a bridge for light traffic on the same location with the red (communism), blue (capitalism) or green (social democracy) approach.
Use case
Building a bridge
In general with the red approach the bridge would be build is few days for a small cost, with the green approach a lot of discussion regarding the impacts, positive/negative are done, including a lot of forecasting taking the longest time and a lot of money, in the blue method the spent amount is also high, but the discussion would be around who can sponsor the costs and to decide to have a new MacDonald’s or a KFC.
What would be your approach?
In this phase, the engineering costs in the green mode are quite high, but the decision makers would do a big party to self praise them for the greater achievement.
From the other side, the red bridge would start to have high maintenance costs due to low quality materials applied or maybe because some steps of the constructions were just ignored.
Finally, the blue bridge seams to be the balance in terms of time, budget and quality…
The pictures shown do not represent the example of the bridge that the project wanted to build, maybe the following one would be the red one:
And then you can imagine the other two colours….
… Now picture this bridge where there are new requirements or use cases, one that could easily be needed is to cross big trucks!!!
How the different colours approach those new use cases?
Here is a guess (this is based on my experience working with the three different colour people (reds, greens, blues)):
REDS:
Easy, build a bridge side by side to cross trucks.
BLUES:
Same bridge but add tolls due to the usage change.
GREENS:
No change, trucks can also cross it because everything was thought during the engineering phase.
Costs by colour: Engineering, Ownership and end user
As you can imagine, the three different approaches have different impacts on the costs for the final solution.
REDS:
The RED approach will keep the Engineering costs low, but the ownership will be increase in steps each time there is a new bridge, that will be a non-stopping build/rebuild of the projects.
– Engineering (Low)
– Ownership (High)
– User (Low)
GREENS:
The Engineering costs on the green approach are very high with some vision for the future that can include forecast of usage, ecological impact etc… sometimes can be overshooting causing projects to stall before it can start.
Europe — Portugal — Alcochete — Airport project is in discussion since 1969
– Engineering (High)
– Ownership (Medium)
– User (Low)
In the green projects, the costs of ownership will decrease with time due to applied best practices of engineering. It is the intention that the costs for users are low, but in real life sometime the only way to keep the systems running is to increase the cost to whom use it.
BLUES:
– Engineering (Medium)
– Ownership (Low)
– User (high)
In the BLUE system is the end user that pays for it. During the initial stage are found ways to funding the execution by “any” mean, the main target is the profit, as it is the only way to convince investors to lend the money to make it.
Epilogue
The presented ideas are maybe extreme or simplistic but in your daily life probably you need to decide which colour to apply in a specific situation, that decision can impact the current and future success of the things you do and in some cases can impact the lives of many people…
… Blend RGB wise! Together with Black and White, you can create a huge pallet of colours.
