Drag racing the bus

Picture it. You’re a school district transportation engineer. You’re in charge of purchasing a fleet of new school busses for your district. The big ones. The expensive ones. The ones that will last you for the foreseeable future. So, you call up Bus Vendor A, B, and C and inform them that you’re in the process of selecting a fleet of new school busses. The following week each vendor dutifully delivers their ‘bus of choice’ to be evaluated. You then grab your intern, put him at the midway point of the bus from ‘Vendor A’ and take it for a spin! You see how fast it goes from 0 to 60. You see how it corners. People hear tires screeching from all over the city as you and your one other occupant sling this bad boy around town ‘evaluating’ the bus. You then repeat the same process for ‘Vendor B’ and ‘Vendor C’. You aggregate your data. You correlated your data. You make pie charts about your data. You do ROI calculations on your data. You do comfort analysis on your data. You do handling analysis on your data. You made your ‘educated’ recommendation and purchased a fleet.

Day 1 of school rolls around and the first thing your brand spanking new fleet of school busses does is immediately do the one thing you neglected to test: they loaded up with kids and trudged along at 20 MPH safely around town. You start getting complaints. They don’t stop well. They don’t handle well. They don’t get good gas mileage. They bounce all over the place and your district has to send 2,000 kids to chiropractic care because you didn’t evaluate the bus under the conditions it’s going to be used in. Instead, you took it for a joy ride. You drag raced it. The one bus that went the fastest with a single guy in it, you bought. When you deployed it, it broke because you didn’t test it using real world scenarios.

Please, don’t drag race your evaluation Access Points. Test them like you’re going to operate them. That way you get a realistic view of how they’re going to behave in the real world. Do your self a favor. Stop joy riding your vendors gear and put it in the real world to test it.

This blog inspiration courtesy of @florwj . Go follow him. He’s awesome.

-Sam