Several years ago, I encountered a client that made the cardinal mistake; they hired a team of “resources” to deliver their project instead of seeking out the right skills. In this instance the tool they used was not MuleSoft but rather a Business Process Management System with powerful API capabilities. That said, the lesson holds true in any context, including MuleSoft so I will share it here.

This company sent its “Resources” on a course, offered by the vendor, where they learned how to use said tool. For the record, I had attended this same course a few years earlier. It is a great introduction to the product but, as I pointed out in my MuleSoft Certificate and the Ninja article, certification does not a Whisperer make.

Freshly retuned from the course, and proudly brandishing their shiny new certificates, this team set to work…

… and then encountered all of the real-world challenges that the course had simply not covered. Nine months later, they had developed a set of processes that looked sensible enough, and which they could show to senior management. The problem only became apparent when you looked under the hood. These processes had all the functionality of a Powerpoint Presentation; they didn’t actually do anything!

After nine months of work, this team of eleven-plus developers had built a solution that the CEO could have drawn up himself, using Powerpoint shapes and arrows. The project was now officially late and actually on the verge of failure.

In desperation, the management team decided to bring in some Whisperers.  This team of four integration experts and one experienced project manager delivered a working solution in nine weeks.

Was their cost to company higher than that of the commodity resources when considering the daily rate?

Yes — and no!

When you consider the fact that a team of four Whisperers was able to deliver a working solution in nine weeks, when the team of eleven “resources” was unable to achieve anything even approaching a solution in as many months, well …

Of course, this is a case of 20/20 hindsight. At the outset, the company’s management team did not know that their commodity resources would fail. They simply looked at the relative day-rates and made a commercial decision.

However, I would submit good business leaders understand the fact that not all “resources” are equal. An experienced leader would have recognised the inherent risks in the above scenario. That experience would have triggered some alarm bells. A good business leader knows about things like the Dunning-Kruger effect and its application in the Technology Hype Cycle.

In short, a good business leader could have predicted this outcome. They would have sought out a handful of Whisperers rather than a team of Commodity Resources with a fresh set of certificates — and they would have done this up-front.

A good business leader would have saved this company nine months of pain and wasted effort.