| This! So much. Sometimes you can plan for success/heroic actions (in the good way) but often it happens by accident. The right person digging into a weird problem they encountered, two people sitting together to review a design or someone doing a firmware update that fixes a bug in the RAID controller giving you double the IOps... I have tons of anecdotes from colleagues who did some unplanned work just because they talked with someone else and that work then turned out to have massive positive impact.
The results are lauded but it wasn't even clear when the "little" project started that it would actually be a massive boon. At a prior job (some website selling hotels online) I was responsible for the project that ended up giving the whole fleet a 25% capacity boost. Instead of 2000 machines we only bought 1500 next quarter. If we calculate that in perpetuity my project was a massive success. Millions of EUR saved since 2011. The project initially started out as "tons of people tried building a decent perl RPM but couldn't get it to work, could you have a look?". The guy originally tasked with it was busy fixing a broken LDAP server.
So I built some RPMs, wrote a bit of tooling around it and we ended up with a Perl environment separate from the system perl which was great because the business was nearly exclusively running on Perl 5.8.9. At that point I looked into using that to get us off CentOS4. With the help of two colleagues we got a CentOS5 environment running and could migrate to a x86_64 environment. That migration than gave us a 25% capacity boost and happiness ensued all around. The OS upgrade wasn't part of the original project scope, we just went with it because it made sense and management understood that it's a good idea. |