Which is Better for your Company and ColdFusion Apps? Control or Speed?

Do you feel like your company is moving in slow-motion? Would you like your company to be more agile, which is to be nimble or the ability to move quickly and easily. What about your ColdFusion applications? Do they move as quickly and efficiently as you would like?

Speed takes a few key things, among them, willingness to let go of control and being more flexible.

Remember what legendary race car driver Mario Andretti once said,

“If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough.”

Let’s talk about what you have to do to get your company and your ColdFusion apps and projects up to speed.

Scared of Losing Control?

I understand, this company is your responsibility, and you want to try to keep track of everything. From the moment you arrive in the morning, to the time you leave, you are working hard. You put out fires and solve problems. Your stamp of approval must be on everything. If there is a change in your ColdFusion applications, you have to know about it.

Have you thought maybe the reason your company is moving slowly, or your projects are not happening quickly enough is you? Are you the choke-point or the weak link in the chain? It’s hard to think that way but try. There is only one of you. If you must have control of everything and you touch everything, could you be the one slowing down progress?

Think about what Lisa Earle McLeod said in her Huffington Post article, “Everything is Not Under Control: That’s a Good Thing.” She says: “It’s tempting to want life to be more predictable, but keeping things under control, rarely creates greatness.”

Think about it while we move on.

Speed or Control? Which is better?

Let’s assume for a minute, that you can only have one, speed or control. Which option would you choose?

While having a fast and agile company is wonderful, if you have no control, things can easily get out of control. You should give up as much control as you can, until you feel a little uncertain, and then let your people do their jobs and watch your company grow!

At this point, I think you get the picture. For your company and your ColdFusion applications and projects to be successful and run smoothly, you need a measure of both speed and control.

Your Company

We all know that to stay competitive in today’s market, we must move quickly. It’s inevitable we will fail sometimes, but we need to fail fast and move on. We need to keep a keen eye on what is going on in our industries and look for trends. When we see something happening, we have to be able to jump on it at a moment’s notice.

So, speed and control in equal measure is the key!

Adobe ColdFusion Applications

ColdFusion apps are a different thing altogether. Whether you are creating a new application or upgrading your legacy code to the latest CFML, you need to work with a combination of speed and control. Control, like version control software, or documentation is especially important. But, you also don’t want to be stuck with the same project forever, so speed is important. It’s a drain on resources!

The Third Key — Flexibility

Flexibility is easier when you have a small company, but all the more important as your company grows. If you’ve given up some precious control and now your company is speeding along, flexibility becomes important when needing to make decisions quickly and trusting others in your company to do their jobs.

When you show the people who work with you that you are flexible, they will be more than willing to give more in return.

Try it with your lead developers. Give them more and more responsibility as they prove they can handle the load, and the quality and speed of your ColdFusion projects will improve.

Matthew Toren wrote: “I define flexibility in business as the ability for a company to make whatever internal changes are necessary to respond effectively to the changing outward environment, as quickly as possible.”

Let that sink in.

The Keys: Control, Speed, and Flexibility

Each of these keys, by themselves, unchecked, will be a bad thing for your company and your ColdFusion projects. An equal measure of control and speed, along with a lot of flexibility, will take your company to where it needs to be.

Business isn’t predictable. There should be some uncertainty, and some days when you feel like you are flying by the seat of your pants. But if you have the stomach for it, along with courage, everything in your business, including your ColdFusion projects and applications will run smoother and faster.

And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.

What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.

And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.

You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.

All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything — your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.

Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.

No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens Next

ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist

Modern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.

√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production

√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading

√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF

√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free!

Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

Originally published at teratech.com on July 13, 2018.