If IT was a restaurant

* Disclaimer: this is not about my current project/employer. It applies to all projects everywhere.

I heard a colleague talking about an effective way to explain “good IT practices” to non-technical stakeholders, using “the restaurant metaphor”

Imagine that you run a commercial kitchen and you only ever cook food, because selling cooked food is your business.

Now, what if your focus was on profits exclusively. So you only [cooked and sold food], and nothing else. I mean nothing else. For instance, what if you never clean the dishes, never scrape the grill, never manage the food inventory (fridge/freezer etc.)? Do you think this approach is going to be sustainable? You can be certain that the health inspector will shut your business down pretty quickly.

Software, on the other hand, doesn’t have health inspectors. It has kitchen staff who become more alarmed over time at the state of the kitchen they’re working-in, and if nothing is done about it, there will come a point where the kitchen starts failing to produce edible meals.

Generally, you can either convince decision makers that cleaning the kitchen is more profitable in the long run or you can count on food poisoning and kitchen fires.