Key Challenges

Important constraints or risks our organization is facing related to our Key Drivers, Customer Segments and Unique Value Proposition. In other words, this is about strategic risk: Internal or external events, changes and trends that threaten the survival of the organization.

Technology choice & keeping up

VSHN’s core technology

Open Source projects might be discontinued, dysfunctional, no longer a good fit for VSHN or becoming legacy technology.

New and extended standard Cloud Service Provider offerings

Cloud providers might start to offer similar service, quality and expertise, which could make our offerings questionable or obsolete for our customers.

Partner Choice

Software vendors providing core technology to VSHN or Cloud Service Providers might discontinue the product, make huge licensing or pricing adjustments, or change features and limitations that directly affect if and how we can keep using it.

Quality and stability of our service

Major outages of our services

If not handled properly it can make customers question the value we provide to them and the relationship as a whole. Especially when using Cloud Service Providers and Open Source technology, we are at the front with our customers, and even if we didn’t cause the incident, we are the ones responsible for resolving it.

Stability vs Bleeding edge technology

Keeping up with technology and stability doesn’t always go hand-in-hand, finding the right balance is tricky. If not done right, we’re the ones to blame.

Technical debt

Keeping up with technology often leads to an endless backlog of work, we might not be able to keep up. Wrong prioritization might lead to a stand-still or cause operational implications we can’t handle.

VSHNeers, and how we are organized

Downsides of our organization form

According to our Key Driver VSHNeers as VSHN, we want to be this special working environment, which also means that we need to always find people who want to play an active part in such an environment, and can cope with the added accountability for the course of the organization.

Missing Leadership

Things do not magically happen, missing leadership in a learning agile organization of mostly self-managing teams can mean that we don’t do what’s needed and waste time on everything else, becoming unaligned with our strategy, purpose and values.

Needed technology knowledge and experience

Covering all the needed technical knowledge 24x7 for a big set of technology and Cloud Service Providers can be overwhelming.

VSHNeers as our highest good

VSHNeers are our main and most important good, we don’t hold any patents or strategic business intelligence, licenses, or similar. Loosing good VSHNeers can, at least temporarily, seriously affect our ability to provide our services.