Check this out, it's crazy I tell ya, crazy. The CERN institute writes "The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), currently being built at CERN near Geneva, is the largest scientific instrument on the planet. When it begins operations in 2007, it will produce roughly 15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data annually...."

15 petabytes is a ridiculous amount of data, so I decided to do a little simple calculation. I will compare the CERN machinery to the standard harddisk on the market today, which is 160GB in size. 15 petabyes of data a year is roughly:

• 93.750 standard harddisks per year
• 257 standard harddisks per day
• 11 standard harddisk per hour

If we assume that the price of a standard harddisk is about 80 USD, you will be spending:

• 7.500.000 USD per year
• 20.560 USD per day
• 880 USD per hour

The conclusion of this could be that CERN has a big bunker for storing all the 160GB standard harddisks...

A couple of colleagues and I talked about how unpleasant surprises could be avoided if you use the time needed to research the task before actually starting to work on it. It turned out, we all did it in our own distinct way, but the end results were the same. I, for instance, use scenarios as my primary tool for scoping a task. Some uses a more theoretic approach and some googles for the answer first and asks the questions later. These are all valid approaches in my opinion.

The tricky part of all this is, that it is very hard to measure the effectiveness of each approach. After all, it is the finished task that is the goal and not the process it self. Some would disagree, but that is another argument. I think my approach is the best, of course, because it asks the questions before looking for answers. The questions help define the details surrounding the task, details that are both critical and non-critical to success. The answers can then be found in books or the web if you do not know them yourself.

By finding-the-answers-first approach, you would typically search the web for similar tasks and read about how other people have solved them. This is also very efficient, but it does not let you define the details of your own task before you get the answer. You could end up half way through the task, realizing you had taken a wrong turn because you didn’t see a small but important detail somewhere down the road. If however, you are convinced that the answer suit your needs, one could argue it would be a waste of time asking all the questions, and thereby making this your favorite approach.

It is of course not so black and white. Different approaches suits different tasks and it would be wisely to choose the right approach before starting the task. However, some tend to lean more on one specific approach more often than others do. In fact, this was exactly what we found when discussing this at work. We all had our favorite.