DevOps Blog

Chalk Talk: Bracketology and the Path to Success

2 minute read
Austin Staats

We’re all busy strategizing our next business move, so why not get some insider tips from an expert like Joe Lunardi, inventor of “Bracketology,” which tells you how to create a winning strategy to complete your college basketball bracket. If you have yet to join the national college basketball phenomenon, it’s the yearly culmination of college basketball games into the ultimate tournament.

Developing your bracket is much like accelerating your business and ensuring your platforms and systems are operating at peak performance. But, first, you need to understand the starting point and where you are now to develop the path forward to achieving your goals.

As Joe puts it, “Winning is fun,” and you don’t need to follow every team throughout the season to create a winning bracket. Instead, there are key attributes you need to look for as you head into tournament season. There are unpredictable moments in the tournament every year that ensures it holds up to the college basketball championship phenomenon. It’s all about taking a five-month season and then putting it all on the line in a 40-minute game.

When I hear it explained this way, it reminds me of many clients I work with on replacing Broadcom/CA and Enterprise DevOps initiatives; they spend months planning, coding, building, and testing, and then a few more months releasing, deploying, operating, and monitoring, all to be tested on some peak season, be it Black Friday, Open Enrollment, or other holidays and events.

The two weeks leading up to the tournament are a blur and this weekend’s Selection Sunday is the culmination. But “it’s all about the potential path,” says Joe. “You need to see the bracket beginnings to see the path forward. It’s not just about picking the top seeds to win.” You need to look at the path and it may not be what you think it was before Selection Sunday.

If you’re a casual viewer of the NCAA College Basketball Tournament or a ”fanatic” who fills out one or even multiple brackets, you likely enjoy chasing the win and testing the method to your madness. As you visualize your upcoming bracket, apply some of Joe’s advice to your winning business strategy, too.

Watch this session with Joe Lunardi now to gain some great bracket strategies—for basketball and business.

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These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.

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About the author

Austin Staats

Area Vice President, World-Wide Sales, BMC Austin Staats leads BMC’s Global Competitive Replacement team. In this role, his team helps clients identify the incremental value they will achieve by migrating away from their incumbent products(s), and the level of effort it will take to successfully make this change. He is a proud alumni of Baylor University, where he actively mentors students in the Center for Professional Selling program.

Outside of work, Austin and his wife reside in Houston, TX, where they are heavily involved with their three children’s activities.