Always Strive for the Best! (and Never Get Anything Done)

Best is the enemy of better.  You may have heard that before.

Often times I’ve seen this… someone asks for a solution for a simple problem.  During design, the designers say “and it really should do this” and the customer says “and it would be great if it did that”, and so on, and so on… and soon, you’ve spent a year in design, you panicked six months earlier and started developing, and the prototypes just made it worse, as more ideas creep in…

Or, even worse- you hit Acceptance Testing with the business, and now that they’ve seen the product, they have a dozen ideas as to new things that should be in there- and not only do they not like the product you’ve built now, because they like their new ideas better, they don’t even want to accept what you’ve built, even though it is to spec.

This scenario is often handled by effective scope management.  What do you do, though, when the new ideas are within scope?  There’s more to this than simply managing scope.  There’s keeping the buy-in to your project.  There’s the perceived success or failure.

My advice?  Keep bringing the customer (or designer, or anyone else involved) back to the main reason you are building this.  Remind people of the business problem that led to this project being started, and why the project needs to stay on scope and on schedule.  Assure them that getting them what they asked for is the real goal here.  Their new ideas are just that- new ideas, and they can be addressed, but doing it now will put off their real goal.

People fail to keep their eye on the ball sometimes.  Sometimes you have to remind them to hit the ball first, before they take off running for the home run.

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