The Integration Engineer
When it just has to work.

A friend of mine once said in a meeting, “Let make sure we’re not trying to save the world when all we need to do is get lunch.”  This stuck with me and I often see teams of developers getting excited about what can be done to the point where they loose site of what needs to be done.

When this happens there is a tendency to try and “save the world” or at least far exceed the scope of the project or problem.  To avoid this tendency, it is good to have someone in the meeting and involved in the planning and scheduling of resources that will constantly ask, “How does doing this help us solve the problem?”  And this also means that we should have a well defined goal for our project.

(If you are your project, write down the purpose and focus and read it every day, or more often to stay on target.)

Projects that succumb to “save the world” tendencies have a propensity to get bogged down, experience massive scope creep, miss their deadlines and expend lots of energy that does not return in realized benefits to the developer, team or company.

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 18th, 2011 at 8:21 am and is filed under Integration Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.