One of my favorite occurrence for me is the realization that I am avoiding a mistake because of a previous Lessons Learned. Learning from your mistakes is awesome, especially when it saves you a lot of time, effort, and capital.
Yesterday was one of those awesome days.
We had a conference call deciding what features need to be in our new online advertiser website. Scott brought up a slight issue with our current configuration and we needed to discuss how to resolve it. This issue isn't a bug & isn't urgent in nature, but could affect future capabilities to our software. We had two directions we could have taken.
Option A) re-scope the project to correct the issue, modify existing database & objects, and add weeks to current schedule.
Option B) clearly identify that the feature is not currently important, BUT ensure we have flexibility in our software to come back and fix it if people start demanding it.
Far too many times in the past had we gone with Option A because we didn't understand:
- How important the feature was to our success
- How to build flexibility in our software in case it becomes important to our success in the future
We used to stop all projects, adding time, cost, and LOADS of frustration to incorporate last minute features.We wanted everything to be perfect IN CASE these features were needed. And guess what, most of the time that feature ended up never being used.
So instead we chose Option B. It isn't important enough to take the resources to add now. But we carefully walked through our current software and made sure that it was adaptable & flexible enough that we could add it in the future IF people request it. BUT if they do not request it, then we just saved a bunch of time, money, and sanity.
It may sound like a simple difference between the options, but believe me... taking time to make sure we have flexibility to respond to the market is way easier than trying to cover every capability under the sun.
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