Dave Nicolette has an interesting post on the subject of good enough now vs better later.  He quotes Gall’s Law: 

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”

and goes on to discuss various takes on the idea that quick and simple is often better than slow and perfect. 

The aphorism I’ve tended to use for this is:

Your first try at anything is going to be wrong.  So make it cheap, simple, and wrong rather than expensive, complicated and wrong.

Which, now I think about it, is another way of saying your development process is going to be iterative whether you like it or not, so learn to like it.

Engineers’ personality types

For purposes of motivation and task assignment I’ve tended to think of design engineers as being somewhere on a spectrum between two extreme types I term “creator” and “builder”.

Creator types are in it for the challenge of coming up with something new, and are happiest when on the very edge of being out of their depth. Their biggest buzz comes when they’ve been beating their head on something they thought was impossible for weeks and have just seen the fist glimmer of a solution. Although the best of them recognise and enjoy the synergy that good teams bring, being part of a team per se doesn’t do it for them. They perform well under extreme pressure but can’t sustain high stress levels indefinitely – a “sprint and glide” environment works best for them. They respond well to an “only you can save mankind” approach.

Builder types like the feeling of being a cog in a well-oiled machine. They like well-defined tasks which are challenging but clearly possible, and enjoy the steady flow of task in, task done, task out. They don’t respond well to the extreme pressure you can apply to a creator type, but will hold up at their pressure limit for much longer. They need to see that the rest of the machine is holding up its end, but given that respond well to a “don’t let the team down” approach.

Most of us sit on a spectrum somewhere in between the two, and understanding where someone fits (which may move around depending on circumstances) is an important line management skill.

I’m reading Boehm & Turner’s “Balancing Agility & Discipline” [47] at the moment, and I’m interested to see that this stacks up pretty well with the “Agile” and “plan-driven” workspace cultures they refer to (p49) . I hadn’t thought of it in the context of matching the project approach to the people you have, but – yes.