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Re^2: The dangers of perfection, and why you should stick with good enough

by Bloodrage (Monk)
on Mar 11, 2008 at 22:28 UTC ( [id://673634]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Re: The dangers of perfection, and why you should stick with good enough
in thread The dangers of perfection, and why you should stick with good enough

One piece of advice I heard recently was 'spend the company's money and your time as though it is your money and your time'.

I've seen this work spectacularly badly at Universities, where every effort is made to horde the income from projects for 'rainy days', to the detriment of the project. Very similar to the way the project leader ran his own finances (lived like a pauper on a strong salary). This was really bad in two ways: His group constantly ran cost over-runs because of equipment failures because of the refusal to service or upgrade equipment, or doing specialist tasks in-house rather than contracting the specialist (usually the statistician). This also often breached the contract with the agency who gave him the grant money for his project! All the funds were for a specific project, not something else and not for profit (which is how 'savings' have to be catagorised here). What was worst was that he never spent those savings, the internal account he stashed his savings in kept getting (legitimately) skimmed to cover costs in other projects (company accounts aren't bank accounts after all).

Money, especially a clients money for a project, is to be spent not saved.1


1 This of course excludes the money marked as 'profit' that should be taken out of the project managers hands immediately, I'm talking about the money that was marked down as 'costs'. Never ever bloody ever run under budget.

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Re^3: The dangers of perfection, and why you should stick with good enough
by samizdat (Vicar) on Mar 13, 2008 at 13:21 UTC
    I certainly can't disagree with you, Bloodrage, that there are situations where anal-retentives in the wrong place screw things up. I'm hoping that most engineers I know won't be so stupid as to act like a bean-smasher.

    What I meant by that advice was that we should have the attitude that we have to make each dollar and each hour of our time count. That kind of individual sense of responsibility is what makes a free market work and it's also the way to keep a big corporation from descending into bureaucratic ossification. The best way to reduce operating expenses is to get development done as rapidly and effectively as possible. Sometimes that means spending more to get enough tools to do the job right, other times it means spending more design time on a whiteboard before spending money.

    Don Wilde
    "There's more than one level to any answer."

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