👉 One hour… that’s all I wanted or needed. Instead, I ended up on a never-ending odyssey through corporate IT, all in the name of efficiency.
I submitted an IT work order to integrate a third-party survey tool with my company’s CRM. The survey company had completed hundreds of these integrations with the same CRM and stated that it would only require about an hour of our IT department’s time.
In my first meeting with IT, they said they were trying to limit third-party integrations and were worried the project would consume too much of their time. They disregarded the fact that I only wanted one hour of labor and insisted that they be allowed to try to develop a tool that would meet my needs.
Three months later, they delivered a product that did not meet the requirements. I asked again if I could just have an hour of labor, and they said not until they were sure it would only be an hour.
Over the next 21 months, I had over a dozen meetings with various IT personnel until they finally approved my request. The integration was completed in under an hour after IT gave the green light.
👉 In IT’s quest to avoid potential overruns and ensure that the project was perfectly scoped, they spent well over 100 hours of labor and delayed an integration for two years just to approve a one-hour project.
Now, I’m sure the IT department has plenty of horror stories about out-of-control projects that ate up ten times the resources they were supposed to, and I understand the need to be diligent when a department allocates labor.
💡 At the same time, people also need to balance the practicality of waiting for perfect conditions versus moving forward with imperfect knowledge.
Have you had a similar experience?
References: Watzlawick P, Weakland JH, Fisch R. Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution. WW Norton & Company; 1974.
Post Title: When perfection is the goal, progress becomes the casualty.