Creeping elegance

Programmers tend to be perfectionists, and are familiar with a phenomenon known as creeping elegance. While writing code, it becomes an obsession to write it as tersely and elegantly as possible, which comes at the expense of time, readability and focus on the final product.

Projects can also experience creeping elegance, in this form an insidious variety of scope creep. Say there's a process optimization going on in a very basic environment. Little documentation, lots of informal procedures, opaque and implicit knowhow ingrained in the employees, organic structure, the works. The project brief states that the goal is to document knowledge and procedures, design and roll out a standardized process, and train employees in the new and formal way of working. The allotted time is nine months, 5 internal people are put on the project for 20% of their time, and three consultants are hired.

A year later, a cold cup of coffee overhears a debate about indentation in the new documentation template, mixed with comments on the frequency of detailed status reports. The cup quietly reflects that, just like twelve months ago, neither the template nor the report are used operationally, but once the project is done they will surely be things of awesome perfection, terrible to behold and a slap in the face of any IT department who gets by with a lesser standard.

What happened? Creeping elegance. It's very hard to decide when to stop once you're improving something. At what point has enough knowledge been documented? When is a process good enough? That's undefined. It's not like a building plan where you're done at some point, when the building stands tall and happy tenants are preparing dinner inside.

Operationally, this is easy. Continual Service Improvement (CSI) is the name of the game. Steady progress. But when improvement becomes a project, it's very hard to keep the creeping elegance genie in the bottle. The only solution is strict timelines, and a project manager with enough common sense to nip creeping elegance in the bud. When the sand runs out in the hourglass, whatever is agreed on is delivered as the final product, and operational CSI takes over. Mission accomplished.