The curse of ill-designed tools

"There is never time to fix an ill-designed tool, but there is always time to waste in trying to use it." This is one of the laws that I have confirmed repeatedly in the professional world through many years of direct experience. Particularly when you are working with software, where creating "a tool" can be a matter of seconds, the division between the developers (who have to build the tools) and the users (who have to use the tools) ensures time and time again that users are forced to jump through unbelievable hoops to use an alleged tool because the development team does not have the time or the resources to fix it.

Photo: stevepb on Pixnio

Looking at it from the perspective of social sciences and group dynamics the behavior is perfectly understandable: given that the group of users do not have the power to impose a certain piece of work on the group of the developers, why would the developers give it away freely? The premise that the users do not have power is an essential one, because in the occasions where they have power the job does indeed get done. Also the perspective of the management is reasonable; why should they put current resources to make up for the (possible) loss of future time? The problem is now, not in the future, and if later on the managers find that the users are wasting time they will put pressure on them or finally request a solution from the development team, but not before many, many hours disappear into the blue yonder of unprofitable work.

I mention this today because yesterday, in the frame of this huge virtual meeting that I am attending this week, we were requested to provide very detailed planning by using a web tool which is very poorly designed, at least from the point of view of the providers of the plans. For the coordination team, which has to coordinate and adjust the plans, the tool is probably OK, but for the rest of us endlessly clicking away every minuscule modification in our plan is cumbersome, tiring and, for the most part, pointless, because in the end the plans is not monitored very closely against the actual events.

The good part is that, in the end, we got somehow the hang of it so that, even if it did not get any less cumbersome, we managed to streamline the edition process and managed to provide our plan with a reasonable level of fidelity. The bad part is that I am dog tired and I am not going to be any good this evening for anything, in particular not for the family gathering. Let us just hope that I get through without lashing out at anyone. Have a nice evening everybody!