Jackhammer or a Spoon?
January 30th, 2007
This is a fantastic analogy for a development approach. I totally understand, and completely agree. I’ve been on my share of jackhammer projects, and although I understand why the business selected the jackhammer, it almost* never makes things better. It just seems to make people (clients, stakeholders) feel better - as if we are doing more to solve the problem.
The spoon can be carefully sold to a client as the right approach, with lasting results, but it’s tricky. This business typically demands results yesterday, and want an approach that has a chance of making the deadline, no matter how unreasonable.
Unfortunately, with tight timelines, both approaches fail. The jackhammer is messy, expensive and produces a Frankenstein-ish result. The spoon is smooth, calculated and efficient, but takes time to produce results.
Knowing what I know, I would always push timelines for quality/cost - those two factors always end up biting you in the end.
* Rarely, projects finish ahead of or on schedule using this approach, but there are usually many casualties as a result. So it is effectively a net loss.
January 30th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
I rather like the spoon myself, much hmore efficent just more time consuming, as you only take out what you want to take out were as the jackhammer is a messy, heavy, peice of dirty equipment that has a better chance of taking out your foot than the ground infront of you…