As I move further into my career and personal life, I find more and more that I seek simplicity over complexity. For years, it has felt like I continually build-up sets of complexity around me. From adding responsibilities at work (and not being very good at letting go of existing ones), to accumulating personal possessions, to adding family complexities with kids that are growing up much too fast.
We’re all familiar with the K.I.S.S. acronym (Keep It Simple Stupid!) but there’s some real wisdom in that phrase. In almost all cases, we can look at a situation and see how simplifying it would produce cleaner, more consistent, and oftentimes better results.
Our customers have complex business processes, complex sales approaches, complex manufacturing lines, and complex field forces that all require constant connectivity, reliable communication, and continuous access to data.
Our world of software systems development leans towards the complex already. It’s very (very) easy to take a business process and build in a mass of complexity right out of the gate. How many projects have you been on where the launch is delayed because you need to build in support for this edge case and that edge case?
When a customer approaches us with one of these complex business problems to solve, we spend a good deal of time up front understanding current state. We map process flows and dig into the details of what the end users are doing, what tools they are using, and what path(s) they take to get the job done.
A lot of our projects involve taking these complicated business processes and automating them (i.e., simplifying them). We look to take complexity out of the flow, not introduce more of it. One of the stated objectives in almost every project ends up being some version of “save time”. In order to do that, we first must identify where the time is being spent so we can look for ways to reduce it. While improvements largely stem from software automation, they often involve updates to business processes as well.
Businesses are much like our personal lives, whereby complexities grow over time as you build and expand your operations. These complexities are all added for a reason, but at some point, doing a thorough inventory to look for optimization and complexity reduction is critical for the continued growth we all desire.