After A Crisis, Move On #

Periodical crises are inevitable situations when working with system. Either because the system degrades over time, we make changes to the system that have unintended consequences or the outside rules and laws change forcing us to adapt our system to be in compliance.

During a crisis period we come up with all kind of ideas and solutions to solve our problems and other ones to prevent it from happening again or at least mitigate as much as possible the intensity and duration of the crisis. 

Having invested much time and effort turning these ideas into a reality we might end up becoming attached to the solution because of how clever we feel having had or found these solutions in first place. This might lead to wanting to find new problems to apply our solution losing sight that we only came up with the solutions as a reaction to a problem which, more often than not, is a specific problem to the way our software works or our business is structured rather than being common problem.

Losing focus of the why we had to put time and effort into coming up with a solution to a crisis which is to solve the crisis and move on with our business can easily distract us into committing more time and effort to this new toy we have and delay or, even worse, cancel currently ongoing projects to make time for the new shinny thing.

Putting an end to a project that helped you solve a crisis is the right choice, sometimes even the harder choice. Even though in the moment it might seem as a waste of effort, in fact, it wasn’t, because it allows you to get back to the work that improves the customer experience, the work that really matters.