The saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is commonly heard in engineering circles. Rarely is it effectively practiced.
I recently got an email from an old customer. The old customer did not purchase maintenance on our product. Our product has been working well for them for over 5 years. Their IT department decided to upgrade the Windows version and other software packages on the computer. Now they are getting errors from our un-maintained product. All I could say was: 1) we are happy to sell them maintenance, and 2) there is no reason why they needed to upgrade.
We have lost many man-months of productivity in the past by trying to correct perceived problems that do not really exist.
Personal productivity can also go down the tubes if you chase fixing unbroken things. Updating Linux for instance can break things. Or updating services on your website. Just because an update exists, it does not mean that you need to update.
What are your thoughts on the saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”?
Comments on this entry are closed.