The hidden complexity trap: When "simple" software isn't

Let me share a truth about software projects: what looks simple on paper often hides surprising challenges that can blow up your budget and timeline.

Knowing how to spot these hidden problems early can save you money and help your team succeed. Better yet, it can give you an edge over competitors who fall into the complexity trap.

Here's what you need to know.

Watch for integration challenges

New software rarely works alone. It needs to connect with your existing systems, and that's where things get tricky.

Take the case of McDonald's UAE. Their IT Operations department made a straightforward choice of project management software, but ran into unexpected difficulties connecting to resource management and financial software systems, resulting in inconsistent data across the organization. They eventually switched vendors to address these challenges, resulting in a 30% improvement in project delivery times.¹

If you look at that in reverse though, as long as they were on that old system, they were bleeding out 30% in time and money on each project!

Smart leaders know to map out the necessary system integrations ahead of time before the project begins.

Look at your data

Most companies have customer and business data spread across many systems. Getting all this data to work together is often harder than it looks.

Going back to our friends at McDonald's, they had data about budgets and shared resources spread across multiple systems. Because of the poor planning and the resulting insufficient integration, all that data was inconsistent across different parts of their operation. Hilarity ensued.

It turns out that reliable data synchronization across distributed systems is one of those Hard Problems in computer science. Very smart people have been researching the subject for decades, and oblivious engineers have been ignoring that research for the same amount of time.

The solution? Make sure your teams are identifying what data needs to be synchronized to where, and what guarantees collaborating departments will need on the freshness of their data. Start with small experiments on sample data sets, and build from there.

Remember your people

Even perfect software fails if your team struggles to use it. Training needs and process changes often cause more headaches than technical issues.

OSF Healthcare transitioned their marketing organization to a digital-first management of marketing strategy and execution and faced the challenge of training nearly 75 marketing professionals in the new systems. The organization took four years of careful study and training program development to fully make the switch.²

This slower but steady approach helped them succeed where others had failed and resulted in a successful transformation of their marketing outcomes.

Break it into pieces

Big changes are risky. Small steps work better.

In a 2013 study, the Project Management Institute found that of the highest performing organizations they surveyed, more than half used Agile, iterative project management.³

That is, they avoid big, detailed plans. Instead, they set big goals, but move towards them in small, incremental steps. This let them find and fix problems early, before they became expensive mistakes.

Keep your plans flexible

Rigid plans often fail when surprise problems pop up. Building new things is a learning process for the teams involved and the leaders who lead them. You don't know what you don't know—until you find out!

Build in room in the schedule to adjust your approach as you and your teams improve your understanding of the problem and solution space.

Here's to your next successful project

Remember: seeing the complexity ahead of time doesn't mean your project will fail. It means you're smart enough to plan for it. Start small, stay flexible, and keep your eyes open for hidden challenges.

Your next software project doesn't have to be a gamble. Use these insights to spot complexity early, and you'll be better prepared for success.

I send out short articles like this every week on Tuesday. I write about how businesses can effectively innovate through software.

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