Wat denkt Veenhof nu?

To build a tool or not to..

This week a colleague send our team a mail with a system he build on Sharepoint for us to share knowledge, skills and favors within our team. The tool looked like a lot of work he really thought it through. You can connect the tool to Outlook so you can see all the new requests automatically or connect it to your RSS reader if that is the way you gather information.

It is to bad this tool will never be used.

This is an example of over tooling. I’ve seen this so often. There is an idea about sharing information and the first thing that is done is build a tool for it. The problem with this tool is that it isn’t there to make a going process easier but to start a process and this will never work. If you want to start a process in a team start that process with whatever means that are already used by the team of people and create behavior. If this behavior is there and people are complaining that the process is cumbersome because there is no tool for it. Only. Then and only then you should build a tool. Until that is the case use your energy on getting the behavior going.