CADDManager on January 3rd, 2007

I have found that many firms may get tied up in trying to make a perfect standard. They try to get everything just right and think through every last option before they publish the standard. This can get tedious and put a damper on momentum. Once you are on a positive progressive path, the trick is to publish while the momentum is still there.

Don’t get too bogged down in the details. No standard is ever perfect or completely done. If you have that frame of mind then you will publish what you think is a perfect standard and be very tempted to never change anything again. Thinking that you have a perfect standard actually makes it tend toward imperfection. Your standard will get stale and you may still think it is perfect. Your standard will be outdated and you will still think it is perfect.

So – get it into your mind that it is always about 85-95% complete. There will always be something that need to be tinkered with. You will always be thinking of things to improve upon.

I suggest you shoot for “almost perfect, but not quite”.

One Response to “CAD Standards – Almost Perfect”

  1. Absolutely correct. The second your procedure is published, it’s outdated. Someone will find something missing or incorrect. Or take for example my recent case. Our company merged with another, my procedure was revised not only in name but I also removed items that were covered at the corporate level. Ten people reviewed it and everyone said it was fine. Within a day I noticed that all of my references to the attachments were pointing to the old revision. I revised the procedure two weeks later to fix the cross reference errors and guess what, I revised two things and added another.

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