Lesson 1: Don’t create an over-sized beast you want to get rid of.
What does the Empire State Building and a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) have in common? They are often associated with over-sized beasts! Like King Kong trying to escape the Boeing P12 airplanes, LIMS deployments are often frustrating as they become over-sized because of their complexity. The complexity starts with the LIMS product. Has it been designed to simplify complexity? Feedback from users of complex LIMS often includes errors crept in and users were not using the product properly because it was simply too much! Their LIMS software did too many things – it had too many options. The number of options stressed the users out and they simply chose to stop using the system correctly. LIMS users wanted, "Fewer buttons on the screen, not more, and to make it intuitive and fun to use," was the general feedback.
Lesson 2: Don’t create complicated deployment project schedules
When recently visiting the Empire State Building I was pleasantly surprised to see the Project Schedule for deployment - a Gannt Chart on one page. According to the history books, the project took 410 days to complete with 3,400 concurrent workers at its peak. The project was delivered on time and within budget. After over 85 years, it is still fully operational.
Software systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated; therefore simplicity should be a key goal in the design and deployment of software, and unnecessary complexity should be avoided.
Too often, people overcomplicate things in business because it’s too much effort and hard work to keep it simple.
We’ve created a simple checklist to help summarise the deliverables required for LIMS deployment within a GxP environment. Your chosen deliverables easily fit on a one page Gannt Chart regardless of size of the deployment project!