With Software Leaving Stuff Out Is Hard

Turn Prospects Into Customers and Opportunities Into Sales.

It’s Leaving Stuff Out That’s Hard

Less is More is a popular theme these days. The phrase (thanks to Mies Van Der Rohe) has come to suggest leaving out anything that doesn’t add value.

Leaving stuff out won’t be a new challenge to Twitter users. The fact is you can’t get much in to 140 characters, so the post has to be short, sharp, on-topic. And it doesn’t matter if the grammar is less than perfect.

Bloggers who review their work, and benchmark against the best, quickly find short simple pointed observations read better, and get read more often. Blogging isn’t a language test – it’s a context test.

Now the concept of Less is More is spreading to the main stream. Everybody wants to “cut through the crap” and “get to the meat”.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, the concept is beginning to spread to software.

Traditional software makers historically focused on adding features so the consultants can tick the boxes. Ultimately the result is higher cost, lower quality, more complexity, less adoption. None of us have to understand too much about Word before this becomes obvious.

For the new breed of software makers this is an anathema. Why build something people won’t use (or probably even buy)?

So the benchmark for tomorrow’s software is Less Features. Less Features equals less cost, more quality, less complexity, more adoption.

The problem for the designers is deciding which bits to leave out. If leaving stuff out reduces function the software won’t do the job.

The answer is making the software more flexible – reducing what it does to generic master data and process so the user can adapt his/her use to fit the need today, and change if to fit the need tomorrow.

Actually users already do this on their own. There’s much more of the world’s information stored in sticky notes, email, spreadsheets and even paper files than there’ll ever be in enterprise software.

To engineers this won’t be news – the whole concept of six sigma quality manufacturing is focused on reducing complexity in process steps, and increasing their capability (flexibility).

As thought leader Suzi Pomerantz reminds us in her blog post Flexibility Means Influence even management theorists promote the value of being flexible.

It’s well worth a read!