Pigs on the Wing

RFC 1925.3:

(3) With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is
   not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they
   are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them
   as they fly overhead.

Every once in a while I come across a project where someone is trying to make pigs fly.  Not literally, although there was one instance that came close at a customer site in Kentucky – I was reviewing a SAS environment at a company specializing in swine genetics and a couple dozen low pressure cells blew through the area, threatening to turn into tornado funnels… but I digress.  I paraphrase this Truth as having more money than common sense – like ordering a solid gold Rolls-Royce and then having to build a custom reinforced road to drive it on (this was an urban legend I had heard as a child that still pops up in some form from time to time).

I think to some extent most of us have some task or activity that we like doing a particular way, even though we are aware that there’s probably a better way to get it done (I still regularly see people printing off every single email as a backup, even though they have a USB drive on their keychain.)  The more extreme cases don’t just do something out of habit but to prove it can be done.  This is not necessarily a bad thing (we wouldn’t be flying at all if there hadn’t been people stubborn enough to prove it could be done) but it can be applied overzealously.

In my professional life, this usually involves a system not meant to do something that is being made to do that something through a lot of time and effort.  Versions of this have come up with users who have a preferred toolset and use it even when it’s not the appropriate tool, and especially when there are tools available that are far more efficient at accomplishing the task at hand.  One such example was a windows admin who had a preferred file transfer application which he had used from the days Windows 95.  He insisted on using this app even though it would often crash on his Windows XP system and occasionally require a reboot.

Another example was a user who had written a lot of spreadsheet-type functionality in her SAS environment and was using SAS instead of Excel.  That in itself would have been fine but many times she was spending more than twice as long on doing the same task in her custom utility as in Excel, and when the company upgraded to the latest version of Excel she started adding the new functionality to her custom code.  While the SAS System toolkit certainly allows for this type of exercise, it’s quite an undertaking to try to keep up with the Microsoft Excel development team (and testing team, and documentation team, and integration team, and …).

When the “pig launcher” is a user things are bad enough, but sometimes it’s the project sponsor, and the whole project should be grounded.  I’ve not participated in such an event, but have seen the aftermath and heard the stories of how things came crashing down.  Some projects are not meant to fly, and yet some project sponsors will manage to find a way to make them.  Have you been part of one?

To borrow a phrase from Pink Floyd, take shelter from pigs on the wing.