T-SQL Tuesday #170 – Learning from Abandoned Projects

Sometimes you have to abandon the game plan.

A football coach might see that the run game isn’t working in the first half and decide to throw more in the second. A basketball coach might see an opposing player dominating in the paint and decide to start double-teaming him with defenders. While abandoning a game plan isn’t desirable, it’s not the end of the world.

For the first T-SQL Tuesday of 2024, Reitse Eskens invites us to discuss what we learned and what adjustments we made when facing our own abandoned projects. Click the T-SQL Tuesday logo to read the full invite.

Big Ideas

Many years ago, our team was frequently getting pulled into specific types of tickets where we were needed to execute scripts to implement fixes. This was happening more often than we’d like and taking too much time away from our own tasks.

We considered creating a small application that the support team could use on their own to securely execute scripts. It sounded simple at first, but wasn’t as simple as we had initially thought.

Among the concerns were where the scripts would reside and how they would be updated if needed. Most importantly, there were security concerns and risks about what protections to build in. The time and effort to build such an application would itself have to be factored in with other tasks and projects.

It was always a lower priority and the project kind of fizzled out. The number of times support needed this type of assistance began to diminish and the ROI was not worth it.

Time

Which leads to the idea of not being afraid to abandon a project if the time commitment doesn’t make sense. The sunken cost fallacy can be attributed to relationships, quitting a book you’re halfway through reading, and automating anything and everything.

How many times have you had a repetitive task and thought, “I’m going to automate that,” but found yourself spending hours on something that routinely only takes 2 minutes? If that 2-minute task is needed multiple times a day, maybe it’s worth it to automate. If it’s a task that you do once every couple weeks, not so much.

Don’t Be Afraid to Fail

For what it’s worth, I did take part of what was started for the script project and turn it into our own tool for managing scripts, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time. Even if a project is abandoned, there is still plenty that can be learned from it and used in the future.

Thanks for reading!