Why people like creating tools?

Call me a slow thinker, but it didn’t occur to me until today how beneficial for a career might be working on company’s internal management/organizing tools. (Not that I am doing such a work – I was just pondering about the fact that the management added yet another request/ticketing application to the existing zoo).

The work on such applications (ticketing, document management, request tracking etc) has some great advantages over any other development work:

• The work is highly visible, especially to the management.


• The work is not mission-critical: a bug in the ticketing application will cause just some trouble. The same bug in a user-visible application might become a disaster.


• Management usually just loves this kind of tools (probably because the tools provide them with feeling of control and organizing power).  Managers pretty soon become dependent on the tools, and the person who creates and maintains them swiftly becomes a VIP.


• There is always a space for improvement – so you can work on the same application for as long as you like.


• Deadlines and schedules are usually quite flexible.


• You can use any cool technologies you like – as long as the application works, no one really cares how it was implemented.

This revelation helped me to get answer to a question which was intriguing me for some time: How come that the number of such systems in my company keeps growing despite all attempts to reduce it? And it also sheds some light on another question, which might seem totally unrelated, but, as I see now, touches the same principle: why people around the globe spend so much effort on creating and improving GTD and other so-called “productivity tools and systems”? The same reason: working on the systems and tools which purpose is to help us doing some work is infinitely more pleasant than actually doing the work…

Technorati tags: Rants, Productivity