Separating from your ideas

It's a common tale, you've conceptualized the best possible solution ever! It's elegant, it's paradigm shifting, it's brilliant, it's the jumping off point for all kinds of new processes and flows.  It's also not working.

Frustrated, you develop, you add on, you rewrite. Diagrams are drawn, you re-architect, you hound other team members for inputs, searching, striving for that missing piece making the hunt for the Higgs Boson look like a child's game of hide and seek.

The problem is that the typical software architect/engineer does not step back to realize that the idea that they are pursuing is untenable. We tend to fall in love with our ideas. Sadly this happened to me recently, where I had some neat ideas on how to improve some facets of Active Directory reconciliation based on some customer requests. And, yeah, it flopped.  Spectacularly. Fortunately, I began to see this happening and thought some more.  I began to fall out of love with my ideas and see some new alternatives. Eventually, of course, I found something simpler that worked.  It did not have all of the perceived benefits of my perfect solution, but it worked, and very well.  Sometimes that's good enough. You can always improve it later.  There's always the next version, or the next roll out. Sometimes its just best to wait for that.