I was just looking over my last entry on the blog and a thought occurred to me, the marriage contract is the only contract where you don’t have to squint at the small print and wonder if it will cause you trouble later on. In fact all of the words of the contract are spoken and repeated, this makes it simple. I think most people confuse simple at this point with easy….I could never be without my husband, but even he would agree that putting up with me is not exactly easy There are a lot of occasions where people tend to get simple and easy confused. Malcolm is in the middle of writing a new system for one of our clients. It looked very easy at the beginning, just update the design and keep the database and code from the old system. Easy. Unfortunately, as with so much in life this was not as straight forward as it first appeared. The front did need updating, that was simple, but several things meant this was far from easy to achieve. First the data stored was not consistent, and the code was poor, so it could not be re-used and he started to re-write things. Once you start re-writing the client thinks ‘this is great, can you make it do this now…’ and before you know where you are you’re designing a whole new system. This has made us miss the deadline, but what has been achieved is truly remarkable, as the system is easy to use now, even if it wasn’t easy to create!