Premature optimization can be defined as optimizing before we know that we need to. In Donald Knuth’s paper “Structured Programming With GoTo Statements”, he wrote: “Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil (c2.com link)
Just like in programming, this concept applies to business processes too. Also see:
Cover art by: https://xkcd.com/1445/
If you would like to expand on the topic as a guest post, know of more resources/posts/essays/etc that we should share here or simply spotted an error, please get in touch with us!
