911 memorial and when it is's okay to have an inefficient organization

It's not the laughter of someone who claims to have seen the light
No it's a cold and it's a very lonely Hallelujah.
Leonhard Cohen, Halleluja


In May Scott [1] wrote an interesting article about the new 911 memorial. Especially about inefficiencies caused by the ultimate will of many many people to find the "ideal" alignment of persons that were killed during the attacks. The article was quite critical against the inefficiencies.

At first I really wanted to say "yea" - that's a really inefficient organization. They violated almost all rules of good agile software design. Made things too complex. Involved too many people. Premature optimization is the root of all evil right?

But.

It's not a software project. It's about victims. And I have to admit that it's absolutely okay to be inefficient there. I think that the outcome (effectiveness) is "great" (if one can say that of a memorial). I really like the memorial. Check out also the detailed technical description [2].

Ian (post at Scott's blog) summarized it nicely [1]:

I think this problem with this post is that it’s trying to make a general point about project management, most likely in the context of software given your bent, but fails to take into account what this thing is. It’s not a website. It’s a permanent memorial to one of the greatest tragedies ever occurring on U.S. soil. It will become a part of the city and if the city is still there in 100 years, so will the memorial. It was worth it I think to go beyond a purely functional organization of the name and try to express something that makes the memorial more moving. If being moving isn’t the core requirement of a memorial, I don’t know what is.


[1] http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2011/how-to-ruin-a-design-the-911-memorial/
[2] http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/all-the-names