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Is "one in, one out" a silly rule? Yes. ;) When do you institute the rule -- on day one, in which case it is functionally equivalent to "do not have any check

Is "one in, one out" a silly rule? Yes. ;) When do you institute the rule -- on day one, in which case it is functionally equivalent to "do not have any checks"? On day 13? Day 7386? What is the quantum of a "check"? Is Sarbanes-Oxley one "check" or a collection of hundreds of "checks"? Does the limit apply department-by-department or company-wide? Your sysadmins will naturally tend to employ a lot more formal checks (most of which are hopefully enforced by tiny Perl scripts) than your R&D prototyping team. Do you force the sysadmins to compete with the accounting department for a quota of checks? Do you incentivize sysadmins to evade checks by getting tasks reassigned to the R&D prototyping team, which (alas) can't afford to have any checks? The last thing you want to do is encourage teams of lawyerly meta-checkers to run around enforcing rules about rules. That's costly, squared.

jbert 18y ago
"When do you institute the rule?" When you realise you have a (potential) problem. It stops it getting worse. "What is the quantum of a 'check'?" More tricky, certainly. That's a potential big problem. "Does the limit apply department-by-department or company-wide?" Whatever makes sense. The idea of the exercise would be basically to: - build an appreciation throught the organisation that checks have a cost - provide a (albeit imperfect) mechanism for exercising some control over it Something doesn't have to be perfect to be of use. "The last thing you want to do is encourage teams of lawyerly meta-checkers to run around enforcing rules about rules. That's costly, squared." That's just ISO9001, isn't it? :-)