There’s a certain kind of high you get when you build something clever. A smart workflow, an elegant automation, maybe even a custom app that makes you feel like you’ve cracked some internal code. But it’s important to avoid IT over—engineering. It’s satisfying. It’s fun. It scratches the itch that made a lot of us get into tech in the first place.
But here’s the thing: just because you can doesn’t mean you should. You need to avoid IT over-engineering and remember the primary goals.
Sometimes, the most effective tool for the job is… a plain old email. Or a quick Teams message. Maybe even (brace yourself) a sticky note. These aren’t flashy solutions, and they won’t land you a speaking slot at a conference, but they get the job done—without adding a maintenance headache you’ll regret in six months.
Complexity Comes with a Cost
Here’s a quick story. Someone once asked for a better way to track when job approvals came in so they could notify the team automatically. Reasonable enough. I built out a Power Automate flow—fairly intricate, I’ll admit. It checked a shared mailbox, parsed the message, updated a SharePoint list, triggered notifications, color-coded the status… the whole thing. Honestly? It worked great.
For about three months.
Then the department reorganized. The approvals moved to a different format. The mailbox was repurposed. The SharePoint list was replaced by a different system. Suddenly, this “perfect” automation was breaking constantly, sending updates to the wrong people, and I was spending more time debugging than anyone ever spent using it.
And here’s the kicker: the team just went back to using email.
The tool I built technically met the need, but it wasn’t the right tool—because it couldn’t flex when the business did. And business always flexes. It’s essential to avoid IT overengineering to prevent these issues.
Choose Boring on Purpose
In IT, there’s a quiet superpower in choosing the boring thing. The unglamorous, low-friction, low-risk solution that actually works and doesn’t need a user guide with footnotes. Avoid IT overengineering and opt for simplicity.
Need someone to approve a purchase? Maybe you don’t need an automated approval flow with multiple branches and a custom dashboard. Maybe you just need to forward the email and type, “Okay with you?”
This isn’t laziness. It’s wisdom, dressed in flannel and sipping bad coffee in the break room. It’s the realization that your job isn’t to build cool things—it’s to keep things working. Bonus points if no one notices you’re even doing it.
Future You Will Thank You
Here’s a fun game: before you build anything, ask yourself one question.
“Who’s going to maintain this when it inevitably breaks?”
If the answer is “probably me,” pause and think about whether there’s a simpler path. One that’s easier to hand off, adapt, or—if we’re being honest—abandon entirely when the winds change, because they will. They always do.
Business needs shift. Hardware ages. People come and go. The only thing you can count on is that your elegant solution will one day look like a weird artifact no one wants to touch. So build accordingly and avoid IT overengineering.
The Bottom Line
Use the right tool for the right job. And sometimes, that tool is just a sentence in an email that says, “Hey, can you take care of this?”
Not exciting. Not groundbreaking. But it works. And sometimes, that’s all you need to effectively avoid IT overengineering.