Field note · 20 September 2026

Conway's Law, From Inside an ERP Project

Systems follow the shape of the people who build them. Ten examples from a single fortnight.

Systems follow the shape of the people who build them. If you have ever wondered why a government process is the way it is, there it is.

You cannot impose a system. You have to change the people into believers first. Clients all start as sceptics. The job is to change their minds. It is slow, and it is tedious.

It also means looking inward. Is your delivery late? That's your system. Is your testing inadequate? System. Is your sales bad? System. Are you not being paid on time? System.

The worst position available is believing there is no system. There is one. It is made of every participant in the process: some in your company, some at your client, some at your bank, some in your government.

So, the funniest examples of Conway's law in our own operation, over one fortnight.

1. There is a task on our board whose title is an entire email. Two hundred words, with its own subheadings. The description field was right there, empty, four inches below. Your data model is a photograph of your team's attention.
2. In August the parallel-run log took twenty-four items in four days. In the last fortnight, four. Nothing changed in the project. The person who logs things had a fortnight. A velocity chart is a biography of whoever is holding the pen.
3. A plan was shared, as a document, with everyone who needed it. It then travelled from person to person, gathering two lines of covering note at each hop. Everyone had the document. Nobody trusts the document. We route information through people because people are what we trust.
4. A question was asked on the 15th. The complete, correct answer arrived at 06:29 on the 21st. The work took ten minutes. The other six days were org chart.
5. A weekly meeting to review a tracker was created twice in one afternoon. The tracker exists so that we don't need the meeting. The meeting exists because nobody reads the tracker.
6. Our internal tool shipped a vault for multi-factor codes. Not on a roadmap. We kept locking ourselves out. Every internal tool is a scar with a version number.
7. A clarification confirmed that the walkthrough sessions are also training sessions. Two teams had two words for the same room.
8. A file of 365 employee records waited fourteen days. Nobody refused it. It needed the person whose job it is, and that person was spread across four other things. Fourteen days is not a delay. It is a headcount.
9. One email contained a passed test report, a signed hard copy walked to the project office, and an invoice. If you want to know the shape of a company, look at what it staples together.
10. A meeting recording expired, deleted itself, then emailed to say so. Most of our systems are quietly operated by previous versions of people, including previous versions of us.

That's the job. Not building the thing. Changing who we are until the thing we build comes out the right shape.

(Clients, colleagues and numbers stripped out. The dysfunction is ours to share; theirs isn't.)