Fred Brooks and the difficulty and importance of design

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk that William Hudson came to see (it turned out he was preparing a piece on ethnography in design).

One of the quotes I used was from an obscure article in the computing periodicals by a certain FP Brooks, from the first chapter of Andy Crabtree's Designing Collaborative Systems:

"The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding
what to build...No other part of the work so cripples the resulting
system if done wrong. No other part is more difficult to rectify later."

Somehow - perhaps because it was not from Brook's classic book, The Mythical Man Month - I failed to connect that this was the same Fred Brooks that wrote the classic text. William pointed this out to me. It's a great quote and a key idea in how we approach systems design.