The Paradox of Patience

Patience in a LIMS implementation isn’t just a virtue. It’s a strategy. And if misapplied, it becomes a liability.

LIMS implementations are full of paradoxes.
One of the biggest? Patience.

You need patience to let the right solution emerge.
You also need urgency to hit deadlines and keep budgets in check.
Get the balance wrong, and you’ll feel it in cost overruns, missed requirements, team burnout, or resistance to change.

When consultants talk about patience, it’s usually in abstract terms. “Be patient with the client,” or “These things take time.” That’s not helpful.
What you really need is strategic patience, an ability to distinguish where patience is productive and where it’s dangerous.

This article explores five critical domains where LIMS consultants must either lean into patience or deliberately avoid it. In each case, I’ll argue for a position that reflects the messy reality of actual projects, not idealized delivery roadmaps.

1. Be Patient With Discovery, Not With Delivery

At the start of a LIMS implementation, you’ll often hear phrases like:

“We just want the system to match our existing processes.”
“We know what we want. Let’s start building.”

These statements are rarely true. In fact, they’re often the biggest red flags.

Clients almost never have fully-formed requirements at the start of a project. They have assumptions, frustrations, and wish list items. They know what doesn’t work. But the deeper "what" and "why" - those take time to uncover.

Here, patience is a multiplier of value.

It’s not about dragging your feet. It’s about slowing down enough to ask the right questions:

• What’s the business driver behind this requirement?
• Is this process truly standardized across users or sites?
• Has the current pain point already been “worked around” in ways we’ll need to unpick?

You’ll need to resist the temptation to implement what they ask for right away. That’s not delivery. That’s translation.
What they really need is interpretation.

✅ Patient discovery prevents rework.
✅ It surfaces latent risks.
✅ It uncovers hidden business logic.

Once you have real understanding, then you move fast.
Because now you’re building something that will stick.

I like to start by building a minimum viable LIMS (MVL) to facilitate this process. Read more about the MVL approach, here.

2. Be Impatient With Action and Visible Momentum

Some consultants interpret “patience” as a license to go quiet, especially in long discovery phases or in-between milestones.

This is a mistake.

Clients get nervous when they don’t see visible signs of progress. Even if the project is moving behind the scenes, a silent consultant reads as a stalled project.

In practice, this means you should be impatient about:

• Delivering outputs, even if they’re drafts
• Sending regular check-ins, even if there’s no new development
• Pushing for decisions on blockers, even if they’re uncomfortable

Action builds trust. And visible action creates accountability on both sides. When you send a weekly update, your client realizes they owe you answers. When you log that ambiguous requirement in a tracking tool, they see the complexity they’ve been hand-waving.

The rhythm of implementation matters. And it’s your job to drive it.

📌 Patience with results is fine.
🔥 Patience with action is not.

3. Don't Be Patient With Data Migration or Integrations

Here’s where misapplied patience does real damage.

Most teams treat data migration and system integrations as end-of-project tasks. “We’ll tackle that closer to go-live.”
Wrong move.

These components hold the most uncertainty and carry the highest risk. Leaving them to the end almost guarantees panic, budget expansion, and even missed deadlines.

Real consequences of waiting too long:

• Discovering legacy data is incomplete, inconsistent, or undocumented
• Realizing your target system doesn’t handle key data structures (or units, or relationships) the same way
• Running out of time to test integrations before production

The sooner you start mapping out your migration and integration approach—even just at the planning level—the better. You’re not committing to final decisions. You’re identifying risk.

Start these conversations as early as possible:

• What systems do we need to connect to?
• What format is the source data in?
• Who owns this data and what rules govern it?

🔥 The riskiest tasks are the ones you’ve been “patient” with.

Don’t wait for clarity to emerge on its own. Drag it into the light.

I recommend reducing the risk of waiting too long by testing your riskiest assumptions first. Read more here.

4. Be Patient With People (Even When It Slows You Down)

Here’s the hardest form of patience: waiting for people to be ready.

Your system might be brilliant. Your configuration might be flawless. But if your users aren’t bought in, none of it matters.

People adopt change at different speeds.
In any given LIMS implementation, you’ll find:

• 🧠 The visionary who wants all features implemented yesterday
• 🤔 The anxious user terrified of breaking something
• 💤 The stakeholder who ghosted three meetings in a row

You cannot rush them. And if you try, you’ll only increase resistance.

Instead, you build trust through micro-interactions:

• Showing that feedback is being implemented
• Offering low-stakes training environments
• Celebrating when someone tries something new in the system

✅ Patience here is an investment in adoption.
✅ Impatience here leads to user backlash, and worse—non-use.

This is one of those cases where “slowing down is speeding up.”

5. Strategic Patience Is What Sets Great Consultants Apart

Let’s step back.

When we talk about being patient or impatient, it’s easy to fall into binary thinking.
What you really need is judgment.

Know when to wait.
Know when to push.
And most importantly, know why.

Here’s a breakdown:

Great consultants aren't "slow and steady."
They’re deliberate. They know which levers to pull and when.

This ability to calibrate your pace is the real skill.
And it's what separates a good LIMS implementation from a great one.

Final Word: Patience Is a Strategy

In the lab world, patience is often associated with maturity.
But in implementation work, patience is tactical.

Use it where it builds alignment, trust, and accuracy.
Avoid it where it masks avoidance, drift, or decay.

Patience isn’t your default mode. It’s your chosen tool.
That’s the paradox.
And once you understand it, you’ll never look at timelines the same way again.