Simplicity is the Dragon Slayer

There has to be a trade off with how useful a system is and how much time and other resources it's taking to implement.

Taking a step back and re-evaluating what it is you're trying to achieve should be part of your system building system. A frequent review is critical to all stages of system design but never more so that looking at the objectives. The objective or result of a system, or the outputs, are the entire driving force for working on any kind of system.

There can be assumptions made about your objectives that aren't necessarily true.

This is where perfectionism comes in, not only with achieving the objective but whether the objective itself is too high.

Minimum viable product, or MVP, is often used in production to get around perfectionism in all it's forms. This is especially true in areas where iteration is not only possible but much easier to accomplish.

While we want to think of what the MVP is for a working system we also want to apply it to the outcomes. Maybe you don't need as much automation to begin with. Maybe the outcome can be lowered more in quality than you realise or drop the rate of production significantly.

While you're working on this outcome generating system, nothing is being generated so it's the same as having no system at all. An imperfect and slow outcome is better than none at all. So keep that in mind with outcomes and how quickly you can construct a system with a smaller scope.