In software development, "think global, act local"

"Think global, act local" is a management motto for multinational corporations used very often in the 1980s.

One of these days I was explaining some students how to start working on a project and I told them this sentence.

The logic is: you have to think about the project as a whole taking all requirements into account - hence, "think global" - but when developing, you must break up the large problem in smaller problems and they work on each one, one at a time, testing and consolidating - "think local".