Revenue / profit targets alone neglect to consider the one factor that actually leads to revenue and profit: happy, satisfied customers. Imagine how successful you would be if you align your goals with what makes your customer successful. Otherwise, even if you are successful in the short term, you won’t be successful in the long term if you’re harming and…
Value Centered Design
User centered design is a valuable approach in creating software: User-centered design (UCD) is a process (not restricted to interfaces or technologies) in which the needs, wants, and limitations of end users of a product, service or process are given extensive attention at each stage of the design process. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-centered_design It requires putting yourself in the shoes of your users…
Sticker shock is a good thing
Sticker shock, finding out the price of something you want to buy, is something firms tend to avoid. That’s why hourly billing is so prevalent. It puts off the hard part of engaging an external partner. One of the reasons I price upfront is to get the money part of the conversation out of the way, so we can get…
Let teams use the tools and practices they want
It’s easy to get caught up in wanting consistency in practices and tooling across an organization. Consistency has many benefits. But, when consistency adds unreasonable delay in making decisions, then it can cause harm. Instead of adopting practices that pay substantial dividends, the organization stagnates for months and possibly years trying to make the right decision. If it’s hard to…
The revenue will follow
Many organizations obsess over measuring revenue. Both historically to see how much actual revenue was generated and estimations for how much revenue may be generated in the future. Objectives are set to increase revenue. And people lose sleep when expectations aren’t met. Which only leads to more measuring. Organizations also obsess over cash flow issues, especially timeliness of invoicing and…
Software development challenges can be opportunities for improvement
Monday I spoke with The New York XP & Agile Meetup Group and a question came up that alluded to the fact that sometimes we have challenges that seem insurmountable. For example, what if we work with highly sensitive information and we need to create databases that contain realistic, but not real information. At first glance, this seems like yet…
Fat or muscle?
When it comes to personal fitness some people want to lose fat, some people want to gain muscle and some people want to do both. Of course there are other priorities but fat loss and muscle gain are pretty common. What’s interesting is when people want to both lose fat and gain muscle simultaneously. Pulling that off is challenging to…
A course on writing code well.
About a year ago, I read a fantastic book On Writing Well by William Zinsser. I spend quite a bit of time using the written word to convey ideas and authoring code to create software. There are many parallels, perhaps the most important of which was Zinsser’s proclamation: Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. – William…
Lost in software nuances
When developing software there are countless nuances to consider, about how business operates. These lead to lots of suggestions and ideas for how the software should behave in various situations. You might find yourself wondering, how do we deal with X, or what about Y, or don’t forget about Z. The extremes of these are along the lines of “What…
Hourly billing and risk adversion
This came up in a comment on my post about What kind of results can you guarantee?: “If you practice value-based pricing, you better be awesome at predicting the future.” I don’t have a link to the original source of this statement, but the statement itself captures an important sentiment. Every day we take risks in life and we don’t…