...it's at the interfaces that things most commonly go wrong. For example, the spacecraft that crashed into Mars because one group worked in yards and another in metres. Their invidual parts were fine but they didn't fit together. It's the railroad tracks meeting in the middle of the US and finding they use different gauges for the track (a great cartoon not a fact). How do you stop this happening in projects.   more »

When someone has to persuade you about why you need a service then you probably don't. Need is pain. When you have something that is really inconvenient in your life then you recognise a solution when someone shows it to you.

Sick of the shower burning your bum when someone flushes the toilet - you need the .......

Worried about losing your family photos from your laptop, then you need the ..........

If there is not a 'selfish benefit' to a company, one that you understand intrinsically, then you probably don't want to buy the product and I don't want to help it grow and succeed (because it won't).   more »

I went into a development programme once and looked at the project plan. It looked good. That’s the problem with Microsoft Project (and Powerpoint) - the biggest, steaming pile of junk can be made to look good. The problem that makes this worse is that most senior managers are incapable of spotting a dodgy project plan when they’re two inches away from it.   more »

During the life of a project, the team will define milestones specific to the project and pass tollgates that are imposed to allow review of the project at important states in the project.    more »

My friend Mike Trup’s posting on his experience about starting up his own software distribution business.  He starts with a nice variation on the classic advice (Ansoff) not to go for a new product in a new market.  Mike’s twist replaces the market with the channel.  I’m going to be posting more about screwing with your channels soon.

1) Do not try and introduce a completely new product or service and a completely new way of buying it all in one go. I promise you, you will be up against enough of a problem trying to get people to understand and accept one of these concepts.

The rest is here

An important part of any product based startup is to consider the marketing channels by which the product will be delivered to market. It’s a simple point but capable of extreme pain for a startup that get’s it wrong and painful enough even if you get it right!

The following goes through the detail of some of the issues that will keep you up at night for a software business. Some of the points are equally valid across other types of product.   more »

Companies can be outstanding at generating new ideas – I mean really world-class and yet they struggle. The simple reason is they don’t have the resources to exploit them. I’m not talking about the resources not existing in the company, I am talking about them just not being available. If the resources are being used for something useful then is that okay? Well only if it is more valuable to the business than the project it is delaying. If not, then your resource prioritisation across the portfolio of projects better be good. However, the more frustrating problem for companies relates to when their resources are ‘lost’ to the business either still working on bad projects or doing ‘after sales’ on previous projects.    more »

I'll do a version of the classic rules of investment and startups some other time but here are a few you don't find in books.

• If there's money on the table - take it! 
  • You’ll be wrong sometimes but hanging on for a better deal later on seems to go wrong way too often.
• If it feels wrong - it is.

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Money invested in a company is there to make something happen.  I normally refer to it as ‘go faster’ money – as the most normal use is to fund the business accelerating towards it’s goals using the extra funding as fuel. 

In comparison, the following are not seen as reasonable uses of their money by investors:

• Giving yourself a great salary
• Taking expensive office space
• Feeling better because you’ve got some ‘breathing space’ money in the bank
• Acquiring a nice company car

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Keywords: ventures, startups, startup, product, investors

In another post, I put up the graphic above as an approach to assessing different projects within a porfolio and understanding the overall ‘balance’.  The projects here represent a company that is sticking pretty close to home in terms of what it does but is expending significant money in trying to develop technology led approaches to their market (the diameter of the circle represents the money committed to the project).

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