Wille Faler’s Buzzword Bingo

In a previous post I noted how some projects try to preempt every conceivable risk by trying to plan, rather than work around them. Instead of making progress aware of the risk, they try to find all the answers for how to avoid the risk before doing anything. Analysis-paralysis is what I would call it. On a software project something will always go wrong at some point, so people better get over it. My opinion is that it is better to make a decision, go with it and then later change and adapt once you’ve learnt more about an issue by actually moving things forward.

You will always be in a better position to address a problem or risk if you know hands-on what it is about, rather than knowing theoretically what it possibly might be about.

The other issue about trying to plan and analyze the exact answer to each and every risk is even more insidious, it creates inertia. If people spend a lot of time planning, making “firm” decisions and having their minds set on a specific solution long before it is actually possible to know whether it is the best one, they will be less likely to want to change their decisions. They don’t want to change their decisions because they have now heavily invested in them, in terms of time and effort. Even if at heart they know that it is a sub-optimal decision, psychology sets in (and sometimes the realities of time-constraints) and will make people fight tooth and nail against any change to the given direction, even if it is straight down into an abyss.

In practice this means that over-planning will paint you into a psychological corner, there will be inertia against change, meaning that you might end up in a situation of “negative progress”: it will be harder later on to make progress and critical changes due to inertia against change, than it would have been to just have accepted the risk, made a quick decision and progressed in the first instance.

Now this post should not be taken as one dismissing risk altogether, because I am not. What I am saying is that you should be aware of risks, take them into account, but don’t let their existence hinder your progress. Make progress, track the risk and address it as you make more progress and get more tangible information and experience on how to address it.

But trying to pre-plan for every possible risk in the world before doing anything is foolish. First of you cannot predict every conceivable risk, secondly you will not have enough information to accurately assess a lot of risks until you actually tackle them, and thirdly and most importantly pre-planning paints you into a corner where inertia against change due to invested time and effort into pre-planning overpowers the motivation to do the right thing and make the right decisions.

Ars Technica, for a post about the trials and tribulations of having (or not having) a dedicated top domain for the adult industry:
Proposal to erect XXX domain faces stiff opposition

How managers talk about their jobs and past achievements tells a lot about them and their attitudes, without them really needing to say a whole lot or even realizing what they are giving away.

It is by no means fool proof, but the way they talk about their previous projects can potentially tell you whether they are bureaucrats or great managers who can drive teams to achieve great things (or more likely: somewhere in between). Take these two excerpts from two different managers and how they talk about their previous project:

1. “I managed a project with a budget of £10 million, and a team of 50 people over a course of 15 months!”
2. “I managed a team of 15 people that spent six months delivering a system saving the client in excess of £10 million in the first year alone for an investment of only £2 million.”

Who would you rather hire? Whom would you rather work for? The first one has experience of managing larger projects, with larger budgets, right?
Yes, but it doesn’t say a whole lot, does it?

All the first guy really told us was that he could spend £10 million in 15 months given a team of 50 people. He told us nothing about what he actually delivered, if anything. This is the bureaucrat mindset, he measures his status and self-worth as a manager by the size and budget of his “fiefdom”, not by any actual return-on-investment, tangible achievements or profit. Any old moron could spend £10 million if they got their hands on it. The manager who prides himself on having spent a big budget is the manager who will be looking to spend more and more money, getting a larger and larger budget. Hardly the kind of guy you want around if the aim is to actually make money and provide tangible value to clients.

The second manager on the other hand talked about tangible achievements, what the value was of what his team had delivered. He measures the value of his contribution by the value of his contribution to whomever footed the bill for his project, not by the size of his personal little “fiefdom”. He even prides himself on possibly having spent less money than was possible. To me, this is the attitude of a manager that is a winner. If I had nothing else to go on, I’d go with this guy every time, whether it was who I wanted to work for, or who I wanted to hire.

The little nuances and the things people emphasize can tell a lot about a persons attitude and worth. This is especially true when it comes to managers, is he bureaucrat who wants to extend his personal fiefdom? Or a meritocrat driven to deliver on what he promised in the most effective way?

Obviously this is an oversimplified example, and only looking at how people describe their achievements can both fool and mislead you, but in a lot of cases it can give you at least a little hint about a persons attitude, which may or may not be corroborated by other “proof” later on.

Yesterday evening I started compiling a list of opportunities and areas that I feel are still untapped. Some of these areas are fiercely competitive, but their promise is yet to be fulfilled which is why I have added them to my list. These areas should be interesting to follow over the next couple of years, and should certainly provide opportunities for any budding entrepreneurs who have the guts to try to address them.

So here goes:

• “Web 2.0″ productivity suites for enterprises. Companies such as Zimbra are currently attacking this market, but it is still pretty much an open playing field.
• Online ad revenue optimization services. At the moment content owners basically have three options: 1. Use something like Google adsense, and probably miss out on 60% of potential revenue. 2. Hire an ad salesman at a high cost. 3. Use some other advertising network. None of these options are particularly satisfactory for a company with limited resources, a technology and/or service that could help companies optimize their ad revenue without being tied to any particular ad provider could make a bundle.
• Monetization of “citizen media” Intellectual Property. People contribute massive amounts of value to other people on the net, but rarely get paid. That may be fine enough in most cases, but sometimes people get exploited by companies who do make money on the back of volunteers. An example of this would be traditional media companies using reader contributed digital photos for a pittance, where they would have had to pay a fortune if a professional photographer would have provided the same photo. A middle-man who could act on the behalf of the “small guy” and at least get some money for them could have a lot of potential.
• PC to Home Entertainment integration. A hive nest of activity at the moment with Microsoft, Apple and Sony to mention a few all vying for first spot. No clear leader yet. Not even a satisfactory solution to my mind. Can it really be that hard to stream media from a PC to a TV and stereo at a reasonable price?
• Utility computing. Pay for what resources you use and nothing more. IBM and many others have been talking about it for a long time, the ones who look closest to actually delivering on the promise anytime soon are Amazon Web Services.
• Contextual search. Google is great for key-word search. But Google is still terrible at working out what I mean with my keywords, asking a question or conveying a context with my key-words is pretty much impossible. To Google it is all just words, not a sentence that is more than the sum of the words.
• Desktop to Web integration. Even though the Internet has been popular for over 12 years, we are still pretty much bound to a PC, that or we are bound to a specific service requiring broadband. I want all my computers to automatically sync up, have the same documents and same e-mail on them seamlessly. I want to easily add new machines to my “virtual desktop”, and I want it to be available even at the times when I don’t have access to the Internet. Still a pipe-dream it seems.
• Market transparency and vendor reputation. You’d think with the Internet it should be easy to find out if a company you are dealing with are con-artists or skilled and reputable. Not so. Finding a plumber who turns up on time, does the job and does it well, and who doesn’t try to overcharge me is still pretty much impossible. Why isn’t it as easy getting a reputation check for a company as it is getting a credit check?

There you go, a few opportunities and interesting areas to follow. I might have given people some interesting food for thought or even ideas for a business. But to be honest, I’ll be happy if I have. If you have anything to add to the list, please feel free to comment.

Cool new features on the way for the Nintendo Wii, with some interesting areas of application..

Walking around different video game- and music stores this weekend made me aware of something that should be considerable news: even though the PS3 was released on Friday to much fanfare in the UK, none of the places I saw this weekend had run out of stock. There where PS3’s available on store shelves for anyone to buy.

Obviously this is anecdotal evidence at best, but it is interesting nonetheless. Both the XBox360 and Nintendo Wii quickly sold out after being released (with the Wii still hard to come by), and none of these machines had any of the potential supply limitations that the PS3 has with its expensive components and BluRay player. So despite PS3 supply being low on paper, it hasn’t sold out. Very bad news for Sony.

Early on in the third generation video game battle it looks like the outsider, Nintendo Wii has taken an early and unlikely lead, considering it has been outselling the Xbox360 by some margin since its release.
Does that mean the plucky Italian plumber Mario will take back his throne as the king of video game entertainment after being dethroned ten years ago?

The always entertaining Bile Blog takes a stab at SOA and ESB’s (strong language).

Very accurate stuff, can’t say I didn’t smile, and I can definitely relate to some SOA snake-oil salesmen I’ve heard over the last couple of years. The people selling SOA as the next silver-bullet always seem to use oversimplified examples to demonstrate how it could potentially solve all manners of complex problems. But that never really is the case.

SOA principles can be useful, in certain scenarios, for certain organizations. But it is hardly a silver-bullet. Just like Web Services, EJB’s, CORBA, MDA etc etc never where any silver-bullets for all problems everywhere before SOA.

An interesting thing about the whole “Web 2.0″ phenomena is the amount of companies who try to create a business around what is essentially a “feature”: something that might pretty neat, but doesn’t provide much value on its own.

Examples of such companies are the numerous companies who have tried to create online calendars, online text editors, web based IM pages etc. Someone might argue that for instance Writely (online text editor) got acquired by Google, and they have a point. But only so in the fact that they got lucky. The wast majority of these companies will quickly fade into irrelevance unless they can find something really valuable for users. Users may flock to their features to begin with out of interest, but I doubt some of these companies have any registered users that didn’t find them through Techcrunch and thought they’d give the feature a spin.

What is the common denominator for all these companies? It’s the fact that their whole business rely on what is essentially a feature that any Computer Sciences graduate would be able to knock up in a week or two. Hardly a very entrenched, unique or defensible value proposition if you ask me.. Actually, it makes the features so useless as money makers even if they are useful, that handy techies with a bit of extra time will knock up their own versions with their own tweaks just to get it exactly the way they want.

Creating a business around something that takes any dimwit around 1-2 weeks to recreate is foolish, there needs to be a lot more to it. Making and publishing prototypes quickly is a good thing, but trying to build a sustainable and large business around two weeks of work will never work, although if you are extremely lucky you might be able to quickly flip your feature on to someone else for a good profit. But how often do people win the lottery?

Over the years I have been pitched numerous more or less half baked business ideas in different circumstances by numerous people. I have also had the misfortune to see and hear about people betting it all on ideas that where outright stupid to use a more mild expression. I don’t really know why I’ve been subjected to this, I think it might be due to me having previously run a more ambitious start-up and still coming out of it alive (although not particularly rich). It might also be due to me only ever having a permanent job for three months of my life. The rest has been self-employed in one shape or the other.
The obvious disclaimer to this post, and me as a business guru in general is that I am not rich. I’m comfortably middle-class, but my attempts at more ambitious entrepreneurial ventures can best be described as “learning experiences” (invaluable as such, I know pretty much exactly what I did wrong). But successes they where not.

So for me to give advice on what to think of before you quit your day job might be a bit rich, but still I think I know enough by now to be able to list a few questions you should ask yourself before quitting your day job:

• What is it that you do, exactly and simply put? Numerous are the times when people have told me about their businesses and five minutes later I have still not had the slightest clue as to what they where actually doing. That is a bad sign. If you can’t tell your mother what you do, so she understands it fully within 20 seconds you’re of to a terrible start. Unless you’re developing the cure for cancer a dummy should be able to understand what you do. Correction: even if you are developing a cure for cancer, a dummy should understand (hint: “We are creating a cure for cancer”).
• Who are your customers? “Men between 18-35″ is not an answer. Be specific, if you sell to businesses you should be able to pick up the yellow pages and quickly find the five companies that would make your best and most likely customers. Being specific is the answer, down to the name if possible. If you know the size, industry, place in the value chain and the value proposition of your potential customer, you are up to a good start.
• Why should a customer care? I don’t care about cool technologies, slightly better performance or shinier widgets and more bells and whistles. I don’t even care about lower prices (unless it is dramatically lower to motivate me to switch). I care about stand-out unique benefits that appeal to me, the specific customer (see above). I would also like to know with some certainty that you can actually deliver on those benefits (and not just talk about them).
• Who is your competition? If you don’t have any, there’s probably not a market (if there where, you would have competitors).
• How do you sustain your advantage? A small start-up in manufacturing is not very likely to be able to compete on lower prices (economies of scale..). Unless you can actually keep ahead of the competition on your unique benefit, you are dead in the water, or at best a living dead.
• How do you make money? What are your costs and what is your business model? What are your key-ratios and numbers that you need to meet? If you don’t know what numbers you need to make, or even how you are going to make money and how much based on any given n (users/customers), then you are in very bad shape..

I’m baffled at the number of people who start businesses without having any idea of the answers to these questions for their own business. Sure, a lot of the time they think they have the answers, but press them a bit harder and they don’t.
The answers they do have usually tend to be some never-ending empty buzzword-blurb that means absolutely nothing.

Here’s the biggest hint I could ever give with regards to this: adding words/expressions such as “revolutionary” or “paradigm shifting” into your pitch doesn’t magically make your business “revolutionary or “paradigm shifting”. They are just empty words, they won’t fool anyone to part with their hard earned cash in exchange for what you are trying to flog.

I’ll continue on the same theme as my last couple of posts, because obviously I missed one very important factor.

Feedback. Self-organizing teams as I mentioned in my last post are a good thing, but it will only end up in confusion if there are no tangible requirements and no customer feedback. Early and frequent customer feedback is critical in effectively delivering any software solution, without it the team will be mostly doing guesswork in the dark, even if they have written requirements. Why? Because as most of us know, software requirements tend to be emergent, the customer doesn’t know what they want until they see it. They may think they know what they want (if you’re lucky), but most of the time it won’t actually be what they want.

If a team can deliver tangible results on a frequent basis in a short cycle and receive feedback on that, both the customer and the team will benefit from it. What will happen a lot of the time is in fact that the customer will realize at some point that they don’t need everything they asked for. They may realize that the 80% of functionality that took 20% of the effort will be wholly sufficient to meet the business goals of a system being created, and be happy at that. That doesn’t happen every time, but it might happen and it is one of the benefits of fast and early feedback.

Finally, because feedback is so essential, the effort to “pin down” and “baseline” requirements is often a futile activity: requirements may not be well defined enough to make any sense to baseline, or they may be completely inaccurate as to what the system really should do. To add insult to injury, these types of exercises tend to focus on non-tangible high-level requirements that are of the very wooly, pie in the sky variety, they can mean anything and nothing.
This is why I particularly like the Scrum Release Backlog approach, it tends to focus on tangible requirements that will provide value over the next 30 day cycle, not what some lawyer thought made a good requirement text that could or could not be upheld in court.

Proper, useful, frequent and quick feedback on requirements and progress are essential. Without it any software project is dead in the water.