Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

Posted on March 24, 2008 - by Yasser

The cake test

Buy a cake and invite a few people to grab a bite. The cake would be gone soon.

Now ask everyone to buy a cake for you. Then try eating all their cakes:

One after the other, or
One bite a cake, or
With any number of spoons, or
Ask a friend or two to join in
(try whatever comes to mind, and see if you can finish them all)

Probably not.

Apply this to real life projects:

A. You need passionate people with the right skills to work for you. A group of such people would help break down large projects into small pieces and will get things done.

B. Don’t oversell your capacity, rely too much on yourself and nurture the false belief that you’ll be able to finish every project that you acquire. Because you won’t, or you would at a later date.

C. Enjoy the cake.

Posted on March 19, 2008 - by Yasser

Don’t promise…

You won’t have to keep them. That’s right.

In human error and that mostly of judgement of how things would fall in place at a time in future, we make promises that we can’t keep. Promises hurt your business if you don’t keep them.

The better way is to under promise. Instead of trying to play Microsoft, give a date range when you’re estimating delivery times and don’t pick one particular date. Say I’ll get back to you soon instead of a couple of hours. If you think something will finish tomorrow, imagine something will go wrong tomorrow and then reschedule your commitment. Don’t say yes to deadlines that your customers propose. They have no idea of what you may be involved in. Tell them politely, we’ll schedule and get back to you.

Making promises are deadly. Under promising and over delivering is what works. Under promise.