5 Tips for Competing with a Lean Development Firm
After reading our white paper “Lean Software Development: Cutting Fat Out of Your Diet”, you probably understand the competitive advantage that a hardworking software development firm derives from applying lean principles.
In the spirit of friendly competition, we’ve come up with 5 tips to help firms that are still plodding along with traditional software development methods:
- Randomly develop only 50% of the requirements. In practice, your clients will only use about 20% of the features with any regularity, so increase your speed to market by developing a shorter list of requirements. With traditional waterfall development, you predict features anyway so why not cut the guesswork in half? Simply take your requirements document (it’s in the big binder) and randomly pull out half the pages. This way, you’ll expend much less effort and still have a good chance of delivering some useful features. As usual, though, you still won’t know if you guessed correctly until development is over.
- Hire a good fortuneteller. Ok, so maybe you’re not so keen on gambling with your requirements list but you still want to speed things up. Can’t bear the thought of wasting your time talking with actual users of the software? You should keep an eye on the late night talk shows because that’s where you’ll find the most successful psychics. When you find one that seems competent, hire that person to tell you what features to develop. An added advantage of this approach is that you can also stay in touch with friends and relatives who’ve passed on.
- Talk fast and interrupt often. Efficient people don’t like to waste time, so get in the habit of talking quickly and interrupting others (especially clients) when you have something to say. The key here is to project the appearance of being purposeful, focused, and of course, efficient. Although this won’t improve your software or speed up delivery, it will certainly enhance your no-nonsense reputation.
- Economize with a vengeance. Your company might not be lean but it can certainly look like it. Replace desks and chairs with smaller ones, swap out 21” monitors for 17” monitors, and replace regular doors with extra narrow ones. Yes, shrink cubicle size down as far as it will go. You can also turn off the air conditioning in the summer and the heat in the winter. Show your customers that you’re going the extra mile to keep costs—ergo prices—down.
- Pray. This one is self-explanatory. (Hey, it can’t hurt.)
If none of these suggestions work for your company, then you might consider getting out of software entirely and switching to some other industry where lean companies don’t have an edge, like…uh…um…never mind.
We, however, are going to stick with software development that’s guided by lean principles and an Agile philosophy. If you’d like to learn more about Agile, read our white paper “Agile Software Development: A Smart Choice for Outsourced Projects”.
And feel free to contact us with questions or comments about our approach to software development.