Cat Herding with Style

So I’m really excited to start at a new client on Tuesday. It’s a fun little startup in Santa Monica that is very hip and web 2.0 cool. It’s a quick contract and should be fun. What’s the first task? Reverse engineering requirements.

Say what?

Ok, so you’ve got a great new idea for a new software product. You and your friends all sit down in a bunch of meetings and figure out what you want the software to do. You guys all sit around and start patching together different bits of code you already wrote, plug in other products and then take a bug-fix approach to adding new features and changing the product. And none of the above involves sitting down and writing a formal requirements document. Which is fine because nobody needs one. But move forward… Bus Dev did their job and found a customer.

And the customer wants to see the requirements document.
And you don’t have one.
And you need one, yesterday. Continue Reading »

Blog about how great their competitors are. Look for opportunities to comment on other people’s blogs about how great the competitor is and use common key word searches. Don’t mention the company you are mad at in blog article or comments (even bad press is press). This drives the competitor up in the search engine rankings, while doing nothing for your old company.

Advanced techniques I haven’t tried yet: flagging posts mentioning the company you are mad at as spam.

I had the pleasure of attending the Greater Boston chapter meeting of the IIBA tonight. It was Bring Your Boss night and the subject was Breaking the Cycle of Challenged Projects by Kathleen B. (Kitty) Hass. The chapter is dynamic, growing and thriving. Hass was a great presenter…

But sitting through the lecture (and having just come from a week-long class on eliciting requirements) I got my fur ruffled. All the skills and techniques Hass cited to stop crap project cycles have little if nothing to do with business analysis and everything to do with sales. Hass’ basic theory is this: IT projects suck. They suck because nobody spends enough time on strategy and analysis. Nobody does the work at the start of the project because Continue Reading »