This is my attempt at answering the fourth question of the chapter on Clarity from the book “The Advantage”. This question is considered a simple one.
The first step to answer this question is to look at all sorts of decisions made at the company or characteristics the organization has. Later we will examine them.
They are:
- We are a small company
- We are based in Italy
- We work remotely
- We have clients worldwide
- We run a community and we are involved in the community
- We have a technical blog which is important to us
- We crate info-products to share our competencies
- We are active in dissemination, i.e., explaining the value of what we do to people unfamiliar with these techniques
- We offer guaranteed results
- We are specialists: we focus on what we can do well
- We aim to have simple processes
- We perform quick discovery processes
- We required to be paid upfront
- We wok in English: we even sent our last proposal to Italian customers in English
- We strive to produce as simple contracts as possible
- We love to teach and share what we learn
- We give seminars at conferences and universities
- We do not have competencies on specific platforms such as IBM i or zOS
- We are relaxed place where to work
- R&D is important to us
- We have flexible working hours
- We have a focus on the North American and European markets
- We produce off-the-shelf parsers
- We collaborate with other legacy modernization providers
- We work across industries (e.g., publica administration, health, etc.)
- We work well with medium companies
- We have small teams, often a single developer per project (plus a PM and an architect for technical discussions)
These are all kinds of unrelated decisions, so the challenge is now to identify patterns and themes.
We should also identify which elements are secondary, just happening to support some other elements which are part of the list.
Then we should also identify which realities or decisions which are true now are accidental or undesired.
My results are:
- We use research and dissemination to reflect on what we do and teach it to others
- We work simple, reliable processes which we can perform with a small team and work best for small and medium clients. Off-the-shelf products are a way to deliver simpler solutions
- We are not specialist in any market or platform, but we may want to change that or partner with organizations with this vertical specialization
This one was really difficult and I am not so enthusiastic about the answers we got. Perhaps we will need to revise this again in the future