.curvejump

The theme of the day at the office was risk management. The reason being a deployment of a clients application that didn’t follow our own rules. The result was several of the things that we wanted to avoid by setting up the rules in the first place:

• the client got something that didn’t work 100% as intended
• we felt bad for not delivering as promised
• we had to put in more work than we planned
• we felt that our brand could get hurt by it

By going back to our routines and processes, by looking at the history and learning from our misstakes we hope that this will never occour again. Even if this was a rare failure in deployment and the deployed application is a small one (8-9 hrs total) we still felt that this had to be addressed and we had to learn from it. And therefore we might aswell be transparent about it and write it here.

Society invented weekends for catching up on development issues ;)

Today we spent a good portion of the day making a massive planning effort to be able to provide a future client with an estimate of how much time we think a project will take.

We only hade  the preliminary specs for one part of the application but it still took us a good deal of time to divide it into defineable parts and to estimate them. Tomorrow we will put these parts into major iterations and give the client a preliminary project plan.

Planning is always fun because we get to dig into our knowledge and share, debate, discuss and structure our ideas. Remember; the plan is irrelevant, the planning is vital.

Today we met with one of our favorite clients, Team SafeBox Archive. We have helped them build a unique system for handling the storage of physical documents for all their clients. In this system SafeBox can manage orders, where something is stored, when it ended up there and lots more. Their clients can see basic information about their stored documents and order pick  ups either from SafeBox storage facility just north of Stockholm and sent to the clients office and the other way araound.

Today we laid out the plan for the autumn, discussed challenges to come and feed back from their customers. The project that we develop for SafeBox is truly unique and we really love it because the application developed really has an impact on the way SafeBox evolves and do business and it really impacts all of their customers and the way the do business.

It’s a nice feeling to make a difference.

Summer is rapidly turning into autumn here in Stockholm and with that we are back in full action at the Curvejump office as of this week.

The next couple of months looks really exciting with both new external and internal projects. This week is really a running start where we are preparing a launch of a major project that includes some pretty fancy UPS API connections and also the start of development for an application that will handle attendance for a venture capital firms funding meetings.

We’re gonna try to keep the blog a bit more alive and post several times a week so that we ourselves can look back and remember all the great things that we have experienced.

Right now we are creating a new website for a real estate agent in Stockholm. This invloves fetching and indexing a lot of data from a centralized system and then presenting it.

The actual fetching of the data is done by invoking the indexer via crontab but there is also the option for the real estate agents to manually invoke to speed things up.

One of the challenges here is to handle the huge amount of XML data that the centralized system puts out and to handle that data quick enough with concern to timeout issues since the website is on a shared server.

Another has passed full of exiting stuff. Not going to write to much here, but there is a Swedish version of this years summary to be read on our website. Cheers and happy new year!

The last couple of months I’ve been running into a lot of people that have just “seen the light” and opened their own business, most of them in IT but some in other business areas as well and most of the time the topic of discussion tends to become client acquisition.

Now, even though some of these entrepreneurs might become or already have become our competition I think it is only natural to share our experience with them. Sure, I might not give them information that would let them steal our best customers, that would just be plain stupid, but I truly believe in the common benfit of competition as a way for all of us to improve our businesses.

My experience in client acquisition is that there are no shortcuts. It’s hard work, persistance and refusal to give up that leads to success. So if I, after aprx 10 years of entrepreunial experience would put together a list of advice regarding client acquisition for new and old entrepreneurs this would be it:

• Join a business network
• Don’t be afraid to ask, the worst thing that can happen is that you get a ‘no’ in return
• Be fair in all your dealings with others; old and current customers, partners, the competition et cetera
• Say yes; it’s harder than no, but more rewarding
• Accept that you don’t know everything and never will, keep education your self about your industri, about entrepreneurship and about people

Well, there it is. Take it and run with it.