Common Challenge

One of the basic challenges of ’starting-up’ is loosing momentum. In the beginning everything is easy, you have plenty of energy and bright future ahead. Unfortunately, soon the everyday pains come by and you have to simply go through them. Many of those are things you wanted to avoid by setting up your company: dealing with unwanted partners, unproductive paperwork, doing things that are simply not inspiring. This is where rhythm becomes so important. It’s essential to move on every day - even a smallest step. You also have to monitor yourself, whether you’re actually making any real progress everyday.

This is where good project management methodology helps. We looked at quite a few, while starting Dooyt, we also had some experience with waterfall methods. After lots of discussions (which involved rapid hand movement ) we chose SCRUM. I’m not going to cover it fully here, you can get plenty of information on Scrum Alliance website. SCRUM has three significant advantages over other methods. It’s simple - you set the goals, team takes them on and produces functionalities. It’s lightweight - you don’t need fancy software to implement it (in fact a whiteboard and a pen would be quite enough) - all we use is a spreadsheet with 3 tabs. It focuses on the rhythm - everyday every team members report in short words three things: 1. What she/he accomplished yesterday, 2. What tasks are planned for today, 3. Are there any possible obstacles in meeting goals.

Scrum has other advantages as well - reducing development time and increasing ROI to name just a couple, but those three are the most important, because they MAKE you and every other team member to keep the rhythm. And this is what makes things roll.

It took me a long time to write this post. 99% of this time was thinking how to do it the best possible way. 1% was actually doing it. Without this 1% it wouldn’t be possible for you to read this post, which would make the whole effort pointless. It’s quite an often thing, that just 1% of what you do makes the whole thing matter. Which doesn’t make the other 99% any less important.

So much for an introduction
Even though this post is coming out in march ‘08, and it says: The art of the start, it doesn’t mean we’re just beginning. In fact - we’re half-way done.
We started around 6 months ago with some ideas, plenty of energy and a bit of free lunch-time. We knew we wanted to make important products. Things that will really bring value to our customers. Things that will improve lives. 
It may sound big. And it is. Some of our ideas are dead simple. Some are so complicated even we still don’t understand what they’re actually going to do But all are going to influence the way users live and work. That’s our basic goal.

The topic is not accidental - a title of a book by Guy Kawasaki. We seem to do a lot of reading and we constantly learn, which can be important for you, as we will test some theories in practice, and will post our experiences on this blog.

So this blog is going to be about Dooyt (obviously - more on it soon), management (business, time, project) and at last but not least - starting up

Make sure you come back, at least once a week.