Common Challenge

Usually when we begin something new we have a (more or less) clear vision on where we want to go. Sometimes we even know how we want to get there. Sometimes the how can be more important then where for us - if we are a bit idealistic… And then the life comes, so be ready to ditch your basic asumptions for final outcome’s sake.

At first we thought that while creating Dooyt.com we will also create a great company to work in, similar to Google: with free lunches, stimulated innovation and not always business oriented products. And, of course, employing thousands of people (well, in future at least). We did put a strong emphasis on structure - even though we chose distributed team for the start, with people working from their homes. We set up communication rules, we carefully chose project management methodology (SCRUM), project collaboration software (ActiveCollab) and we were planning kick-off meetings for our team. We also wanted to keep our day jobs for some (preferably short) time.

The reality proved to be a bit different:

1. It was hard to find the right people to create a great team
2. Managing HR took more time than it was worth - we didn’t have time to focus on polishing our products
3. Working our day jobs we didn’t have enough time to take care of product development and the team
4. The product development went slower than expected (mainly with us as bottlenecks)

Fortunately we are used to being elastic - so we adjusted ourselves

1. Our team is now responsible for inventing and marketing the products, and main architectural coding work.
2. The rest of the coding is and will be more and more outsourced to India
3. Simple business tasks are passed on to our Virtual Assistants, also located in India
4. With some of our time freed (thanks Tim Ferris) we are inventing new products - so expect more from us in near future

As you probably noticed, it’s not really about ditching your dreams, but rather going a bit deeper to figure out what your big dream really is. For us it turned out to be inventing great products. The side effects like creating new jobs etc. apparently can be also achieved this way - the only difference is that the people are now working in India

So whenever things don’t quite go as planned try this: 1. Go up, to find why you really started, what’s the REAL goal. 2. Then think how you can change the “how to get there” (for instance by outsourcing - try Elance for that). You’ll be surprised how elastic your assumptions can be.

And remember to let us know how it went

If you liked this post, make sure you give it a kick on DIGG or MIXX - someone might apreciate it.

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.