If software project nightmares are costing you sleep before the project even starts, you're paying attention to the right risks. Ten executive-level moves that move the success needle long before a developer touches the keyboard.
If your software support team feels like aliens who've never run your business, you're not crazy and you're not stuck. Three responses you should never accept from a support partner - and what to demand instead.
Halfway through the budget, half the functionality done, and the CFO is yelling. Sunk-cost reflexes will keep you spending - five questions that cut through the emotion and tell you whether to push, pivot, or pull the plug.
Your business software is an asset on your balance sheet, even if your accountant doesn't list it that way. Seven concrete moves to protect that asset from the all-too-common single-developer, undocumented, prayer-based support model.
Your business has habits the same way you do - and most of them quietly compound, for better or worse, every quarter. A practical health check on the workflows running your company while you're busy running it.
More than half the process improvement projects we run trace at least one finding back to inadequate software. The honest comparison between buying off-the-shelf and building custom - including when commercial really is the right call.
A specification feels like overhead until the day it saves you a six-figure rework bill - and then it feels like the smartest line item in the budget. Part four on why the boring document is the highest-ROI deliverable in the project.
Specs don't fail because nobody talks - they fail because nobody listens. Part three on the unglamorous communication discipline that keeps "that's not what I meant" out of your project's last 20% and your invoice's bottom line.
If your developer assumes your business runs like every other company in your industry, the project is already lost. Part two on the three steps that get you and your build team on the same page before code takes the wrong shape.
The gap between "yes, that's what I need" and "that's not what I asked for" is measured in dollars, weeks, and patience. Part one of a four-part series on the spec-writing steps that close the gap before it costs you.
The lowest hourly rate on the planet doesn't always produce the lowest project cost - sometimes it produces the longest one. An honest look at where offshore wins, where onshore earns its premium, and how to choose based on your actual risk profile.
The same techniques that let credit agencies score you let your business predict which customers will churn, which orders will go bad, and which inventory will move. A plain-English primer on what data mining can - and shouldn't - do for you.