New ideas – what direction to go?
Posted May 20th, 2010 in Outsourcing IT by Wojtek GurgulWe have had a very interesting discussion this week at PGS. The subject has been: “What is better: investing in a fairly safe project with reasonably high probability of success with a limited return rate, or investing in a project with Global market, high risk, but in case of success – enormous return?” I think I’m quite conservative. If you have $x for investment, only a small fraction of that x can be spent on high risk projects. Also – before we start high risk projects we should prove that we know how to make “small” money on the safe projects.Today we have only one project which has no defined customer yet. It’s a product we hope to place in many places, but haven’t got a paying customer yet. All the other projects already have business partners who will invest their money as well to sell the product once it’s ready. This is much safer.
We currently have 4 R&D projects going on. I get mad, as they go slower than I would dream they should. But I do remember Dilbert… So now I have to carefully define what I really need to limit the time needed, and to get the best ready-to-market product in the limited time. And what is great – the team challenges me every time I come with any new idea. I also learned how to write specs, which mean something. I remember the first time I wrote my specs, one of the leaders came to my office saying the worst customers give us better documentation :-). But it does not change a thing that everything goes so slow… Having 70 developers company you would think that you can get any project completed by tomorrow. But most of them actually deliver customers’ projects and cannot work on anything else, so I need to wait. So I practice my patience. Meanwhile I get specs ready for new projects to work on. We get more of them, so the pipeline is full until the end of the year. I wish I could the results now…
Tags: discussion, innovation, programming
