About 7 or 8 years ago, while still calling St. Louis home, I worked at a small consulting company. I was in my early thirties and had been given the job as project lead for a large project. We were to write a back office system for an office supplies wholesaler named Distribution Management Incorporated. I was naive and inexperienced. Thought we could get the job done in a year. It took much longer. During that time, I was interacting with the customer almost every day. Much of the time we worked on site.
It seemed like a breath of fresh air when I moved to TurboPower and the closest I ever got to a customer was my newsgroup reader. Well, there was a yearly Borland conference where we got to meet a few customers. But the day in, day out stuff was via email, telephone, and newsgroup.
Now I'm back on a large project, writing a large system for Earthbound Farm. They're one of the largest, if not the largest, organic food producer in the United States. And they've asked Falafel Software to replace their existing system with one that's web-based, written in ASP.NET. To be honest, I had dreaded working on the project because it reminded me of the one mentioned at the beginning of this post. But that feeling changed after getting into the thick of things. It's a lot of work, but also a lot of fun.
I've been onsite two out of the three weeks, which is my lame excuse for writing very little in this blog.
Going back and forth between the two worlds, it brings some thoughts and questions to mind. And just to remind you, the title of this web site is not "Home of Brilliant Insights". Most of the time it should be called "Still Chewing".
In the ISV world, I'd often found it difficult to know exactly what to make. What problem is a person trying to solve and what will they pay you for it?
In the consulting world, it was quite apparent what the customer needs done. As a matter of fact, they need a lot done and you can see where they're hurting.
In the ISV world, I had so few ideas and I wonder if it was mostly due to limited contact with people outside the company.
In the consulting world, I've been so close to the people and their needs that it was overwhelming.
How do you bridge the two worlds? How do you move from solving this particular customer's need into making something that can solve the needs of many customers?
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Sean Winstead
Tags: ISV, Customers, Consulting