I’m a big fan of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s book, Freakonomics. If you don’t know the book, the gist is that the authors take a lot of raw data and apply statistical analysis to it in an effort to come away with a conclusion. Sounds pretty dry but the beauty of the book is in what data they choose and how they break it down. The ...

If you provide a service for clients, do you have a way to deal with clients that give you headaches or frustrate you? You should.

I was given a piece of business advice from a friend with quite a bit of experience in the area. He said, “never say no to work, just say how much.” I find so much value in such a short statement. The meaning here is ...

There are “trouble spots” in all projects. These are the parts of the project that aren’t fully thought out, lack documentation or in general are just vague. In the programming world, they are also the parts of the project that you or your team doesn’t have experience developing or that the solution is unknown. I can’t tell you the number of projects I’ve been in where ...

“Don’t copy your competitors… you end up with their bad ideas.”

When we start a project, we usually do some kind of competitive analysis to get our bearings on the client’s place in the market. The idea with this exercise is not to come up with a list of elements to copy, but to understand the world in where our client does business. Sometimes in conjunction with this ...

Often when I meet with clients to discuss a technology project, either ongoing or new work, we have to discuss a problem (or rather the opportunity to do better) and then we try to come up with an answer or solutions. We brain-storm, discuss, collaborate and sometimes argue to get to something we can both imagine would be the solution.

While this process works well, it really depends on a ...