About Business
Running a UK SME: hiring and recruitment process, supplier decisions, pricing your own work, and the operational problems that usually turn out to be process problems rather than software ones.
A surprising share of the problems businesses bring to us as software problems are not software problems. A role that will not fill is usually a job description asking for two people, a salary band eighteen months out of date, or a four-stage interview process losing candidates to a two-stage one. A system nobody uses is usually a process nobody agreed on. Buying software to fix either is expensive and does not work.
The pattern is consistent enough to be worth naming. When a process is undocumented, everyone involved has a slightly different version of it in their head, and the differences only surface when someone tries to encode it. That is why our own build projects start with process mapping rather than requirements: writing down what actually happens, including the exceptions people handle by habit and have stopped noticing.
Articles here are about diagnosing the real constraint before spending money on it. Sometimes the answer is software. Often it is a decision nobody has made, a role nobody owns, or a supplier arrangement nobody has revisited since it was set up.
2 articles in Business
How to Brief a Software Agency (So the Quote Is Real)
A one-page brief structure that gets you a fixed quote instead of an estimate that drifts, with the six sections that matter and the details you can safely leave out.
12 Questions to Ask a Web Development Agency in Manchester Before You Sign
Ownership, hosting, who actually does the work, and what happens in month seven: the twelve questions that tell you which kind of agency you are talking to, and the answers to look for.