I was a programmer in a former life – doing everything from bond pricing on Wall St. (fun!) to managing groups of programmers. Some of the techniques programmers and project managers use to be efficient and work as teams should be used by business owners to improve their own efficiency, encourage team work, and limit mistakes.
So get your geek on, and keep reading to see how the programmers do it.
DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself)
Also known as DIE (Duplication Is Evil), DRY is a method of software development that attempts to limit duplication of programming code. Why? Not only is it inefficient, but when if you need to make changes, you’ll have to make changes in multiple places.
In our small businesses, we often duplicate both work and data. For instance, many businesses keep their customer database in multiple places like Outlook and Quickbooks. We constantly run into businesses that duplicate work in their day to day workflows. Making changes to our workflow or business software seems like too much work, but if we could accurately assess the costs of duplicate work and bad data, we’d quickly see we should adopt DRY in all our business processes.
The Agile Manifesto
In 2001, a group of uber-programmers put together a manifesto on how to program efficiently and have happy customers. The rules are simple, and I’ve only had to change one word to make it apply perfectly to every small business:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working services or products over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
These tenets speak for themselves. I think every good entrepreneur adheres to them instinctively, and they remind us why people from large companies or MBAs often don’t make good entrepreneurs.
Scrum
Scrum (just like a rugby scrum) is a method developed by programmers to complete important projects quickly. Instead of complicated deadlines, rigid requirements, and task delegation, Scrum encourages 2-4 week “Sprints” in which a tightly-knit group, working together, completes a fully functional product and shows it to the customer. After getting feedback, they go through another “Sprint”.
Scrum’s philosophy is that customers change their minds often, and you’re better off getting something that works and showing it than waiting until the end – only to find they changed their minds. I think that any business activity you take on should contemplate this method of encouraging teamwork and getting something that just works out quickly.
So there you have it. Listen to your programmers – they can teach you more than just how to jailbreak your iPhone.
