Analysis Paralysis
Table of Contents
We're in the software business (well actually the SaaS business, but that's not important right now.)
Like any software provider, we need to cater to our customers' various needs... but only to a point. Too many options and you wind up with lengthy menus and screens full of checkboxes and before you know it you've built Microsoft Word. And more options are the enemy of quality-control, since you can't test every permutation of features.
But if you build too few options, your customers can't wrangle the product to adapt to their business processes. It's unrealistic to ask customers to bend their business around our software. They just won't buy your product because it's not right for them. Great way to go out of business.
The most successful and elegant products find the right balance. Enough flexibility to work in real-world situations, but enough common design so customers share a similar experience.
This brings us to our latest challenge -- bringing effective Job Costing to ClickTime. This is the age-old problem of matching actual vs. budgeted time/money on projects. It's the ability to do coarse- or fine-grained estimation, track progress, and maintain control of projects that threaten to exceed their bounds. And it's the secret to managing profitability.
Sounds great, right? Now try asking 100 businesses how they want to do this. You'll get 100 different answers. One budgets hours per-project, per-month. Another breaks down each project into phases and assigns dollar estimates per division. Another measures utilization per project, per job-title, per month.. We have dozens and dozens of sample spreadsheets showing how our customers are currently managing their job costing analysis. There are simply too few common threads for us to see a standard platform emerging.
Hundreds of hours and scores of meetings later, we kept coming back to the same thing: it's those darned spreadsheets. Everyone's using them. So why reinvent the wheel? What if we could build a ClickTime-spreadsheet hybrid? A powerful analytic chimera? We got pretty excited about it . (Yes, we're the sort of company that gets excited about stuff like this.)
Stay tuned for more details...
