In the last few years of my professional career, I have had the opportunity to work in various programming languages, operating system environments and team dynamics.  I have also recently been given the task of deciding what type of products I want to be designing and developing.  What I’m about to write were thoughts specifically triggered as a result of a conversation I had today with my brother, who is a very intelligent creative design type.

He has been talking up the idea of creating various Wordpress themes and plugins as well as various iPhone applications, mostly as a way to get his (or our) names out there as knowledgeable people in the respective fields of programming.  This would ideally lead to a consulting agency for project-based work for larger clients wanting more specialized development tasks performed.  It sounds like a very good plan, to be honest, if you’re into that kind of work experience.  Sometimes I think I am, but then most times I feel a bit more grounded than that…

It takes a talent for multitasking to be in the consulting agency environment.  I’ve tried it out a few times, and I can honestly say that I find the various unrelated projects from differing customers to be distracting to one another, and to the flow of my creativity.  Now, this experience has been in the IT consulting field, which may be entirely different from the programming consulting field, but I suspect the effect is simply less intense and that the short term nature of consulting arrangements tends to distract from the longer-term nature of designing robust software applications.

Much more interesting to me, personally, is to take a project from its concept, architect it well, and help it grow into a fully mature and stable product that somebody finds useful.  The pressure is a little less intense as you can feel free to make mistakes with design, as you will have (more) ownership, responsibility and the inherent ability to fix those mistakes given the longer timeline of feedback from users.

To all my future readers, regardless of the programming slant to this post, what are your thoughts on consulting versus long-term projects?

I’ve been reading an interesting book by the name of “A Whack on the Side of the Head” over the last many months.  One of the interesting concepts that I’ve tried to leave myself open to is that of “Cross-fertilization”.  This would be the theory that you can learn many concepts from areas of expertise outside of your own.  A software engineer can learn things from a gardener.  A professional sports player can learn things from a grade school teacher.  Well, I have been involved with my wife in team teaching 3 year old children in Sunday School at my church.

Now, I must give a lot of credit to my wife who is an excellent teacher for children.  She is absolutely fabulous at grabbing the attention of children and teaching them at the level they’re ready to learn.  She loves to do it to.  And to watch and participate in that instruction and activity is inspiring on so many levels.

What occurred to me today, however, was that ties can me made to the concept of knowing your audience, and communicating to them only what they are prepared and interested in hearing and learning.  So much of the time in marketing campaigns this concept is largely underestimated.  Many campaigns focuse simply on age range and/or gender for consumers or company size and revenues for businesses.  However, most cold calling and mailer campaigns (not to mention email campaigns) I’ve heard of usually have many more people simply ignore them than actually respond or end up converting into a sale.

However, it’s not just the marketing department that has a tough time at truly understanding their audience.  In fact, they probably understand that concept quite well given that they deal with it in such an intimate fashion.  Many other business units suffer from the problem of being unaware of their audience’s needs and interests in and how to communicate with them about them regarding those topics in a manner that both parties understand.  For example, how many times does an IT department truly understand where the executive team wants going with the business.  What if the IT departments took the time to learn how to communicate ideas and capabilities of technology to executive teams that were business savvy rather than tech-savvy?  What if engineering teams took the time to work with materials acquisition experts to understand the costs of their designs?  (to be honest, I’m not sure the good ones don’t)

My point is that many benefits of efficiency would be realized.  Costs would be reduced, businesses would be more nimble, marketing campaings would be more effective and less annoying.  These are just some examples.  I could probably do better at explaining HOW to find out more about your audience, but I’ll save that for another post.  Something about suppliers and consumers being willing to engage in open conversation about their products and services and consumers valuation of them…  Yeah, that’s a topic that I think I need to explore more about.

I’ve been thinking lately about my decision making processes that I
utilitize for various aspects of my job and my personal life. I have to
ask myself sometimes, am I making this decision based on factual data
and measurable statistics, or am I making the decision purely to
satisfy my ego? Think about the many decisions you make in a given day
and you’ll see what I mean. Though I am not sure what brought this
question to my mind the last few days, I am glad to have it lurking
there now.
Many of you critical thinkers out there are probably saying “of course,
any idiot would know that.” But that’s just it, even though I like to
think that most of my decisions are based on critical thinkers, many
people make decisions based on wanting to fulfill their own objectives
and not necessarily those of the people the decisions affect. Not only
that, but sometimes, if they would stop to think about the decision and
look at it critically, they would be far less likely to make wrong
decisions or decisions that cause more headache than they needed to.
Maybe I’m just being very philosophical tonight. I guess I’ll sit back
and ponder tonight and leave sharing my thoughts for another time.