One of the interesting things about starting up a company is the huge amount of advice on offer. Family, friends, customers and everyone on the Internet has a theory about every aspect of your operations.
It's certain that at least some of the advice is good, especially when it's being offered by someone who has used that method successfully in the past. What's also certain is a one person company cannot can implement all of it. Should I try out EVM, agile, tdd, obj-j, ec2, flex, git, tmux or any of the other 191 things recommended to me this week? And if so, which month am I going to sacrifice to test them all out?
This isn't just because of the time required to try new things and reflect on the lessons learned from the trial, but also because the advice is often contradictory.
As a project manager my solution to any dilemma is white board based, and so I now have two new (virtual) ones in my office.
- Things that work for me.
- Things that work for other people.
Each development cycle I go through I pull one or two things from the latter board and give it a go. If it works for me I put it on the first board, and from then on use it on any project that it seems appropriate for. This goes for everything from project management process to technical tools.
This might sound simple, but it's common to see people either trying to adopt too much change at once or alternatively to attempting to bash in all their screws with a hammer. The only problem I can see with giving this advice is that I have no idea when you will get time to try it out since so many things will already have been recommended to you this week.