A New Beginning

kasprouse:

Charlottesville has some railroad tracks that pass through the heart of town, and I’ve walked along them quite a few times on shortcuts from one place to the next, or just to get off of the street and have a different view of things.  Today’s photo of the day is my obligatory train tracks image, with a side order of trees. Enjoy!

Near the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville, VA

I walked across these tracks almost every day last year for daily standup meetings at a client site. Last year this photo represented my routine. Now it symbolizes a new beginning for my company.

While we still work for this client and they are wonderful people to work with, our relationship has changed. Over the course of 2010 & 2011, we accepted a staff aug role with this client. It involved design, development, requirements analysis, and project management. We had staff aug engagements in the past, but this would turn out to be our largest and longest staff aug engagement. It was good, steady work and a consistent paycheck.

But, my business partner and I don’t want good, steady work. We don’t want to build a staff aug firm. We want to take ideas (either ours or our clients) from the ground up and transform them into new brands or products. We have no issue achieving this goal with the services business model as long as we get this opportunity. We also plan to dabble in the “product” world too, but for now we are all services.

So beginning January 1, we are no longer in a staff aug role. All of our resources are back in the office, every day of the week. It’s awesome. I feel like we can accomplish anything with the team we have. However, only 19 days into the year, it’s a lot tougher managing our resource plan than it was the last two years. With a small staff (less than 10), managing resources within a staff aug model is a piece of cake because the projects are typically longer. You just have to do a good job minimizing the time in between staff aug projects.

Our first internal review of these initial weeks is this Monday. It will be interesting to hear the team’s feedback. I know it hasn’t been perfect, but I also know we will improve. All I have to do is look at this photograph for motivation. I don’t want to walk across those tracks again.

Oh by the way for my fellow Cville followers, follow kasprouse for great daily photographs of Central Virginia.