Capital vs. Marketing

Marketing expense begins where capital expenses end.

You can buy an office chair at a Big Box store for $50. It will do the job.

You could buy an office chair with style and greater functionality for $500. It will probably do the job better.

The $500 chair will also give signals about how you view form, function, comfort, attention to detail, and so on.

The first $50 could be viewed as a capital expense. You needed a chair.

The next $450 could be viewed as a marketing expense. You intentionally spent extra to buy a chair that had better form, function, and so on.

A visitor can then expect that you care about form, function, and so on, and not just using the easiest, cheapest option.

What does your chair say about you?

Peter

Keeping Your Stars

A happy little thought on a Friday: Your best staff are probably looking to leave.

The Great Recession has been tough on careers, assuming you have been able to maintain yours among the layoffs. There is pent-up 'departure demand', workers who have delayed advancing in their fields either by choice or by circumstances.

In other words, your best staff are probably working on exit strategies. The moment the job climate improves and they see an opportunity, they are going to take it.

Are your going to save your response until your most talented staff starts to defect, or are things you can do preemptively to keep the wanderlust to a minimum?

Will increased present costs (if any), save you costs, both financial and opportunity, in the future?

Peter

Bad Concepts

Everything John talks about in this post is spot on. Too little time is spent up front thinking about the point of what you are doing, and whether its worth watching.

If nothing else, follow the link to the Windows Launch Party. Painfully forced and bad.

Peter

Off The Grid

I just returned from a short Holiday "off the grid". Nothing too drastic, but a few days in a place without cell phones, Internet and cable TV resets one's sensibilities.

I'm always surprised how quickly I don't miss being connected.

My brain wanders around when I step away from the daily panic, too. It looks past its normal three-day time horizon and starts asking bigger questions. It considers new paths, new workflows, new content. I enjoy the ride.

At times I wish I could fully shut the office out of my head, but at the same time I am reassured that it is peculating on my mental back burner. I often return to work with a page full of notes and questions, which I then annoy my co-workers with for a few days. 

"Why do we do it this way?"

"Have we tried this?"

"What about....."

While I may unplug technologically, I guess I never completely disconnect.

Peter

Brilliant Marketing

This is great stuff.

It works on so many levels, too.

(Design Fetish is one of my favorite sites, also.)

Peter

Scope

Once your project is up and rolling, a serious landmine is "mission creep". Increasing the scope of a project from what was originally planned can wreak havoc on both the calendar and the budget.

The hardest part of managing changes in scope is recognizing what requests can be accommodated-  changing the color of the GUI shouldn't be a big deal, changing the GUI itself is- and which ones are deal breakers.

Defining the limits of the project to all the stakeholders at the beginning can go a long way in producing a project that everyone is happy with.

Peter

Seldom Too Much Planning

My current project is suffering from too little planing on the front end, which is making it expensive on the back end.

I am amazed at how often this happens.

The cheapest part of the project is the planning phase. It involves a limited number of people and hardly any materials, so the cash costs are few, yet most projects spend too little time in this phase. For some reason it doesn't feel like real work, or something that is to be endured rather than as a crucible to refine the project before the first egg is broken.

You wouldn't begin building a house without first knowing exactly what each room is going to look like, yet jobs routinely begin with at only a napkin sketch of the finished product. While this can be successful, the odds of big cash costs and emotional trauma are large.

In short, I'm not sure I have ever worked on a project that was over-planned. I definitely willing to find out.