This question came up last week. I am hearing from my project management team a bit of distrust in the technical capacity of our web development team. I think we suffer because of the distance and culture but the project management team takes every late delivery or small bug as evidence that the development team may not be capable. My quick response was that this was likely some combination of: Weak development team Poor communication, especially around requirements and expectation setting Past failures (missed deadlines, bugs, downtime, etc.)

All executives want a software development organization that delivers high quality products with low cost in a timely manner. The leap from manufacturing to software development, however, has not been complete and has distorted our view of how to do this. Thursday, March 18, 2010 -- Lean-Agile: Using the Right Vision to Manage Transition. Unfortunately, while we want productivity, quality and low cost, trying to achieve these directly often has the opposite effect of what we want.

And it’s surprising how few startup founders think in those terms. And it becomes really important to have that granularity really fast. I’ve talked before about initial conversations with founders and the questions I’m likely going to ask Startup Software Development – Do Your Homework Before You Develop Anything . Tim Berry has a great post on Why I Hate Those Huge Market Numbers tells us that he doesn’t like to see business plans with multi-billion market numbers used as the basis for projections. It’s the old – 5% of massive market gives us a big number.