There is always more time – for your most important project

At a strategy planning session with a software company I attended recently, towards the end of the session, even as we came close to finalizing a set of powerful strategy for focusing the business on the best segment and scaling it to capture more market share efficiently, the group struggled with seeing how the strategy could be realized, given the constraints in resources and time that they face. They have had so much organic growth that they were afraid of affecting their business and the momentum they had in the market if they were to devote more time executing the chosen strategy at the expense of “keeping the lights on” work.

Firstly, I think this is a good problem to have and is very common in high growth (expansion stage, in our terminology) software companies. The reason is that young software companies are typically bootstrapped and grow very efficiently by maximizing all resources available to them. There are often no superfluous resources and people often assume more than one role in the organization. Now given the circumstances, how can they get the time/resources needed to grow without investing heavily in people and new resources?

That was a great discussion and I learned a lot from the participants’ diverse viewpoints. I just want to list 3 ideas here, all of which are very commonsensical but are often overlooked when you are deep in the details:

– There is always more opportunity for efficiency. For any sufficiently complex process, efficiency can be found in almost any part, being it a production process, a hand off or a quality control step. Application of leading principles can be very helpful for trimming down wasteful steps and unnecessary complexity.

– Secondly, while it can be true that the organization as a whole is very stretched and will not be able to invest more into a particular new direction. However, we need to break the investment in resources and time into specific business departments, one at a time. With this rigorous review, we will be able to have a true understanding of the additional load on each key team member and business function. This also is another opportunity for finding efficiency hidden in the complex business layers.

– Lastly, it might be necessary to examine the company’s vision against the current activity load.
Are these activities fully supporting the vision or are they just a distraction? At any company, there should be tension between the current activity and the vision, and the key to success is to leverage this tension to force the company to be more focused and effective. If an activity is a distraction, then just doing it is already effecting the business in a negative way, and not doing it any more is going to be good than bad to the business.