We are unsure why it is so, but *some* contract Agencies and their employees have a very limited view of the World and have sand-boxed their small minds into thinking that people cannot be good at more than one task – perhaps they themselves are only good at one thing? LOL
What they need to realise is that when you run a small to medium business it can be a godsend to be able to learn and know more than one thing, not because you want to work on everything, but sometimes it is a necessity due to budget reasons. If you are not one of those Agencies, feel free to give us a call.
What a typical 70 hour work week consists of for ‘each of us’ at the moment:
– Make initial contact with potential customers based on leads and discuss with them their very high level layman requirements in order to ensure that we are able to help them or not. If we believe we can help them we then arrange if necessary a meeting in order to meet them and discuss their high-level requirements and try to convert them into customers or likely customers (some of our products are sales of established products and some are new developments so the initial contact can be quite different depending on what it is).
– Perform some BA work in relation to customers for which we have converted and/or almost converted – sometimes it is pre-work, but other times just further clarifications or requirements gathering – depending on the state of the product or work, demonstrate it in person to show them the progress as well as clarify certain complicated aspects that may require clarification.
– Analyse, design and develop the products depending on which product we have to constantly switch between html/css/javascript/java (front end – java for the applets) to php/python/c#/java (backend) to vb6/java (desktop or android apps) to objective c (iPhone apps) not to mention the different SQL backends. Some products use almost all the mentioned technologies – does anyone these days develop using a single technology? I doubt it! (Agents take note).
– Provide customer support and training.
– Schedule and manage after hours product releases with clients as well as system upgrades where necessary.
– Project manage the small team we have which includes ourselves – we are a very agile company but depending on the budgets for particular jobs we may be more or less formal in our approach. All our jobs we manage to some degree of formality in that we track requirements/stories, we have our goals/scrums, we have our r&d/spikes and we have our standups/emails (when we are not in the office). We are always on top of things.
– Design and prepare advertising material and it’s copy as well as attend promotional shows when we can.
– Payroll and Accounts, this is the less fun part but we have to do it and we know how to do it – properly!
We don’t all have the exact same knowledge of everything or the same level of knowledge of everything but we have a very solid cross over and we are forever increasing our knowledge in all areas.
If you ever get asked by an Agent why you know more than one thing or how you can be good at more than one thing – ask them if they only know one thing and why they only know one thing! IT started as our hobby decades ago, still is our hobby today, but not only that… for decades we have worked in the industry at business sizes ranging from small to corporate as well as running our own – successfully!
JC & FW
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