Managing Technology - A pain for startups.

We all know that it just takes an idea to be a successful especially in today’s world where people are ready to invest in your ideas. However with increasing competition; path to success is getting difficult day-by-day and distance between success and failure is shrinking.

Today’s entrepreneurs have much more to manage than ever before. Between managing several aspects of running successful business, one can easily get off the track from the core business idea. You would be extremely lucky if you find right blend of resources and everything gets aliened as per your expectations.  In today’s world business demands are changing very rapidly and so is the technology to implement “Great Business Idea”.

Having worked on technology side with several entrepreneurial clients, I think I can speak of their psychology and some of the common pain points they have in implementing and managing technology.

• Do with the less – Since entrepreneurs are very effective managers and self motivated and they expect same from the IT personal in their group.  With the limited resources at hands and more work to do, almost everyone gets to wear different hats at different times and manage more than one thing.  This leads some processes managed inefficiently despite someone putting in lot of working hours; we can’t expect one to be master of everything.  Classic example would be single person managing infrastructure support, managing software development, keeping up to date with the emerging technologies and even hiring technology staff.
• Need this, this and that too – The business needs change very rapidly; especially when you are working with a startup company where the business idea is still under testing and yet to mature. The business specifications change every other hour and hence there is a need for technology people to share the same vision with the business personal and be innovative and agile in delivery.
• Resource Availability – There are very few people with the entrepreneur’s mindset; and even few who can challenge themselves and take on difficult path to success especially when easier options are available. I accept that working with startups is difficult but if you stick to your guns for a while that could result in great rewards, however not everyone thinks that way and technologists these day prefer working with the big-brands with some level of job security. This leaves few options open for startups to hire great skills.
• Ignorance from Biggies – All major technology service related companies have always focused on big deals and volume business as with their fat delivery processes and strict CMM obligations it becomes difficult for them to justify the effort in small account management. If a big company has ever tried adding some of the startups and small clients to their portfolio; these clients have suffered heavily due to cost, lack of attention and inflexible delivery cycle.

Enough about the issues; in my next post I will try to share my experience about managing technology and software delivery for this difficult yet interesting segment. 

About the author: Asheesh is a Partner with ebusinessware, inc. a leading global IT consulting company headquartered in New York City. Asheesh can be reached via email at asheesh.sharma@ebusinessware.com