At Wubbleyou, we empower scaling businesses to scale quicker. We empower growth and solve challenges through technology. We do that largely through software development and technical consultancy. 

We’ve realised that a lot of businesses have the same challenges. Businesses understand that tech can help, but they don't really understand how. For that reason, we've built a Business Automation Roadmap. After answering a quick set of questions, the tool will generate a business automation report specific to you and your business. The report will contain a raft of recommendations, orientated around reducing stress in the business and generating return on investment. This might even be through increased profits or increasing revenue.

There are 34 questions to answer. You select the answer to the question and the stress level associated with the activity. An example of a question might relate to budgeting. Do you use spreadsheets? Or are you not forecasting at all? How stressful is it? The process takes about 10 minutes. 

Once this a complete, you will receive a summary of the situation in the business. This will include the things which are going well and a list of things which could be improved. With every question you've answered there will be a recommendation on what to do next. The idea is to gain an understanding of the following:

· The pain points of your business, and how they are affecting your business profile

· The easy wins that will improve your business

· What you don't know and give you some recommendations to carry those things forward

· Some actions to take over a 12 to 24 month period. 

For example, the report might highlight eight easy wins to carry forward. It will show how these easy wins would affect the profile of the business. Crucially, it will also detail how does the stress profile of the business change if we implement the easy wins.

Not everyone is going to have the skills and the resources within the business to carry this forward. We see that a lot with our clients. We work with our clients to deliver a plan like this in partnership. We act as a technical director to support you at a director level. This means we can inject tactical support, to push that plan forward. The tool enables us to pull recommendations from the report, and work with you to complete in the next quarter to improve your business!

If you are interested in trying out this tool, please contact us.

In scaling businesses, adapting to inefficient and inadequate software can seem easier than changing it. But it isn't.

We've created a Business Automation Roadmap Tool to begin to address the issues. The tool maps out your pain points, allowing you to make small changes, and plan for the bigger ones.

Excel is great. It's hyperflexible. It allows us to create forms, processes and to-do lists. We can use it to model and forecast. Scaling businesses manage complicated and multi-step processes using one excel spreadsheet. For a time this works....

It starts when an Excel limitation prevents you from doing something at a critical point. You work around it, but it's a little bit annoying. Then it happens again. And again. These issues compound, leaving you with an irritating spreadsheet management process. 

If you have a spreadsheet with several contributors, the limits to Excel become clear.  Let's say you manage the core delivery process of the business in one spreadsheet. Many people interact with this document everyday.  People begin to over-write each other. Key information starts to disappear. There isn't a way to limit what people are seeing. 

With every update, there is a new sheet, or a new column. For example, each row needs comment or a weekly update. You end up either with a column with tonnes of text in it, or you start a new column each week.  Another example would be a report which needs to be done weekly. This results in one Excel document with a million sheets in it. And this duplicates every week to generate the new report.  The result is masses of data, with duplication, inaccuracy... and because it's Excel, a million more sheets.

Reporting with Excel is a nightmare, namely because it doesn’t connect with other software. A business director with two bits of software or two reports gets confused. This is even more the case if the reports are painting different pictures. The director wastes time trying to figure out which is correct (if either are!). If you have two figures for gross profit- one from an Excel spreadsheet and one from accounting software- which do you believe?

What once was there great innovation for the business becomes a burden. It causes business pain. With this in mind, is it a good idea to produce reports in Excel? 

To start with, absolutely. Tools like Excel are a great way to test or prototype a solution, using the skills available to you. When working with straightforward, small amounts of data, Excel does the job. But there are better tools to achieve the same thing. Software like Smartsheets or Airtable offer largely the same benefits, but they remove the headaches at the same time. A lot of this software can integrate with other tools, so you can connect up your CRM to your delivery process for example. Or automate your project kick-off process when you win a deal. Or automatically generate invoices.

We’ve worked with several businesses this way. Businesses are turning over between £2-10 million a year, yet they manage their delivery process via excel. It's not uncommon to see businesses of this size wasting a 5-6 figure sum over a three-year period by managing a process inefficiently. Their businesses were transformed by using better software, both in efficiency and value. It's typical to observe return on investment of somewhere between 325% and 800%, using a mixture of off-the-shelf and custom software. This reduces business pain at every level. People spend less time fixing the things that are going wrong, or wondering why the data is bad. The management team gets better data. This enables them to make data-driven decisions with information they can trust.

There is a life beyond Excel, and we’re telling you it’s a happy one.

Excel is great. It's hyperflexible. It allows us to create forms, processes and to-do lists. We can use it to model and forecast. Scaling businesses manage complicated and multi-step processes using one excel spreadsheet. For a time this works... until it doesn't.

In business it's common to be fire-fighting, especially when you're scaling. It’s easy to neglect the problems when the business is growing quickly. But more and more problems occur. If you leave this unchecked, fire-fighting might become all you do. You're making no progress: all you are doing is running around with a fire extinguisher putting out smouldering fires.

You need to turn this around and get the level of fire-fighting under control before it becomes a critical issue.

Make a list of all of the things going wrong in the business right now. Estimate how much time it consumes fixing these things every week. Look at their impact on the business: on a scale of one to five how risky would it be if this was left unchecked? Rate the problems according to their urgency.

Work through this list and identify any easy wins. An easy win is something that can be permanently resolved quickly. An example of this might be a lack of coordination in a team. 

Everyone might be completing a key process in a different way. Get everyone round a whiteboard and map out the best way to complete that process step-by-step. With everyone's agreement, finalise the way that the team is going to execute the process. In time, evaluate the procedure. See if you need to modify any steps to mitigate any issues occurring in the future.

Make a judgement call on: what is going to be the quickest way to free up more time for improvement? For example, if you think one of the priority items is going to take 10 hours to resolve, it's going to free up 5 hours a week in time within two weeks, which could be put into continuous improvement. You’ll quickly see a return on investment. 

Use Google to find information on the challenges you have. How have other people have solved the issue? Most business functions are the same, so it's likely that you're not alone. There is plenty of good off-the-shelf software out there, designed to solve very specific business challenges. They can offer a high return on investment. It is another easy win.

We would always recommend joining local scaleup programmes and groups, to share thoughts and gain tips.

Calculate the minimum amount of time your team is able to invest into continuous improvement and resolving issues. It’s important to get that toe hold to fix challenges and use the freed up time to snowball the effort.

As more time is released, set a business level KPI for the amount of time which is reinvested in continuous improvement. Monitor that on a quarterly basis. Allow anyone in the business to put a case forward for dedicating time to resolving a challenge or testing an opportunity. Make sure that it is definable what the return on investment is going to be. 

Create a template where someone is able to summarise the challenge of opportunity and the resources required to execute it. Include the return on investment in terms of money or time. This allows the management team to quantify why the continuous improvement effort is valuable to the business. An alliance everyone's thinking ensures that continuous improvement has both positive and material outcomes. You could even think about linking it to a company wide bonus structure so everyone wins!

Make sure that you’re all on the same page

Everyone in the business needs to be clear on the challenges that the business is trying to solve. Put the issues into a framework, where they are tracked as part of quarterly objectives. Every member of staff can now see what to solve this quarter. They can then work towards solving those challenges themselves.

It is also vital to execute this plan from the top. The management team need to lead the change. They have to demonstrate how it's making peoples lives easier, so that it becomes a cultural initiative within the business.

It's important to understand that this effort is a marathon not a sprint. You are likely to see rapid improvements in the first quarter for example, because there are a lot of easy wins. However, the number of easy wins will probably dry up and the challenges may get it harder to solve. This is natural and it shouldn't be disparaging. It just means that you've prioritised your difficulties correctly. 

There needs to be a consistent effort around continuous improvements, as well as protected time invested every month and every quarter. This ensures that progress marches forward. Doing this will prevent an increase in fire-fighting and you will reach a point where things become manageable. Why? Because the business is prioritising and solving issues every quarter, rather than letting these things build up.

Fire-fighting is a natural part of business and you can't eradicate it. But it is controllable. It can be even be used as an accelerant of growth!

How to fix repetitive and costly mistakes

As a tech specialist, we have to emphasise the importance of knowing your pain points. Clients want new software to achieve their goal. In actual fact, software is only part of the solution, designed to improve something or solve a challenge.

We can give a few examples to illustrate this. 

You’re an accountant and you want to increase your customer base. Instagram is a platform that you aren’t utilizing and you want to try something new. You approach a marketing consultant with a brief to set-up an Instagram account. You set a schedule to post on it three times a week and a budget to sponsor a post every month.

The issue is, you expect five new sales leads from Instagram every month. And the marketing consultant isn’t aware of this.

Instagram is a photo platform: it’s great for food pictures and landscapes. So the questions is: can you reproduce what you do in engaging photography? What kind of audience will you attract on Instagram? How can you make posts useful to your audience? The metrics are also an issue: the client may see an increase in following, but what will that mean? How many of these clients will convert? 

The marketing consultant was unaware of the accountant's objectives. Instagram is a huge platform, but it wasn't the correct one. LinkedIn and Twitter would have been more appropriate for their sales goals.

Instead, the conversation will happen 6 months down the line. The client has invested £1500 in the agency. They still only have 500 followers and they have no new leads. The agency haven't delivered on the objectives they were being measured against. The issue is that the agency were unaware of the objectives, and neither party is happy.

The same applies to tech. But the budget is bigger and it’s vital that we do things right. 

Software is often seen as a solution. But if the tech partner isn’t sure what the problem is, then what are they solving? Software needs to link to your strategy and not be its own entity. It’s especially dangerous with software development. Clients ideate solutions and create a spec without involving tech people. The brief/spec becomes the aim and the client forgets the goal. If the tech partner doesn’t know what the final goal is, they may be implementing or building a new piece of software for something redundant. 

Say for example a client wants to increases their revenue by £100k that year. They decide to ask a tech specialist to build them an e-commerce site. This would create a new revenue stream.

 If the tech partner is doing their job right, they want to look at the bigger picture. An e-commerce site would be a huge investment, so the tech specialist has deep dive into their processes. There is no reporting software. Their stock managing software is poor, it doesn’t allow for product wastage. Their margins are all over the place. 

The tech specialist wants to first concentrate on their processes. With better reporting, the business can make better decisions about their business. This has less risk than jumping into a new revenue stream without being well informed. 

A good tech specialist needs to be asking the right questions. It’s important to ground any software project with 3 things:

The objectives: what will the business achieve if we build this software? How will it contribute to the end goal?

The measures: how will we know if we meet our objectives?

The value: how will the business be better if we install this software? Will we see more profit, scalability and less business risk? Can we quantify it?

If we look at the example of a sales platform; you’re looking at the website to generate £100k of sales in its first year. The tech team can build a great platform with superb functionality. But if your product isn’t suitable for online sales, the delivery charge is eating into your margins and you haven’t got anyone on the team to market it, then what’s the use?

A great tech partner will challenge your idea of a solution. They will use their experience to strengthen it or ditch the bits which won’t help. If the right questions are being asked and we can align our objectives, your software project becomes a quantifiable investment with business outcomes. And not a project leaving you wondering why you’re spending money on it....

Software needs to link to your strategy and not be its own entity. It’s vital in software development....

Software is part of the strategy, not The Strategy

Wubbleyou was founded on the 5th of March 2010. 12 years on, we chatted to Mark Renney the Managing Director, about how the landscape for Software Development has changed, and his learnings with scaling businesses.

What did Wubbleyou look like 12 years ago?

Wubbleyou was 2 people, my business partner Mike and I (whom I bought out in 2020).  We started the business during a gap year at Northumbria Uni in 2009 and incorporated in 2010, during the ‘great recession’.  We were given lots of support by the Northumbria uni incubator (which still exists today under Graham Baty!), including office space.

We did small bits of software development, but focused more on website design.  This was around the time ‘mobile friendly’ websites were becoming a thing, which presented opportunity for us.

From a business perspective, literally everything was new to us and we were pretty naïve, but we were confident in our abilities!

Much has changed. In 2017 we decided to scale the business and as part of that we pivoted away from website design into pure software development as this was where we added the most value. This seemed scary at the time as web design still made up around 50% of our revenue and our plan was to axe this revenue stream within 6 months, but it remains one of the best decisions made in the business. 

We’re now 10 people and focussing on custom software development and technical consultancy, partnering with scaling businesses (our clients) to empower their business objectives and solve their challenges with technology.

We also have a team who are the business, and it’s also our job to empower the people in that team to reach their own objectives in their career (and sometimes life).

What's been the most exciting project that you have worked on?

Flaky answer but I genuinely enjoy them all – all our clients have ambitious missions and strong visions, supporting them is exciting.

If I had to pick, it would be the work we do with the Department for Education on the National Apprenticeship Awards – we built and maintain complex software to manage the process, and the DfE orchestrate many stakeholders in a frankly awe-inspiring way to make it work every year.

A favourite would be a phone app we built for the University of Southampton as part of a study to track the movement and behaviours for 1000s of freelancers across the UK.  During internal testing our team had this on our phones to test efficacy, and the morning after a team night out I submitted a bug report as it was showing we were at a pub for 30m that I could not remember – the team swiftly corrected me as turns out we were there and that I even bought a round: the app was right 🤷.

What has been your biggest challenge and have you overcome it?

Not in a bad way, but I’m always acutely aware of the amount I’ve personally had to change and adapt throughout the growth of a business.  Like many others, I started the business because I was good at something (software development), but it is a completely different skillset running a scaling software development business.  The development skills are super useful, but layering on top of that finance, people, operations, sales etc was not expected at the outset.

Self-awareness around my own limitations, what I can learn and what I must find better people to do, has helped.  Lots of reading and trying to turn ‘I don’t know what I don’t know’ into ‘I know what I don’t know’ helps too. I’m always learning.

The business itself faces new challenges every day, as we’re solving complex technological problems with our clients and at the same time facing our own as we scale.  But we have frankly, a class team of people and we do our best to empower each other to successfully solve these challenges.

Where would you like to see Wubbleyou in 5 years' time?

I want Wubbleyou to be a significant value contributor to the north-east, through the ROI we deliver for scaling businesses, the knowledge we give back and the people we empower.  Pragmatically, we’re executing a plan to scale to 25 people to increase the scale at which we deliver our value.

Wubbleyou was founded 12 years ago. Mark Renney, the Director, talks about how Software Development has evolved and his work with scaling businesses in the north-east

In this blog, we are talking to our current Project Manager Emily. We're recruiting for a Project Manager for Maternity cover, so we thought we would use the opportunity to chat to Emily about her job and what we're looking for in a future candidate... 

How long have you been working at Wubbleyou?

I’ve been at Wubbleyou since May last year. I had worked as a Project Manger for 3 years before then at a large company.

There’s no such thing as an average day! We have a Standup meeting every day at 10am with all of the developers. From there, everyone gets to work. For me, that can be talking to clients, consulting budgets, looking at support desks, looking at action projects and where we are in sprints, or liaising with Mark (our Managing Director) on upcoming projects. Because it’s a small company, there’s a requirement to wear a number of hats, so I’m in charge of Service management too! I also look at Recruitment. Mark and I work together on strategic operations too. 

I also explore future projects with existing customers- we always want to build lasting relationships with our clients. That’s crucial.

What would really impress you about a candidate for the PM role?

As a company that’s scaling, we need someone to drive that change forward. We would like someone who would get stuck into our processes, and bring about positive and meaningful improvements. We have achieved such a lot in the time I’ve been here, so it’s a really exciting time to join - I’m really looking forward to seeing what further successes the company can make.

Something that is essential in the candidate?

Because Wubbleyou is a small company, You have to be confident in your own abilities and decision-making, as you would be the only project manager. This would suit someone who is used to working autonomously.

What has been your favourite project to work on?

The National Apprenticeship awards were really fun. We do it every year, and it’s always a great project. It runs from April to December. The team is really supportive, and because we had a lot of involvement- from the website, to streamlining the application software, to live-streaming the event- it was a really good varied project to work on. And we attend the event every year; so it’s always fun to go to London!

What’s the best thing about working for Wubbleyou?

The best thing about working for Wubbleyou is the ability to get things done. Because it’s a small company, there is no unnecessary red tape or bureaucracy. It’s a very transparent place to work, and it’s easy to get everyone on board and implement change. There is no blame culture at Wubbleyou; if something goes wrong, the focus is on fixing the problem. Mark and the team are always looking at the best ways to improve things, so challenge is welcomed and ideas are always discussed.

If you're interested in this role, please see our careers page for more information.

We talk to our current Project Manager Emily about her role at Wubbleyou and what she would like to see in the candidate for her maternity cover

How should you describe your business in the software brief?

Firstly, it’s important to know about your business, who you are and what the ambitions are.

You likely have this information already – just copy and paste this from your website!

Consider adding to this with information on the business ambitions and objectives:

What made you want to start this project?

What are your business objectives over the next 12 months and 5 years?

Where have you been as a business? Are you growing rapidly? Have you recently had any major changes?

How many people do you employ right now? How has this changed over the last 12 months and how will this change going forward?

List 3 to 5 high level pain points which are important to solve

What are the most important pain points, in order, which you are looking to solve during this project?

How do these translate to key objectives?

E.g. We have to manually move lots of data which is time consuming and error prone

E.g. We use Excel, and constantly muddle up and overwrite each other’s work

E.g. We are not able to make reports which make sense, and can’t make data driven decisions

Consider how solving these problems will generate an ROI for your business.  Please see our article 21 Indicators that lack of tech is slowing scaleup growth, for inspiration on these.

Why are these problems worth solving? What does that mean to you and the business?

How do we ensure that we aren’t solving problems for the sake of it?

How do we ensure that solving a problem has a positive impact for the business?

Ensuring that solving a pain point generates a return on investment, or empowers the achievement of strategic objectives make a problem worth solving.  Do the problems you want to solve generate enough value to make it worth the investment of time and money?

Summarising why these problems are worth solving helps gauge the value of completing the project, and allows us to set measures of success – how do we know it was done correctly?

Consider answering the following questions

What growth opportunities are unlocked by solving the pain points above?

How will it either save you money, or allow you to generate more revenue?

How will this project better allow you to achieve business objectives?

How will you measure the success of this project?

Why is solving these problems, and this project valuable to the business?

You may have already tried to solve some of the pain points in this software brief. If so, what have you tried? What worked well and what failed?

Understanding this allows us as solution providers to learn from your previous work, and rule in/out solutions going forward.

For example, have you tried any off the shelf software to solve the problem? If so, why didn’t this work? Did aspects of it work? How would you implement a better solution?

If you have documentation for the processes at hand, also consider including those here.

What other software are you using right now which relates to this problem?

Understanding what else is in play ensures we don’t get tunnel vision, and that we consider the wider landscape.  Consider listing the following:

Current software you use which you believe should be replaced

Current software you think might be impacted by this project

Current software you want to keep, and integrate into this solution (e.g. we use accountancy software X, and want invoices to be created automatically)

Software you’ve seen and think would be beneficial for your business

What do I need to add to understand the solution?

What key features do you see being present in the solution?

You may have already ideated a solution, if so, feel free to bullet point how you see this working, or attach any documentation, mind maps etc you’ve put together.  E.g.

We want this to integrate with our accounting software, so that we don’t need to manually create invoices

We need our clients to log into a portal and see information about their account without having to contact us

We need to have a reporting suite to we are able to see real time information on the use of the system and the revenue generated through it at any one time

Budget: What are you willing to invest to solve this problem?

This can be tricky, most people don’t know how much software costs!  Why would you? It’s like someone knowing how much a cake factory costs.

It’s important to assess a budget against the Return on Investment the project will generate for the business, so it’s an investment and not a blind cost.  

For example, “It will cost £50k” might look scary with no context, however, “The project will create £150k in cost savings for a £50k investment” is a much clearer decision!

In any case, consider a budget, even if it’s just how many 0’s the investment level has.  A good solution provider will bring up budget before proposal, and an open and honest conversation should ensue.

Timescales must align between your business, and those put forth by a solutions provider.

For example, a solutions provider will likely already have a pipeline of work and will not likely be able to start the project immediately – it has to be scheduled in.  Knowing that in advance allows for an alignment of expectations before a proposal is put forward, and saves everyone time.

If you have key dates which must be met, add these here.  Consider the following:

Key stakeholders, e.g. if you must onboard your clients, are the clients themselves on a cycle which could line up with a launch of software

Consider who is important to engage with for the solution.  We advocate that the following people are involved in the process:

Who ever is making the final decision, this is generally the managing director, or someone from the leadership team if that decision is designated.  Involving them too late is likely to lead to a situation where they do not have the information they need to make a decision

Who will be managing the project day to day from your perspective? Ensure they are involved from the get go

Who are the key users of the software to be implemented? Ensure they are a part of the process when defining the problem and the solution – having these people invested and bought into the process makes it easier to implement the software into your business later

It’s important to decide what you’re looking for from a proposal, and how you will choose the best proposal for your business.  This makes it clear internally from the outset what you’re looking for, and makes it easier for you to communicate that with suppliers throughout the buying process.

For example, you may feel that one of price, ROI, experience, timescales or quality of the solution are important.

If a supplier puts forward a proposal focussing on the shortest timescale, but you actually care about the highest ROI, the process with that supplier may not have been the best use of time.

Having these also makes it easier for you to score proposals objectively, meaning you are able to pick the proposal best for your business.

It’s common for us to see a one page software development brief summarising how a solution might look, with a request for a quote on that solution.

It’s great that effort has been made to document the project, but in this form it’s generally not informational enough to go straight to a proposal.

You will likely receive a proposal with lots of assumption, and detailing a solution which will not fit your needs as a business.  You may also receive proposals which are solving different problems (as they are assumed), so it’s hard to compare them like for like.

Designing a solution, without detailing/understanding pain points, objectives or ROI

When bypassing these steps and looking straight at a solution, how are we sure that the solution actually solves your problems? 

How do we sense check it to make sure it hits business objectives? 

How do we assess the investment required for the solution and check that there is a positive Return on Investment?

How will we mutually be confident the project is worth doing?

Without answering these questions, you may not feel confident making a decision once you have proposals, simply because it’s ambiguous whether the project is even worth doing.

Answering these questions first, ensures the project is viable before jumping into designing a solution.

Providing a software brief which is the solution

We always think it’s great when this has been thought through, but we will still advocate that we go through our process to understand the problems and ROI.

How do we ensure we understand the problems and value? How do we ensure that the solution you’ve design fixes these?

How do we ensure that the solution is the best solution possible?

It’s also worth considering why you are engaging a solution provider in the first place.  Is it because they are technically competent and experienced? If so, are they the best people to design the solution alongside you, based on problems you’ve put forth?

Pushing for a proposal/cost before understanding ROI and value

The problems this causes have a lot of cross over with the above.  This generally involves short cutting the process and putting forward a proposal without answering key questions about the project.

When we’re put in this position, we will always bow out rather than put forth a proposal, as it’s morally better for us to shake hands and call it a day, rather than putting forward a solution which we simply cannot justify.

We must follow our process to ensure we have a mutual agreement with you that the project has value.

If a project is started under these circumstances, it makes it hard at the end of a project to understand whether it was a success or not.  The software may have been delivered successfully, but has it actually had a positive impact on the business?

Equally, it may be discovered that a project is actually not worth doing or the ROI doesn’t stack up, and this is also fine! 

A good solution provider will discover this early in the process, and will not want to spend your money on a project which does not generate ROI.

Assuming a project is able to start immediately after contract award

Solutions providers like us generally have carefully managed project plans with multiple ongoing projects, it’s rare that we’re able to start immediately.

For example, we’re generally able to start planning, discussing and designing the solution fairly quickly, but we typically have a lead time of weeks, at any given time, before core development on a project can start.

It’s worth assuming that a lead time of 8 weeks may be typical, but this will vary amongst solution providers.

When scoping a software project, communication is extremely important.

From our perspective, scoping out a project consists of developing an in depth understanding of your situation and pain points, and then working with you to identify how to generate the maximum return on investment by solving those pain points.

However, at the start of every conversation, there is naturally a knowledge gap. Naturally we understand tech and you understand your business and pain points, we must bridge that gap!

Based on over a decade of experience, we’ve put together a template detailing how to prime a development agency like us, with the information we need to understand your project.

Simply, it lets you and your team evaluate the problem at hand, and give that to solutions providers like us in a consistent and detailed way.

If done in the right way (see our template!), it ensures proposals are geared to solve your problem and generating ROI

If the conversation is only orientated towards a solution, how are you able to guarantee that a proposal:

Has a measurable/positive impact on the business

Detailing the objectives, measures and values up front in a software development brief, allows you to assess proposals against these and answer the above questions

It makes it more likely quotes you receive are comparable

Consider engaging with multiple solution providers without this, will all of them have the same information? If all solutions providers have different information, will they all be providing proposals for the same problems?

It should provide wider context of your business and objectives, but also laser focus on the problems at hand

It’s important that a project has clear objectives which are measurable, and that the value of the project is understood.

At the same time, sight of the wider context allows a solution provider like us to recommend strategic decisions which provide more value now, or make decisions for the solution which deliver more value in the long run.

It may sting if a solution implemented now has to be changed in consideration of your wider objectives – knowing these earlier allows us to make informed decisions.

What is a software development brief? See how to write a ROI focussed software brief, which aligns with your business objectives

Ensure ROI is a priority for your software project, by using this software development brief

Close to one-third of IT decision-makers (32%) say that digital business has already helped their organization achieve revenue growth (with an average of a 23% increase) – according to IDG.  Are businesses which are not taking care of this missing out on a substantial increase in revenue? 

LinkedIn Sales Navigator suggests that there are ~360k MDs/CEOs in the UK, but only 32k Technical Directors/CTOs/CIOs.  Based on this, back of the napkin maths creates an assumption that up to 91% of businesses have no one in the leadership team with a technical background.  The same search for businesses with a headcount of 11-500 people suggests that 87% of scaleups/SME businesses suffer the same problem.

How does this impact a business? Well, technology can be a complex subject.  As businesses, we outsource legal and accountancy services for the same reason.

Businesses likely use accountancy software like Xero or FreeAgent, and on occasion use online software to generate lower risk legal documents (like a website privacy policy), but when it matters (like filing yearly accounts, or reviewing contracts), we use experts.

It’s common for scaleup founders to understand their business, and the business strategy they have to drive it forward.  However, who is looking after the tech? Who is driving forward a digital strategy to empower your business strategy? Is this creating opportunity cost for the business?

Blog

Business Automation Roadmap Tool

How much Excel is too much Excel?

How to fix repetitive and costly mistakes

Software is part of the strategy, not The Strategy

Wubbleyou 12 years on

Employee Insight: Project Manager

Ensure ROI is a priority for your software project, by using this software development brief

Why scaleup businesses are hurt by a lack of technical/digital strategy

The future for scaleup businesses is ‘remote first’, here’s why office space is now optional

21 Indicators that lack of tech is slowing scaleup growth

Why it costs you more to use WordPress for complex web platforms

10 things a scaleup business could do right now to improve business security

How to use the MVP approach to develop your product or software

How to systemise your business

10 Essential Paperless Tools That Will Save Your Business Time and Money

Case Study: Franks Portlock