Continuous Improvement and Phasing Your Development
In our more than 20 years of trading, we have learned a very important lesson which we embrace as part of our way of working with our clients. The lesson is that perfection is an illusion, and believing you can achieve it can be a very big and dangerous delusion. Particularly with the Internet, where everything is so quick to change, you can pretty much guarantee that perfection today will not be perfection tomorrow. We have seen a number of businesses fail for the sake of perfection as well as going after a single idea or strategy that doesn't match up with the outside world. With a number of start-ups, rather than trying to bring to market an offering sufficient to prove principle, some have continued to develop and invest only to find later that ultimately the market wasn't interested.
No, we have learned that in an environment that is constantly changing, it is far better to make a number of incremental improvements as your business evolves, rather than attempt to do everything at once. Interestingly, this is much the same as the '80's concept of 'Total Quality', which was to seek to continuously improve in progressive small steps. Incremental and phased development against a moving target still moves you forward, but when inevitably the environment changes in the following month, you've still made a positive step in the right direction. By contrast, if you try to do everything at once, the risk is to go too far, invest too much and to corner yourself into a commitment to a system that is then too difficult or expensive to change, We almost always find with big projects, that a significant percentage of the new functionality developed turns out to not be used or needed. Whereas with small changes, no sooner than the job is completed and the new functionality is used a little, it becomes very obvious what the next step must be.
So we embrace Continuous Improvement or 'CI' as a development principle, and it really does pay off for our clients. Smaller steps are also much easier to manage for everyone, and after a few years of steadily undertaking incremental improvements, it is amazing how they accumulate into great strides forward.
We recommend Continuous Improvement in development, and also in marketing, SEO and design, and seeking to, every day, make it better.