We’ve had a history of not having a much of a problem with getting work. Basically, as we’ve put out proposals they’ve been accepted. We’ve had a very high acceptance rate in our sales process, which means that in a sense the development team has always been a bottleneck.
As we have grown we’ve basically been doing more and more paid work as opposed to our product development. Product development is an area we’ve gone through a phase of neglecting and are now having to re-establish.
It has been quite hard work bringing that back in, it having been a core of our business when we started. And strangely a lot of our practices evolved out of the fact that we were our own clients. We didn’t really adjust our processes particularly in light of the fact that we shifted to actually having real projects with real clients, expecting real delivery dates and so on. Partly that was because in the early days that worked and we were able to deliver on time and so on, but that was in the mix of the work we were just developing by ourselves. So effectively that gave us slack if necessary, though I don’t think we ever realised that.
As the product development got squeezed gradually, then of course it meant squeezing other clients’ projects or even the same client’s project. Although we’d been quite good, one of the pressures that pushed us, correctly, into changing development streams to be focused on a client was that it made it much easier to get the client to prioritise: “Well, you know, which is most, more important to you?” Clients would need to allocate resources on this project or that project, instead of us having to be in the position of, “Well which is more important, your project, or this other client’s project?” which never gets you very far. [LAUGHTER]
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