Well, since I’m still getting back into the swing of blogging consistently again (man, was that a mistake for me to stop. ha ha ha), I thought I’d give you another update on something I’ve been trying to do. In an attempt to remove myself from the equation of the person that does everything, I’m trying to delegate more stuff. Now, this is incredibly difficult as a small business person used to doing everything. It’s tough because there is no one to delegate things to unless you go out and find them. It’s also incredibly difficult to let go of doing things I’m good at.
Both of these are excuses, and I know it. But it doesn’t make it any easier. Now, my first that I’m willing to start stepping away from is the day to day ABAP coding. So I’ve gone through several different iterations. First off, I reached out to some friends to see if they were interested in making some extra money. Like everyone, they were interested, but what often happens is that life just gets in the way. I don’t fault them at all. If I was so damn addicted to my own business and seeing it succeed, I’m certain I’d be doing the same thing. Now this isn’t to say that I won’t still get the chance to work with my first round of candidates… but it did mean that I needed to keep hunting.
Lesson 1. finding people willing to work on a fixed bid basis for programming is incredibly difficult. There’s good reason behind this, but it doesn’t help my pocketbook :). With programming, there are often unforeseen issues, poorly written specs, incomplete analysis, or just “weird” data that you thought you understood until you started to extracting it. Any number of things can cause work load to go from 40 hours to 80 hours. Most of the programmers doing this for a living and not a hobby (I count myself among the hobbyist) recognize this, and will only do it hourly. So, I went onto ELance, and put a sample job out there. It’s impressive how many responses I got to the job. it was also interesting the rate ranges, and the approaches that I got with each. I only found one person that gave me enough of a comfort level to try him out. So far, the experiment has proved to be a success. But, it did require an hourly rate. The good news is that my programmer has done the homework upfront, so his estimates have been right on, or even under budget. This is good on many levels. First, it’s teaching me to write better specs each time. Second, it gives me an outsiders perspective on my thoughts. Finally, once we figure out exactly what’s involved, for the most part, I’m just spending a few minutes a day answer questions, and the rest of the time the code is being written without me.
Lesson 2. Prioritization is key. When I realized that I found my first consistent contractor, I had to figure out what was most important to me. Now this should be easy, but I look at my extensive development list, what specs I currently have written, how attached to my own stuff i’ve become, well, let’s just say this took some effort. The hardest part was letting go… I have an idea that I really want to do, but I keep getting pulled away from it. I even had a pretty solid spec written, and some of the work started. But, since it’s my latest and greatest idea, I wanted to do it myself. Well, I had to take a leap of faith and let it go. I moved my work over to the dev box, and handed the spec over. Again, it’s good because my idea is only getting better with another set of eyes. But it was a bit of a challenge.
All and all, the experiment has been successful. My next addition needs to be someone that can do ABAP Web Dynpro. Otherwise I will end up doign all of that myself, or paying someone else to learn it. Neither is the end of the world, but in the idea of delegating, looks like this is the next most logic place to go… if you know anyone, or you’re interested, please ping me. I have some simple things to get started on and we can do a trial of each other 🙂 Or, I’ll be happy to let you learn for a fixed bid project. 🙂
Thanks for reading,
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike