Stop selling man-hours. Sell a standard.

For our first eight years we sold what most software companies sell: people and time. A client needed a system, we estimated the hours, and the invoice followed the hours. It is an honest way to work. It also has a flaw that took me years to see clearly.

What the client is really buying

When you buy hours, you are buying effort, and nobody wants effort. A bank does not want a few thousand hours of engineering. It wants a system that reconciles every night. The hours are only the unit the vendor finds convenient to count.

Selling hours also points the vendor in the wrong direction. A slower team bills more, and a team that solves the problem quickly is paid less for better work. Nobody designs it that way on purpose. It is simply what the invoice rewards.

The projects that went well

When I looked back at our own projects, the good ones had something in common, and it was not the technology. They had the same few people on them. If the right project manager and the right architect were assigned, the client was happy. If those people were busy elsewhere, the result was a matter of chance.

A client should not have to be lucky.

The decision in 2020

In 2020 I rebuilt the company’s strategy, products and organisation around one decision: stop selling man-hours and headcount, and start selling a standard. We wrote down how an engineer is recruited, how they are trained, how readiness is measured and how a team is managed. Then we made it repeatable, so that the tenth team works the way the first one does.

What a standard is

A standard, as I use the word, has four properties.

• It is written. A practice that lives only in someone’s head leaves when they do.
• It is taught. A new engineer is trained to it before being counted as ready.
• It is measured. Readiness and delivery are checked against it.
• It belongs to the client. The documents stay with the company that paid for the team.

What changed

For the client, technology becomes something they can plan. They know what each role answers for, how a new hire becomes productive and what happens when someone leaves.

For us the change was harder. Selling a standard means we answer for delivery, and attendance counts for nothing. It means paying for training before there is revenue to show for it. And it means keeping people, because a standard is worth little if the people trained to it leave within the year.

At nine I wrote code so that winning a game would stop depending on luck. The work is the same now, only larger. I want enterprise IT capability to be something that can be planned, replicated and delivered, until it becomes an asset the company owns.