Regarding point number one, I had little opportunity for that because mostly there were just the two of us with outside temporary hires for larger projects.

Number two is very important, but you must market that fact. During the 20 years that I did this work full and (for the last 5) part-time, I was always on schedule, on spec, and within budget. Sometimes, that means late nights. Once, I went to a client and warned that I might be late. I wasn’t, but it was a difficult meeting.

The flexibility factor is very important in a service business such as software contracting, but focus is important in other businesses. Are these really different? You must focus on what you do, not what your customers do, as your primary business. Being flexible is part of your business focus. It was for mine where we did financial software, device drivers, database design, GUI design, and in several languages.

I’ll claim that number four, embracing change, is a constant in our field, software. We delayed moving to mobile platforms as long as we could and then sought out a way to do it. Many presented themselves, but only one provided a clear path to take our Java-based software and put it on every mobile platform without a complete rewrite. It’s now working beautifully, and we have moved all of our customers over to the HTML 5 version of our software.

Number five, understanding customer needs, is the most important part of this type of business. When you must convert customer ideas into reality, you have to work hard to know what they really want. I had one customer deliver a “complete” specification from which no one could have created software. Close interaction with customers is very necessary throughout the entire project because you never truly understand the customer until you begin to deliver your earliest versions.