Software development in times of recession

If….. How do eat an elephant? One bite at a time! …. is true.

Does it follow that this is true….. 

How do you cope with a recession? One day at a time?

Anybody who has had a business consultant over the door will know that “fail to plan” and you “plan to fail”. So now that the Bank of England has admitted that the elephant in the room has been there for a wee while – the recession – how do you cope?

For software developers like us we have to plan as part of our normal behaviour – but how do you plan when things look bleak. It’s clear that the next 18 months look grim so the first thing is to accept that and then figure out what to do about it.

We’re a naturally inventive bunch so if work slows we’ll shift more effort onto our in-house projects. That will accelerate our own product development and ensure that when the world cheers up we have something new and exciting to offer.

At the moment, however, our software development activities for customers show no signs of slowing down – in fact somewhat the reverse (touch wood). So for now we’ll continue to batter away and redouble our sales efforts to do our best to avoid any down time.

Taking a recession one day at a time is a sensible enough approach but we think it’s important to use it to reassess and to become better at what we do – so we’ll plan to come out the other side of this better than when we went in.