Still afraid of missing your deadlines? Read this piece of content and find out way to avoid it.

After founding Solidstudio, Pawel was an originator in terms of pursuing expertise in eMobility. With the build-up of a solid knowledge-base on industry’s needs & wants, he now keeps a close eye on products’ development. He’s also hugely responsible for the business’ side and designs the business models for our products.

Paweł Małkowiak

Project delays are frustrating and can end up costing your organization more than just time. Depending on the nature of the delay, the direct and indirect costs to fix it could be substantial. Direct costs such as re-doing work or requiring more work than originally planned and indirect costs, such as having to pull workers from other projects or tasks and delaying those items as a result can add up quickly.

Fortunately, you can take steps to minimize or even completely avoid project delays and keep your project humming along smoothly.

Common Project Delays & Their Root Causes

Planning is one of the most critical stages of any project. When teams don’t spend enough time planning and figure out exactly what the project requires so that it can be 

Without a solid yet flexible plan in place, some features can end up taking more time and energy than expected or may require more functionalities than you have accounted for. You should also make sure you have a plan in place to ensure each component can successfully integrate with the whole project. Trying to make different components work well together can eat up a lot of extra time and energy, and can compromise the integrity of the whole project if they aren’t properly taken into account.

In too many cases, teams don’t fully recognize their project’s requirements before they begin development. If you don’t invest enough time and energy into the planning phase, you may encounter portions of the project you haven’t planned or budgeted for and may end up scrambling to finish the project before the deadline.

This issue typically arises when 2 or more companies work together to complete a project. For example, if one team is responsible for UX design and another handles the development side you need to make sure both teams are on the same page at all times, and that both are meeting their deadlines. A delay on the development side not only threatens the pace of work for that team but also for the UX team that is relying on them. This single delay ends up delaying work for both teams, potentially delaying the project even further.

Not Having the Right Skills for the Task at Hand

While a screwdriver is great for working with screws, it is a terrible substitute for a hammer. When 

 or building an internal team of developers, you need to make sure you choose people who have the right skills for the job.

Far too frequently, we encounter companies that have committed to a project and realized after the fact that their team doesn’t have the necessary experience with a particular domain or technology that the project requires. While this obstacle can be overcome either by hiring additional team members, 

outsourcing part or all of your project to a more qualified company

, or training existing team members, all of these solutions require extra time and effort to implement, threatening the project’s scoped timeline.

How to Minimize (or Even Avoid) Project Delays

Have a Plan That is Both Detailed & Flexible

As we discussed previously, investing in the planning phase is crucial: a good plan sets your project and your team up for success while a poor plan or a vague plan sets you up for failure. That being said, sometimes unexpected issues arise that will require you to adjust your plan, so make sure that the plan, and the scope, are both flexible enough to accommodate unforeseen problems.

All key team members should be communicating with each other daily.

 This helps ensure that any hiccups or obstacles that arise are communicated effectively to the rest of the team so they can create a contingency plan and react accordingly. Regular communication also helps avoid miscommunication, which can delay or even derail a project.

You should always do your homework before partnering with any 

. Make sure you meet the individuals you will be working with and verify that they have the time and the skill set to complete the task. Meeting with your partner team also lets you gauge how they approach their work: Do they act proactively or wait for disaster to strike? Do they approach their job with enthusiasm or with a begrudging attitude? Do they appear rushed or stressed like they are stretched too thin, or do they appear competent and in control of their workflow?

The answers to these questions will help you determine whether or not a team or individual is someone you can rely on to get the task done correctly and on time. You should also make sure to pick a partner that can scale effectively to buffer themselves against challenges and delays quickly and effectively so that the project can still be delivered on time. This is where good communication comes in again: When the software development company and the client communicate effectively with one another, potential delays and other pitfalls can be spotted ahead of time so they can be avoided or addressed proactively instead of forcing team members into a reactive situation.

Overengineering, (where a product is designed to be more robust than necessary or have more features than are actually required, resulting in a creative process that is inefficient or unnecessary complex), is a common cause of project delays. To help your team avoid the overengineering trap, please read or blog post 

One good example of avoiding project delays is discussed in our 

Our team was tasked with migrating a legacy application to a microservice architecture when we discovered additional deliverables. To ensure the project wasn’t delayed, we scaled up quickly, adding 2 more developers to our original team of 3. We also invested heavily in building proper CI/CD pipelines. By investing the extra time and effort early on and scaling our team appropriately, we were able to save more time and energy later on in the development phase, setting our future selves up for success and reducing the amount of work required overall.

Sometimes even the best-laid plans can’t prevent delays. If a delay occurs, the most important thing you can do is approach the situation proactively and focus on finding a solution rather than assigning blame.

Event storming is worth a shot and here is few reasons why.

Having a chance to work with well-established startups from the e-mobility sector, Bartek gained invaluable knowledge on the industry requirements. On his path, he was given the opportunity to work on numerous EMSP applications and CPO platforms. Bartek is also our Head of Delivery.

Bartłomiej Łazarczyk

Most developers already had the chance to hear or read about Domain-Driven Design. Long story short, this approach is meant to help in modeling complex domains by offering precise tools and encouraging the use of specific, domain-oriented ways of thinking. It is a powerful methodology that works perfectly well with greenfield projects. But what about a legacy system that was, in addition, poorly designed and maintained? The cost of introducing this approach to the entire company is huge, takes a lot of time, and requires some training courses (not only for developers). Thankfully, there is a simple technique invented by Alberto Brandolini called 

. This is a good starting point for discovering Domain and introducing DDD.

Recently, we have started to implement the Domain-Driven approach together with one of our clients, and our goal is to integrate processes for discovering domains based on different Event Storming workshop variants. In the wake of a few sessions completed so far, we have reached some insights, and we would like to share some of them in this article.

First, let's focus on the workshop itself and its most popular variant, Big Picture Event Storming, with its basics and how to facilitate it. The main goal of this workshop is to gather all people that have a business, domain, or technical knowledge in one place and model the current understanding of the system.

You might say that there is nothing special about it, right? There are many other workshops and techniques that accomplish the same, so what makes Event Storming special?

The biggest advantage that speaks in favor of Event Storming is the clear, easy, and structured way of communication between employees from different company units. And because of that, we can naturally stimulate our participants to start a dialog, discussion, share thoughts and, most importantly, to agree on the language and discover it with us.

To perform this workshop and make it successful, you need three key ingredients:

The right people - a greater variety of the group, may color the final view by reducing bias, but be sure to invite only those people who have the most influence or knowledge about a given subject and care about the problem. They will be your domain experts. Developers with long service can be useful experts too, but they need to understand that the event should be considered as business-related.

A good location - the room needs to have at least one long wall and be large enough to accommodate gathered people and give them some space.

An experienced facilitator - you need a person or two who will ask the right questions, timebox every phase, and be able to explain all the rules and stages clearly so everyone would understand them.

As I wrote before, the room needs to have a long, straight wall on which you will be able to stick paper rolls. The bigger the wall, the better. At least at the beginning, all the participants should have space to stand and walk, so you also need to move all the seats to the place or corner, which is not easily accessible. The next important thing is a table with a lot of sticky cards in different colors, a few markers and a board with a legend of what each card means.

Sticky cards are the best tool used in the meeting. In the Big Picture variant, we can differentiate between five types of cards.

Orange cards represent an event and are the main building blocks in our process. To be more precise, this is an event relevant from the domain expert perspective. Events should always be phrased at past tense. Example: Report was generated, Charging has stopped.

The yellow card represents people involved in some event or process. You can treat it as an actor as well. Remember that the goal is not to specify people for each event but to accentuate the involvement of someone outside of the system. Example: Portal user, Support team member

The violet card represents the system involved in some event or process. It can be either an external or internal system. The same as in the card for people, the clue here is to emphasize some external involvement. Example: Third party API, Database

The red card represents a hotspot. This is used for marking a place with the lack of proper knowledge, something that is not working well or to mark a place of disagreement between participants. This is a sign that we need to take a deeper look into it later. Example: Generating report takes to long

The green card represents an opportunity. It can be used for specifying something that is already working quite well, something that we can improve, or some other handy ideas. It can be a good alternative to the hotspot card for an attendee who prefers resolving problems rather than complaining. Example: Delivery reception can be automatized

Up to this point, we have a place to organize the workshop, we have the tools - but what is the process itself? To quickly answer this question, there are five different phases in this meeting:

To benefit from our long, carefully prepared paper board, we need to draw a small timeline at the top of it, explain what each card means, ask everyone to think about some events happening in the system, write down an event on the orange card, try to stick it somewhere on the timeline and do it again and again until everyone runs out of ideas. It’s easy as that! Nevertheless, we often run into a problem with starting to stick cards. In that case, you need to encourage everyone or place an example card yourself to show that it’s just placing a card on the board, nothing more. Since it’s chaotic exploration, the location on the timeline does not have to be 100% accurate but will be helpful during cleanup. This phase should not take long; if you see that no one is writing anything on the cards for more than a few minutes, you can just finish this phase. In the end, it should look more or less like on the image below.

After chaotic exploration, of course, we need to do some cleanup and sort out all the events we have gathered on the board. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Some parallel processes will surely come up, people will try to kick all events around, and a lot of confusion will happen. To make this phase nice and effective, we can introduce some structure at the beginning. There are quite a few good strategies, but we highly recommend specifying a few pivotal events and introducing swimlanes. We ask our domain experts to choose up to four-five most significant events in the flow. They don’t have to be perfect; it’s enough if the other sequence of events is depending on some pivotal event and cannot happen without its occurrence. That will create a framework on the board, which makes sorting other events easier by determining whether they happen before or after a given pivotal event. We can introduce swimlanes for all sequences of events that can occur at the same time. When everything is put in order, it’s good to make a walkthrough from the first card to the last and assure everyone that they did a great job.

In this phase, we ask our domain experts to specify a few people and systems which play some role in the events. We need this information to have a full picture of the serious dependencies in the given system. It may also point to a place where there is no full control in the system, or where constraints and conditions are present.

So far, we have quite gained a lot of data about our domain, but still, it doesn’t feel as solid and detailed as it should be. To encourage our participants to be more creative and take a different perspective, we should spend more time on the backward walkthrough phase. In general, we need to ask someone from the audience to read out loud all the events starting from the last card. What is different now is that we ask additional questions like:

Is there something more happening between X and Y?

These questions will make domain experts think in different ways, stay focused, and not take something for granted. As a result, we will have new information and more details - and therefore, new events, new flows, and new structures. The most important rule here is to discuss and fill the magic gaps between events if they are apparent. There might be a situation when an agreement cannot be made due to a lack of knowledge. In that case, marking it as a hotspot is a good choice.

The last phase could be optional, but the overall picture of the system will gain a lot from that information. We would like our domain experts to specify hotspots - aspects to improve, and opportunities - ideas to introduce. After that, we organize short voting by drawing an arrow near the most important hotspot/opportunity in the system. This information is a very important sign that in any further discussion, we need to dig deeper into this area and try to solve this problem. We can also prepare a simple metric for a given hotspot/opportunity so it can be expressed with numbers, and as we know from our experience, numbers are intrinsic for business.

As you have already seen, this workshop is not so complicated from a technical perspective and probably could be performed by anyone who knows its rules. However, just as in real life, details play the biggest role. Some obvious behaviours and attitudes are often forgotten in effect, so here are a few tips that came along with practice.

Event Storming is all about the people and their knowledge. The goal is to have as diverse and useful a group as possible. To achieve that, a simple stakeholder mapping technique comes in handy. We need to find a person who knows the system and the company quite well. It can be a Product Owner or someone from the management board. Then, together, try to determine potential participants on a simple figure with two axes: influence and interest. For simplicity's sake, we can divide the figure like in the image below and map people into those areas. The conclusions are self-imposed.

Remember to make the goal of the workshop clear to everyone, especially in the Big Picture variant. People often tend to lose their track if they don't narrow the scope a little by having an explicit reason for carrying out the workshop. That may result in many wrong, or irrelevant events, so unnecessary confusion could happen by accident in further phases.

A good facilitator is priceless and makes a huge difference during the workshop. Leading a workshop is a skill that demands time and experience to be improved, but fortunately, we have some advice on that matter (especially useful if you're just getting started).

At first, keep the meeting and rules in scheduled bounds and don't allow too much freestyle. Boundaries trigger creativity and require mental effort. The next thing is about too specific questions during the Big Picture Event Storming. Not everything is important and necessary at this level of abstraction. More details should be discovered later when the scope is limited, and we have a clear goal to deliberate specific aspects. When something is not clear, just mark it a hotspot.

The last and most important thing is to focus on the language that springs out during the discussion. Domain-Driven Design puts linguistic differences first, so try to pick up details and attributes up as much as you can. Ubiquitous language is necessary to appoint subdomains, and there is no time to write down everything that has been said.

If you gather people from different company units, they could have their own definition of an event. It is really important to have a common understanding that events should be relevant from a domain expert and from a business perspective. An event should not be connected to some implementation and technical concepts because it's highly probable that it doesn't reflect the problem and domain. Often, it is far and away from the business-related issue, especially when you are considering a legacy system that wasn't designed in a Domain Driven way.

Do your best to specify good pivotal items. Ask as many detailed questions about chosen events as you can, e.g., "Are there some events that cannot happen if this event has not occurred?", "Is it necessary for some processes to start and go on?", etc.

This will speed up the cleanup phase, and in the future, it can point to a moment when the language is changing. Pivotal events often come with new processes that could be related to different subdomains.

It's hard to book at least three hours in everyone's calendar. It's even harder to stay focused and feel good during such a long meeting. Proper timeboxing and breaks are a must. Spend your time, more or less, in these proportions:

Chaotic exploration: about 10-20% of time

Enforcing the timeline: about 30-40% of the time (cleanup takes some time)

Backward walkthrough: 30-40% of the time (most of the details come up here)

Hotspots and Opportunities: max 5-10% of time

People would love to see the result of spending their precious time on discovering their domain. Also, from the perspective of a software architect, you need to have a better overall view and possibility to manage it without effort. Digitizing it seems to be the best solution, and for that, we recommend an online tool called Miro. It has a feature to capture sticky cards and convert them to online notes, which can save a lot of time.

Now that we have finished the workshop, everyone is completely exhausted but also satisfied with what they have achieved. And then they ask the important question: What is going to happen next?

The answer is simple. Now it's time for the domain architect to discover and validate the subdomains. We have a big picture view of the whole system, but we don't understand it yet, we cannot tell what exactly is happening underneath, what problems there are, and what exactly we want to solve.

We need to determine emerging subdomains. It's not easy; some even say it has more in common with art and intuition rather than logical patterns and equations. What's more, there are dozens of heuristics and techniques for doing it, and none of them are universal.

Nevertheless, here are a few worth mentioning.

This can be a good entry point for further considerations. Each organization has different units that can reflect different subdomains. Unfortunately, business processes, which are a part of the core domain, often cross different departments, so we cannot rely on this heuristic much.

It's a common situation that within one company unit, there are few domain experts responsible for different issues. This is a clear sign that we may expect different problems in one place and may need different subdomains.

Probably the most important and practical heuristic, which assumes that words and terms have a different meaning in different contexts and subdomains. Company products have different meanings in the sales department and different meanings in the warehouse department. If we don't focus on the language, we risk failing to see these various perspectives, life cycles, and issues separation.

If some aspect comes with huge business value, it should probably be a separate subdomain. You can be almost pretty sure that this aspect is connected with the core domain, the company determinant.

Many business processes often involve different subdomains. Establishing factors that highly influence the process may point to a change of involved subdomain. Finding that might require introducing a clear chronology and asking for more details about what is happening between two events.

Discovering complex domain with Event Storming

How to deal with the troublesome business reality? Read this peace of content.

2020 became a huge game-changer in nearly every aspect of life, bringing new habits, practices, and relationships. The trust issues became even more important. We are heading to an end of the year that requires all of us to take the necessary steps to get through the crisis, face up to the challenges, redefine business goals and come to conclusions for the future. We have all experienced, to some extent, the aftermath caused by global lockdown - the economic slowdown, varied models in response to the crisis. 2020 was a year of testing, remodeling, and creating multiple scenarios. These challenging conditions affected the way people perceive and want to hold conversations with professionals, as well as match business partners. Here you can find some useful, universal information about the global changes in B2B that were dictated by the recent pandemic and how they may help redefine strategy for 2021. Some data and personal view for the passing year as well as tips for the year ahead.

 , the preferences and behaviors of B2B decision-makers have changed dramatically since the beginning of 2020. This applies to the way how business meetings were arranged, as well as to services provided by various participants. Global trends redefine how B2B sales models diversify affected by the pandemic. The survey applies to the new state of sales, and business management which might be helpful when designing new strategies, funnels, and creating partnerships. This is a good time for rethinking and implementing, for both current and future projects, because the design that takes into account the preferences of decision-makers will play a significant role in creating the company’s value and future profits.

 models are preferred by 70-80% of decision-makers. The advantages pointed out are travel savings, safety, and ease of scheduling a meeting. This approach applies either to ordering and reordering, as well as identifying and evaluating new suppliers.

 are as efficient or even more powerful than the prior models. In April 2020 65% of respondents declared that remote sales are as effective as face-to-face meetings (or even better performing). In August the number of respondents claiming the effectiveness of remote sales increased up to 75%. Additionally, 45% of respondents pointed out that remote sales were more effective.

 for remote sales or self-service does not only apply to the low-value purchase. 70% of B2B decision-makers declare the purchase of up to 500,000 USD via a self-service or remote interaction. 97% of the B2B clients consider a purchase in an end-to-end digital purchase model.

 Nearly 90% of the respondents declared that the new, remote sales models will stay for a longer time, and 60% declared to keep a certain limit in face-to-face meetings, even if the salesforce will be ready to meet in-person. Most companies point out additional sets to become successful, these are the ability to remote transition, basic video technology, new profiles of sales representatives, redesigned sales training. Over 80% of B2B companies declare to introduce more agile sales processes and focus on different sales methods, while nearly 60% plan to decrease the number of sales representatives, 70% plans to switch to a more dynamic resource model.

What are the forecasts for the economy of 2021?

After the global economic decline, the market is expected to bounce back. In the mid-2020 we faced a V-shaped recovery, that is noted, to drive to excel pre-pandemic GDP levels by the end of this year - setting the stage for strong post-recovery growth in 2021. The economists from 

 point out that now we are entering a new phase that is on track to deliver 6.4% GDP growth in the coming year. Several industries generally have been more affected by the effects of global lockdown, despite fears and uncertainties, global forecasts are more optimistic than they might seem.

Taking into account the changes that will remain with us, as well as the predictions for 2021, and the fact that we will never return 100% to pre-pandemic behavior and processes, it is worthwhile to redefine the core strategy. When looking for new opportunities, as well as setting new strategic goals, you should not reject the solutions given on the plate. Knowing that the expected growth, as well as digital relationships, will be fed by credibility, trust, and experience, these qualities will play an even more important role in building sustainable partnerships than before. Combining with excellent customer service, unique experiences, and discovering new paths will boost the global recovery, as well as will set businesses on a new road to success.

2020 proved that we create a system of connected vessels. When one broke, the next dependent parts started to leak. After a year of uncertainty, another optimistic view is that since we live in a mostly digitized world, where partnerships transcend political borders, the recovery is expected to happen even faster. Asynchronous recovery, on both, developed and emerging markets will accelerate in the same year. The exact speeding up is assumed around March or April when most of the geographies and sectors will join the revival.

Customer experience will play a central role

Promising forecasts are ahead, here are some thoughts which you can execute right now to be prepared for an upturn. Strengthen your partnerships and focus on making new ones. Setting a customer in a center of all your efforts, or in other words, having a focus on your customer’s needs and filling their expectations, will help you win 2021. Accelerated digital transformation will continue to grow, mapping, and designing improved customer journeys. According to the 

 , 87% of professionals say customer feedback became more important than it was before the pandemic. Businesses also gather feedback in new places, 60% of respondents claimed they’ve added new touchpoints.

A fast response will be crucial but must be followed in the right direction. Whether it is B2B or B2C, the rules are similar. Understanding the value you can provide, and what your customers expect from you will let your business make strategic changes quickly and confidently. That’s one principle that establishes agile businesses apart from the rest.

Face-to-face meetings won’t happen anytime soon, and even if, these will differ from what we have known. Digital experiences will play a dominant role. E-commerce and digital actions have become more important, keeping a close eye on the customer experience, setting new paths, and testing new digital channels will become the new winning strategy. The data that can be gathered and analyzed via digital channels will help improve decision making, shaping the future of your business, and prepare to better react when unexpected turbulences appear. Consider how the experience you’re delivering via the website or digital services could play a dominant role in the 2021 strategy.

A business plan for 2021 - what to expect and how to win new reality?

Types of clients to avoid when you run software development business.

Everyone who dreams about starting their own software company needs to answer this question: I know how to build stuff, but where am I going to find my (first) clients?

I’m not going to share a guide to finding clients here. I’m not in the position to give people advice about it. I want to share my observations of the different client types who approach software companies - to be more precise, the client types you better avoid.

I’m not sure whether the more you grow, the fewer such clients approach, you manage to build mechanisms that block them, or you gain more experience and learn how to talk with such clients.

I feel that we’ve been dealing with a relatively high number of such 'cliche clients' in our early days. Another possible explanation is that at some point such clients no longer bother you that much since the people you want to do business with are in your sales funnel too.

Before listing my three least favourite types of clients, I want to note that I think some of them can still be transformed into leads. The question is: will the contract benefit you as well the client or just a client?

A common way to validate your startup idea is discussing it with others. The more you talk, the more your idea can be challenged and improved. It also gives you more information about possible competition. It can even help you find a partner or a customer. I’ve always thought that’s the most sensible way of founding a startup - or any other business, to be honest. It turned out a lot of people feel exactly the opposite.

Here’s an exaggerated representation of the conversation I’ve had many times (

 Hello, I have an idea, and I would like to talk about it as I am looking for a tech partner.

 Hi - sure, we can help you with that. What do you have in mind?

 Well, it is like an Uber for Crypto. But I can’t tell you any more details.

 Ok, I will keep everything confidential, but I need some information.

 Of course! I am sending you an NDA. Please sign it so we can talk.

Well, nothing wrong until this point, an NDA is a pretty standard thing, and it’s understandable to protect a business idea. Then the situation develops...

 I am looking at the NDA, and it says I need to pay you $500k for any single wrongdoing... I’m pretty sure our contract will not be worth that much, can we think about a more rational number?

 (conversation begins to chill) What do you have in mind? $500k is not a significant number if you think how much the idea is worth.

I can add a few more things here: rage, theft accusations, and swearing included. I understand the need to protect your ideas, but if the client starts the cooperation with a trust level equaling zero and is convinced everybody wants to steal from them - no NDAs will change that attitude. Collaborating on simple tasks will become a nightmare.

 Well, I want you to sign this $500k NDA, but I don’t have money to pay you for the work - can it be equity?

2. Treat everything as due yesterday - except the money.

We may laugh a little about the first client, but this second type can cause severe damage. Cashflow is crucial at every point for a service company. Developer salaries, equipment, office - all of that generates substantial costs, and lack of money can let you to bankruptcy in just a moment. The brutal truth is that in the early days, a software company is two invoices from going down.

If the client is not paying, is late with the payment or continuously tries to find ways to postpone the transfer - in my mind, that’s the biggest red flag there can be and a sign to quit any cooperation with the client. As painful as it can be - it will be always less painful than finding out there is no money to pay your staff with by the end of a month.

Sometimes you read an e-mail or answer a phone call that seems to be perfect. The client knows what they want, has an idea about the price, and has structures and processes in place to handle your team. There is only one ‘but’ - it all needs to happen now.

Such a conversation seems so right and tempting at the beginning of running your own company that you may rush into it - you call friendly agencies to ask if they have anybody spare to join you ASAP, move some of the developers from internal projects, and neglect other (possibly important!) leads. Once you have it all or most of it in place, contact goes silent.

Well… it happens - you think. But after a few weeks the same client calls, gives you a decent excuse and the situation happens all over, including the going silent part.

I don’t think there is a way to defend from such client. The difference between an experienced salesman and a newbie, is the latter is so excited about everything that they may go through a number of such cycles before giving up on such client.

At Solidstudio we had the pleasure of working with great clients. Sometimes with ok ones. We managed to cut off not paying customers and avoid signing deals with cagey ones. I believe trust is the most critical value in a business and not having it with the client will prevent you from building a meaningful and lasting relationship that works for both parties.

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Understanding Project Delays: Why They Happen & How to Avoid Them

13 AUGUST 2020 • 10 MIN READ