I once heard a saying that you don’t know where you are if you don’t know where you’ve been.   I’ve had the pleasure  of working for several start-ups as well as some established companies through out my career.  I’ve always been fascinated by the transition companies go through when moving from start-up mode to corporate operations.  No where is the change more evident than in IT.  This is a tough transition plagued by pitfalls and hard lessons.  Hopefully, by you reading this post and the ones to follow, you can gain some insight as well as avoid some of these pitfalls should you have the fortunate experience of making it out of start-up mode.

This post is the first part of a series I’ll be posting in the next few months addressing this phenomenon.  Many of these lessons are from first hand experience.  However, like I said I’m fascinated by the process and I would love to hear your stories be them successful or otherwise. 

Characteristics

What is start-up mode vs corporate operations?  We will need a definition.  My view of a start-up is a company that is just trying to establish itself.  This is a loaded definition because there are many facets to an established company.   The first is that a company must establish a product or service.  No doubt obvious and tangible.  But we must also consider the non-tangible, things like culture and brand recognition.

So what does a start-up look like from an IT perspective?  The truth is that it can be in a variety of states, but here are twelve points I typically find to be true: 

1. No centralized management of assets
2. Data center sprawl
3. Release Management in disarray
4. Lack of code standards or code reviews
5. Inconsistent SDLC processes
6. Missing Architecture strategy
7. Lax security policy
8. Missing disaster recovery plan
9. Lack of code documentation
10. Lots of ‘small apps’ to bridge a gap
11. Missing or lacking quality control points
12. Inconsistent help desk operations

These points all sound bad, but remember, the goal of a start-up is to make it to a point where these issues can be addressed.  Implementing a coherent SDLC process is useless if you don’t have a product or customers to serve.

So what makes corporate operations different than start-up mode?  I’m sure most of you reading this can think of examples where the corporation you work for either isn’t doing all of these activities or struggles with these activities.  The main difference is that the corporation you are working for is probably doing some of these or is working towards these activities.  A start-up has to begin with a clean slate.  Improving one of the twelve activities is a different animal than starting from scratch.  Especially when you consider the ‘culture’.  Remember you are moving away from the mind set of ‘just get it out’ to ‘let’s do it better’.  For many folks that were involved in the start-up from the beginning this is a tough pill to swallow.  Attrition will happen, you will loose rock stars and gain new ones.  For this reason alone it’s good to start implementing some of these controls as soon as possible.

During Part 2 of this series I’ll begin to discuss which of the twelve points above are the least painful to implement, and why they are important.  Please check back for more next week!