Should you build or buy? - WordPress.com · Develop from scratch 100% 100% 1 day 1 week 3 months 1...

Should you build or buy?Does it depend on how long you will be spending on it?

Buy and Tweak

Develop from scratch

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1 day 1 week 3 months 3 years1 year 10 years

Time invested in the platform

Time scale is approximately log, means that time passes “quicker”

on the right. E.g., gap between 3 and 10 years

feels the same and 3 months and 1 year

Buy and Tweak

From scratch means using application developers, you are

allowed use a database and other pure tech products. But basically

pure development from something like c#, Ruby, Java or

other similar platform.


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Buy and Tweak





Means that you buy a system that solves the

problem. As time goes on, the time is spent using

features of the system to enhance the experience.


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Buy and Tweak





Means that you buy a system that solves the

problem. As time goes on, the time is spent using

features of the system to enhance the experience.

I don’t think that this is “man years”, I think it is more like

“elapsed time”, but also there is a factor that longer projects

tend to grow a team, etc.


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Buy and Tweak


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I’m pure out of the box, all online, all cloud, You just start using it, It Just

Works

Buy and Tweak


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Works

Think: “There’s An App For That”

Buy and Tweak


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Works


For a lot of things, we start to use some funky

spreadsheets, which verges on “development”

Buy and Tweak


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Works


For a lot of things, we start to use some funky

spreadsheets, which verges on “development”

Up here, we are at the end of scripting and Excel, and the

advantage swings to “proper”

development


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Throwing something together with little security

or scale can be done in a week or so.

Buy and Tweak


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Development feels productive, but might

be off track

Buy and Tweak


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be off track

Diminishing returns set in as development

ramps up

Buy and Tweak


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be off track


ramps up

At 3 – 6 months, the hack ‘n’ slash dev process is creaking. Quick wins have been taken

and now we need to consolidate and clean up.

Buy and Tweak


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be off track


ramps up

At 3 – 6 months, the hack ‘n’ slash dev process is creaking. Quick wins have been taken

and now we need to consolidate and clean up.

Also, at this point, a serious procurement

and deployment is possible. Many

features are unlocked quickly

Buy and Tweak


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Time invested in the platformFull rollout of a

powerful purchased

system will take a year or more.

Buy and Tweak


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Time invested in the platformFull rollout of a

powerful purchased

system will take a year or more.

Peak of “hype cycle” probably

starts 1 year from the pre-sales

process

Buy and Tweak


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Buying disillusionment now creeps in as more

and more detailed customizations occur

Buy and Tweak


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Advantage of out-of-the-box is being eroded

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Now, building your business specific stuff feels hard, requires IT support and

approaching dev amounts of effort for every change.

Buy and Tweak


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Now, building your business specific stuff feels hard, requires IT support and

approaching dev amounts of effort for every change.

Despite being expert on the

platform.

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For the case where the business IS the platform, and you live and die by this stuff -e.g., Facebook, Twitter – time expended becomes infinite.

Nothing but development will do (e.g., Snowflake, BigTable).

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Facebook; Amazon

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Original architecture now looks naïve, business has moved on too far. Development collapses

under weight of tweaks.

Facebook; Amazon

If it turns out that you weren’t really competent to build it all, you

go bust here.

Buy and Tweak


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Original architecture now looks naïve, business has moved on too far. Development collapses

under weight of tweaks.

Facebook; Amazon

If it turns out that you weren’t really competent to build it all, you

go bust here.

There is another

possibility here

Buy and Tweak


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Buy and Tweak


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Business Projects

Buy and Tweak


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Reb

oo

t zo

ne

Buy and Tweak

Business Projects


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Reb

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In this region, the risk of restarting

the project whether you build

or buy is high. Sometimes, you just need to start

again.

Buy and Tweak

Business Projects


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Business Projects


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There is a final interpretation of the

curve, that it represents the mix of

home brew and purchased solution

Buy and Tweak

Business Projects


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So, at 3-5 years, we might expect a

solution to be an approximately equal

mix of build

Buy and Tweak

Business Projects


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So, at 3-5 years, we might expect a

solution to be an approximately equal

mix of build

Buy and Tweak

Or a mix of purchased toolkit and

development work?

Business Projects

Should you build or buy? - WordPress.com · Develop from scratch 100% 100% 1 day 1 week 3 months 1...

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