Agile beginnings
It’s only a little over a month since our former employer, Interesource, went into administration. A week earlier we’d never have thought about starting our own company; Interesource had assembled the best team we’d ever had and we had a stream of new business leads that made the future look pretty exciting.
In the shock that followed the collapse of Interesource, we were all just focused on trying to pay our mortgages, having not been paid the salary owed to us for October, so any kind of strategic plan would have been an indulgence. Of course we had a series of sessions at the pub in which we all expressed how much we’d like to work together again, but we all knew that pragmatism would have to win out over sentiment.
Neil, Abbie and I had worked very closely with each other and got on particularly well. I really wanted to work with both of them again, and I felt that if we didn’t seize the opportunity immediately it would be gone for ever. I jumped at the chance to bring them in to help me when the Telegraph asked me to write their User Generated Content strategy. Just on a word-production basis, I couldn’t have done this on my own but, from a standing start, we produced a document crammed with ideas that we had developed together.
Over the course of the time we spent writing that document, we gradually agreed that we ought to seize the chance to start our own company. Resident was born.
We decided what we would be doing before we decided on a name. Our shared experience of web agencies both as employees and as clients gave us an excellent platform to help other people select, engage and work with an agency. Interesource was a ‘full service’ agency, but Resident will not be. One of the things we will do is to help businesses understand the emerging trends on the web, adapt them to their environment and then implement them. But we won’t be doing the implementation ourselves.
One thing that we’d like to do a lot more of is to help development teams work better with their customers - internal or otherwise. When I first joined Interesource in 2001, relations between the creative and technical disciplines were not good, but over the years we hired well and worked very hard to forge bonds between these two vital departments. By the end, we were working really well together and had been for some time.
There are often even more intractable problems between developers and their customers. There is a natural and understandable linguistic divide, but there are also misunderstandings that can sprout when everyone is under pressure and such tensions can ultimately destroy a project.
So, we’re keen to help companies with in-house development teams, or agencies with teams that are struggling, to get the best out of their development practice. All of us have experience of the problems I’ve been describing from one angle or another. I have years of experience of mentoring developers and getting them to build quality into the development process, and I’m really keen to continue doing so. This is another aspect of our shared experience that I would never have expected to make use of in this way.
And it struck me. We’ve started our business in a very agile way. There was no grand plan, there were no targets, no dates and no expectations. We simply started working on a document and found that there were other people who were interested in talking to us, other people who were interested in joining us and still more who wanted to hear about what we were doing. Who knows where it will go from here?
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