Inception Stage Started - WBS and stuff

Now that I've had over 2 months to get started as a microISV, here's what I've accomplished:

• transition to self-employment and spend time with family
• read or skim about 100 marketing/business and technical books
• read tons of web articles about business/marketing
• develop some qWIKpage technology
• put qWIKpage on the back burner

I have now committed to developing RoadRaceResults.com.

Here's where I'm at with that:

• initial Work Breakdown Structure created
• set up productive work environment (The Pilgrim's Den)
• implemented a "Big Visible Charts" system for personal project management (another BVC link)
• did some preliminary scheduling

I'll talk more some of this in later posts but I want to mention a bit about making the Work Breakdown Structure.

In the past I have used WBS's to get a project started when it was anything but obvious where to start. Even when working on a single person project it is essential to get a feel for what work needs to be done.

The typical approach I use is to breakdown all tasks on post-it notes and build a hierarchical structure of work down to individual tasks. Each tasks is about 1/2 to 2 days. If a task is very important but only takes an hour or so it still may get a WBS entry of its own.

These post-it notes then form the basis of a MS Project Gantt chart. This time around I felt I didn't really want to use MS Project since collaboration and communication isn't necessary. So I searched for software specifically designed to create WBS's.

It seemed that WBS Chart Pro is the most popular tool in this niche. With a 30 day (50 task) trial license I tried it out. Yes, it is quite easy to use and does what it should but I don't really see any advantage over using a subset of MS Project's features to enter tasks and print out a tree-like Big Chart.

In a post to follow I will show and describe my Big Chart system.

This now officially unleashes the Inception Stage of my microISV business.