Software development firm interview:  Habañero

This is the final in a series of three interviews - first up was Teknision, second was Zetetic - with software development firms. In this interview, I speak to Steven Fitzgerald, President of Habañero, with offices located in Vancouver, Calgary and Regina.

When and how was Habañero started?

Habañero unofficially started its life as a collaboration between the two founding partners (Neil Jensen and myself) in 1995. At that time we were moonlighting doing web development and a little CD-ROM authoring.

By February of ‘96 we were incorporated and we both dove in full time (“full time” as in 70 hours a week) with an initial focus on external website development. Neil and I were really excited about places where technology and design met and it was clear that a whole new world of possibilities was opening up.

It was a year or so after that that we began to take the journey of evolving from “a couple of consultants working out of their homes” to a real organization. By that point, Habañero was starting take the form that is more similar to how it looks today with the same values and purpose.

Are the services and technologies you provided at the start the same as you offer now?

We started as a website development company and cut our teeth early on developing the user experience ethic and perspective on the world that is very much alive and embedded in our offerings today.

Our focus now is spread across the application stack from websites and e-commerce to enterprise content management to Business Intelligence to Enterprise Resource Planning.

What have you found to be most effective in marketing Habañero?

We are very focused on developing long-term relationships with clients so marketing into our existing client base is an important strategy for Habañero. With this model, we’ve found that very focused, strategic efforts aimed at specific areas within our client organizations is one of our most effective forms of marketing.

We also have great success co-marketing with Microsoft. The most successful joint campaigns have again been pretty focused on specific clients and service offerings.

What tools do you use to manage projects, track bugs and handle feature requests?

We use lots of tools! The tool we use depends on the type of project and when it was started. We’ve introduced Team Foundation Server (TFS) in 2006 for source control, but have only really started leveraging more of its project management capabilities in the last year. As a result, there is a mishmash of tools that we string together to help us keep on top of all of it.

Managing Projects

• Microsot Project, Excel, Word, Changepoint, TFS
• We also use lots of templates: Project Charter, Project Plan, Project Closure, Status Report, Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), Change Request, etc.

Tracking Bugs

• TFS, Excel, SharePoint and a custom web-based ticket tracker

Feature Requests

• Word, Excel, TFS, SharePoint and a custom web-based ticket tracker

How would you describe the development process at Habañero: agile, iterative, waterfall or your own custom brew?

I would say that Habañero strives to be an agile shop, and in the past several years we have evolved a great deal. The reality of executing projects in a professional services firm is that our project approach must often be optimized to best work with our clients. That being said, once the project gets into development, we’ll do it iteratively.

Depending on the complexity and size of the project, we try to get as close to agile as possible and a typical project would start off with a high-level visioning, requirements and solutioning/designing sprint (2-4 weeks), and then run for x number of 2 week sprints until the most important features and functionality were implemented.

What are some important business lessons you’ve learned since starting Habañero?

That’s a very big question!

I’ve always maintained that if I had any idea of how complete my lack of understanding of what it would take to build a business was, I never would have had the guts to start Habañero. There hasn’t been a quarter go by in the last 13 years that we haven’t learned important business lessons. Each of these lessons was critical to us at that point in time.

That said, if I had to pull something out of all that, a lesson we keep learning over and over is the role of patience and persistence. To realize meaningful, indelible change it takes a consistency of vision and strong leadership to be sure; however, the patient, persistent follow-through is really the tough part.

All the big evolutionary changes we’ve seen at Habañero have been a result of a large number of small changes led by various people across the company. Clarity of vision is important to make sure all those smaller changes push us in the same direction.

However, the big lesson for me is the value of not giving up and stopping early on a change-related journey even if success does not come easily. All of our significant steps took persistence over a long period to really make them part of who we are and how we work.