Camels and Llama’s

8 Mar 2009

Its funny, I was just sat here reading some of the notes that I have made over the months regarding our business strategy, and animals of various sorts seem to be used, very often, as analogies for how our business performs and I just wanted to share a couple of examples (for fun).

We have a phrase at Software Add-ons that talks about ‘The Camel’. This refers to the way that cashflow is effected by the changing rolls of the individuals. When we are selling heavily our cashflow goes up, when we are actively involved with bigger projects, ‘doing the doing’, we don’t sign as much (granted the bigger projects bring in more cash in the first instance, or at least that is what is supposed to happen!). This causes a wavy line, similar to the hump in a Camel, hence the relationship.

Another animal that we sometimes talk about is the Llama ‘effect’, now, not a true analogy here (it should of course be the push me, pull you from Dr Dolittle), but when we are working on a project, we find that there are ‘Push projects and Pull projects’, in other words, those where the client takes an active lead and helps us move things along and those where the client needs us to PUSH every step of the way. Its odd, in these cases you could almost feel that the client is happy spending money on work that they may never use, but that’s the ‘Llama effect’ that we sometimes refer to.

As I say, just a bit of fun, but it does help us visualise easily, situations that occur during the normal day to day process in our business.

Do you have any ‘animal’ related examples? I guess refering to our development team as ‘little Monkeys’ sort of counts……