Putting 2006 behind us, of course it’s time to set down our resolutions for the new year. The thing that makes resolutions different from goals or plans is the idea that achieving them is primarily a matter of will or resolve. They can be…

• quantitative (lose 20 pounds!) or qualitative (eat healthier!)
• subjective (be a better person!) or objective (spend 10 hours a month helping out my favorite charity!)
• personal (appreciate the little things more!) or altruistic (make the world a better place!)

…but they are things that challenge us because they challenge our ability to overcome our limitations, our conditioning and our environment.

Of course, I’ve got my list of personal resolutions…..drop 20 pounds, finish the Cooper River Bridge Run in under 50 minutes, and complete a lengthy list of home improvement projects….just to name a few. However, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to try and come up with a New Year’s Resolution that has an impact on our Products team at Blackbaud and, by extension, the products we deliver. While surfing the web looking for some ideas, most of what I found centered on resolutions like “write more reusable code”, “comply with web standards” or “do more usability testing”; all worthwhile goals, but they didn’t capture my imagination or feel like what I was looking for.

Eventually, I came across an article discussing New Year’s Resolutions and “Deficit Thinking”. The article defines Deficit Thinking as “an ingrained habit of focusing on gaps and weaknesses instead of what’s working” and goes on to talk about the value in avoiding it and provides some strategies to help avoid it. The article itself may be a little too Stuart Smalley and doesn’t specifically apply the concept of Deficit Thinking to software development. However, the basic definition of the comment did strike a chord with me. Much of what we do in developing software necessarily involves Deficit Thinking;

• Product Managers and Business Analysts study gaps between what our products do and what our clients need them to do (or what our competitor’s products do!).
• Developers work to ensure that all of the product requirements are satisfied in the code they write and try and figure out why their code won’t compile or pass unit tests.
• Quality Assurance Engineers demonstrate the creativity of Van Gogh (for the QA people out there, that was a compliment, not a comment on your mental stability!) in devising test plans designed to identify gaps between what the product does and what the Business Analysts said it should do.
• Usability Engineers exhaustively test our products for ease of use and collect reams of data that point out where they are substandard.

It’s not a stretch to say that a software development team simply can not function without a culture deeply rooted in Deficit Thinking. That said, I think that providing truly compelling products and solutions to our clients requires an ability and willingness to balance this mindset with one that keenly recognizes how and where our product features provide value to our clients and seeks opportunities to build on that value or apply that value to new challenges. This type of “Opportunity Thinking” (for lack of a better term) provides a valuable complement to skills we all bring to the process of building products by focusing that process on maximizing the value we provide to our clients rather than towards satisfying a list of requirements.

So, there you have it, my New Year’s Resolution for Blackbaud products:

To balance “Deficit Thinking” with “Opportunity Thinking” by recognizing the value that our products provide and thinking of new ways to enhance that value and apply it to the challenges our clients face.