First, let’s define a ‘one-off’. I’m sure there’s some sort of technical definition somewhere, but to me it’s a piece of development that’s likely not to be repeated for any other partner. It’s not a minor thing like a map mod, but it is significant enough that you need to make a call on it. Examples I’ve seen ranged from designing an entirely custom beginning to end electronic shopping through payment process to developing a process to convert paper order forms into sales orders. And a whole bunch of others…… When your company’s customer base is huge and varied, you get asked to do a lot of them.

Our evaluation approach for one-offs was pretty simple. We focused on the size of the opportunity relative to the cost of development, and we also considered the possibility of leveraging the work to either add a capability to our portfolio or to solve a broader problem. If the opportunity was huge, for example if a new contract with a customer was at stake or there was a potential loss of business, we would find a way to get the work done. We may have to hire a consultant to help out or prioritize it ahead of other work, but spending an incremental $5K to help snag a couple million in new business was a no-brainer. Note that we did due diligence to ensure the validity of the ‘new business’ promise before proceeding. That was the situation with the first example above: we had a giant contract with a huge customer in play, and we worked with other areas within the business to design a highly customized process that resulted in a big ‘win’ for us.

Adding another tool to our set was the consideration in our other example. We received a request to help a branch office that was being deluged by dozens of faxed orders received daily from a large multi-site customer. We determined that we could help save cost in order entry, improve quality, and add a capability if we supported this effort, so we designed a process using a 3rd party for fax conversion to EDI 850 format and implemented it pretty quickly. It never became wildly successful for others, but it was something we could offer customers who were just working up the conversion curve to true electronic ordering.

What’s the downside of getting involved in a one-off? Well, there’s not much of one if you use the criteria we based our decisions upon. However, if the opportunity ends up being smaller than proposed (on non-existent) or if the work can’t be further leveraged, then you burn resources, spend money unnecessarily, delay projects with better ROIs, and set a bad precedent for future project opportunities.

Our bias was generally toward finding a reason to say ‘yes’ to project proposals rather than ‘no’, but realistically the challenges of resources and priorities were always in play. We depended on our partners in the business to help us gather the information we needed to make decisions. Sometimes you just have to roll the dice, but in this economy you better have a good reason!