Managing a software project without a full-time CTO is challenging. These five principles — learned from projects across Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia — keep projects on track.
Over 60 % of software projects miss their original deadline. In the African startup context — where runway is short and market windows close fast — a delayed project can mean the difference between success and failure. These principles are drawn from real projects.
1. Two-week sprints, always
Monthly milestones are too long — scope drifts, blockers compound, and by the time you notice you are behind, you are very behind. Two-week sprints force a delivery cadence. At the end of every sprint, a working, demoable increment should exist. If it does not, something is wrong that needs immediate attention.
2. Change requests in writing, always
Verbal agreement to a scope change is the single most common cause of project disputes. Every change, no matter how small ("just add one more column to the table") must be documented with a time and cost estimate before work begins. Use WhatsApp, email, or a shared document — the medium does not matter, the written record does.
3. UAT before payment, not after
User Acceptance Testing should happen before the final payment milestone, not after. Clients who have already paid have little leverage to enforce fixes. Clients who are about to pay have every incentive to test carefully. Structure your payment schedule with 80 % tied to working software.
4. Staging environments are not optional
Deploying new features directly to production is how you corrupt live data and lose client trust permanently. Every project should have at least a production and a staging environment. The cost is a few hundred pula per month — trivial compared to a production incident.
5. Documentation is a deliverable, not an afterthought
We have inherited projects where no documentation exists — no ERD, no API spec, no deployment guide. When the original developer leaves, the project becomes unmaintainable. Insist on documentation as a contractual deliverable, budgeted and time-boxed alongside the code itself.
