Hi JohnK,

Reading this thread it occurred to me that I had seen several of these 'topics' before, and it finally hit me as to where I had seen them.

Whil Hentzen's "The 1999 Software Developer's Guide" has chapter titles as follows:

Section 1 - How do I get the business I want
Chap 1: Setting Expectations
Chap 2: Positioning
Chap 3: Marketing
Chap 4: The Initial Contact
Chap 5: The Sales Call
Chap 6: An Agreement to do Work
Chap 7: Auditing an Existing Application
Chap 8: Pre-Development Scenarios

Section 2 - How much will it cost - and how long will it take [designing]
Chap 9: The fundamental premis behind Time and Dollar Quotes
Chap 10: The Functional Specigication
Chap 11: The process of developing Specifications
Chap 12: Determining Time and Cost
Chap 13: The cover letter and delivery of the functional spec
Chap 14: Specification War Stories

Section 3 - Where do I "make" the software? [the factory]

Chap 15: The development environment
Chap 17: Your secret weapon: An adiminstrative Assistant

Section 4 - How do I make the software [Manufacturing]

Chap 18: Good-Fast-Cheap: pick any one
Chap 19: Manufacturing Instructions
Chap 20: Code Reviews
Chap 21: Application Feedback
Chap 22: Testing: Who does it?
... more, but tiring

Section 5 - How do I get others to help me?
5 more chapters under here

Don't know if you have it, but I am expecting it to be helpful (only glanced at it as currently under a fairly long contract, so will read it later).

Cheers

Jim N

>Hi Stephen ---
>
>Excellent ideas. Yes, I'd like to see some utilities/templates/whatnot addressing business topics available on the UT. I'm actually in the process of writing a proposal-maker using integration with Word and, when and if I ever finish, it's getting posted here on the UT.