ID-GEM is a new product we've just rolled out Amadeus. It's joint effort between a few groups (sales, estimation, software, marketing) within the company. It encapsulates and expands on our business development and requirements gathering process that we've been refining over the years. I also wrote a blog post about it for work here.

The core of the product is that software projects almost always fall into one of five categories, and if you spend the time up front to think about which category you're in and how you want to achieve your goals, you can have a great framework for making crucial decisions down the road as your product or project moves through its life cycle. Here are the categories:

1. Capturing Market Share
2. Revenue (Increase/Create) B2C
3. Revenue (Increase/Create) B2B
4. Reduce Costs or Increase Efficiency
5. Improve Community or Well-Being of Users

We looked back over 20 years of consulting to determine these categories, as well as what we felt were the most telling, challenging, and crucial questions for projects to wrestle with at the beginning. This enables you to have the right answers in place when things get challenging down the road. The questions can be quite different depending on which of the categories you fall into.

If you are considering a software venture of some kind, you should take a look. It's free and easy to use.