The central component of your business are the goals and shared values that your business exists to fulfill. For some organizations, this is simply to make a profit, whereas other organizations such as charities and social enterprises place a higher priority on their social agendas. Understanding ambitions will allow you to accurately define the requirements of each of the other components in order to fulfill them.

Possibly more than any other component, strategy is dictated by the central element that defines the goals and shared values of the organization. There is always going to be more than one method to achieve the same goal, hence the type of strategy you use will depend on your vision, aspirations and ethics. Make sure to develop a strategy that your team are both comfortable and capable of executing to avoid failure resulting from conflicting politics and lack of experience—in other words don't be over ambitious.

A strategy has no value unless it can be executed with the skills needed for it to succeed. Ideally, the strategy should be designed to make use of the skills that you and your team already have, but there may also be the requirement for skills that you don't have—or at least not to the level required to successfully execute the strategy. There is a requirement in this type of situation to either hire new staff who have the required skills, or to identify key partners who can contribute to the strategy's execution. In the case of using key partners, this can be achieved by partnering with other freelancers, contractors, and businesses, who specialize in the skills required; although caution should be taken to make sure that the key partners you select have the right level of skills and can operate in a way compatible with the style that you and your team use to work, in order to avoid conflict.

The execution of strategy through the deployment of skills needs to be performed in a structured way that avoids problematic situations and conflict occurring through politics. This involves the use of a formal structure to identify which members of the team are able to make certain types of decisions and who is responsible for managing different staff and key partners who have been brought into the project for collaboration. Structure is all about facilitating a high quality flow of information that improves performance and decision making capabilities.

The style in which you and your team engage business activities is an important factor that can avoid both technical and political conflicts. When it comes to writing your software, all team members need to be able to write code in a consistent style that other team members are able to understand; having just one person break this can introduce both technical and political conflict to the business. This highlights the need to vet skill capabilities when recruiting new staff and selecting key partners for collaboration. The same issue of execution style exists for other areas of the business aside from the technical programming implementation, hence the need to ensure there are shared styles for working across all business activities.

The performance of all other entities in the organization are enhanced by the systems you use, hence the need to make sure that you make use of the right systems that can provide both capability and efficiency. Along with skills, systems are what allow you and your staff to play a part in the strategy's execution, hence the importance of ensuring that everyone has the required levels of skills to use the systems they need to execute their part of the strategy.

This could just be yourself if you are working as a lone software developer, or more likely to involve key partners you collaborate with and people you employ. Either way, staff are an important part of your business because businesses don't run themselves. There is a need to ensure that the people in your business have a compatible style of working, skills required to execute their part of the strategy and the ability to use the systems of the business. It is also a big advantage to have staff sharing the same values of the business in order to ensure consistency and to avoid political conflicts that disrupt execution of the strategy based on differing ethics and values.