MatrixMaxx is Matrix Group’s Web-based association management software (AMS) that is used by dozens of trade associations and professional societies to manage their membership applications and renewals, meeting registrations, committee rosters, tradeshows, sponsorships, foundation fundraising, e-mail lists, and publication sales.

Beer and cream cheese is the software development methodology we came up with after exploring several agile methodologies, including SCRUM.  While there are many flavors of agile development methods, most are characterized by:

• Breaking big projects into smaller tasks that can be accomplished in hours or days, never weeks or months.
• New versions of the software are released in short timeframes, called timeboxes or sprints.  Sprints can last 1 day to 30 days.
• The goal of each sprint is to produce a working product that the client can use immediately, rather than having to wait months or years for a release, bug fix or new functionality.
• Each team has a customer representative who represents the client perspective and makes him/herself available to team members.  In the case of SCRUM, there are 3 roles: the ScrumMaster (who serves as the project manager); the Product Owner (who represents the stakeholders/lients); the Team (the staff who do the development work).

We call our methodology beer and cream cheese because about 18 months ago, Tanya, the MatrixMaxx Director, posted to one of the SCRUM message boards, asking if anyone had experience with having the same person be the ScrumMaster AND the Product Owner.  One ScrumMaster sarcastically remarked, “You CAN do it, but that would be like combining beer and cream cheese.”

Fast forward one year.  The MatrixMaxx team is still using beer and cream cheese, but our process has changed, and for the better.

• Where Tanya used to play the role of Product Owner and ScrumMaster, she is now the Product Owner.  Geoff is our Brewmaster.  As a result, Tanya can focus on the product road map and client requirements.
• Our sprints are now 15 days long.  Major product releases are quarterly, but we put out small enhancements, especially custom enhancements for clients, twice a month.  Clients love this!
• Although we still primarily use our intranet to manage tasks and requirements, there is a whiteboard in the MatrixMaxx team area that lists tasks that have been designated for the next release/sprint.
• We’re doing a better job of tracking projects and elements that tend to go over budget.

We plan to refine our beer and cream cheese process even more over the next year by:

• Going back to shorter, daily check-ins, which have turned into lengthy discussions about tasks and requirements.  We realize that the entire team does NOT need to be part of all in-depth discussions.
• Giving each team member one long item and one short item per day to encourage maximum productivity from all team members and help us manage the backlog of small items.
• Making a renewed commitment to identifying and analyzing tasks that tend to make us fall behind or go over budget.

BTW, we still hold beer and cream cheese parties where staff bring in baked goods made with beer and cream cheese.  My favorite this year was the dark chocolate cupcakes made with beer and topped with cream cheese frosting. Yum!

How about you?  What software development methodology does your company use?  Are you an agile shop?  What’s working for you?  And how did you select the methodology that you are using?

Matrix Group:

• Created user profiles that helped in guiding the entire design and development process
• Developed a site design that showcases the benefits of being an ASF member, including educational programs and events, as well as other tools and publications to help small foundations be successful
• Implemented a content management system (CMS) that gives ASF staff full control over the entire site and supports a multi-leveled taxonomy
• Implemented MatrixMaxx, Matrix Group’s enterprise association management software for associations and professional societies.

Visit the new ASF Web site

This afternoon, the MatrixMaxx team at Matrix Group held a Town Hall meeting with clients to get feedback on about a half dozen features slated to go into the 10.1 version

Instead, we decided to crowdsource the specifications.  Crowdsource?  What does this mean?  Wikipedia defines “crowdsourcing” as the “act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community, through an “open call” to a large group of people (a crowd) and asking for contributions.”  Wikipedia also uses this definition: “the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals.”

In the past, Tanya (the Director of MatrixMaxx) and I would sit down, discuss requirements, maybe make a few calls, and then decide on the specifications for each release.  This time around, we decided to get immediate feedback from as big a group of clients as possible to validate our ideas and generate new ones.

The Mechanics of the Town Hall Meeting

• We sent an e-mail invitation to all MatrixMaxx clients, inviting them to an hour-long, online Town Hall meeting.  The e-mail provided details on the half dozen topics under consideration, with a general discussion of the options available.
• Clients were invited to provide feedback in real-time during the meeting, before the meeting via phone and email, and after the meeting via phone and e-mail.
• About 60% of the clients registered at least one person to the Town Hall meeting, which was conducted via conference call and Webex.
• Tanya ran the meeting, leading the discussion and taking notes, which were shared out via Webex to all participants.

Immediate Benefits of our Crowdsourcing Experiment

I don’t think the meeting could have gone any better.  Even I was surprised at the level of engagement from clients, as well as the thoughtful feedback on our proposed changes.  Here’s what we learned:

• A bunch of brains are definitely better than 1, 2 or 3. In one hour, we explored topics and prevented duh! moments in February.  For example, we proposed making the CID (the security code on credit cards) required on all meeting registration forms, but several clients correctly pointed out that they have already sent out paper forms for many meetings. If we require CID and they get back a bunch of reg forms back without the security code, they’ll have to call members and cause a lot of extra work. So, could we require the CID on the WWW side but not the intranet side? Honestly, we had never considered splitting the requirement between WWW and intranet.  What a great idea!
• The Town Hall meeting got the attention of clients we rarely hear from, despite regular outreach. When we have little contract with specific clients, that’s a red flag because we don’t learn about their issues and problems, which means we don’t have the opportunity to fix them.  The meeting was a great way to re-connect with clients and show them we want to hear from them!
• Clients liked hearing other client perspectives. In the past, when we decided to implement a feature one way, we made some clients happy and others unhappy.  Today, clients didn’t all agree, but they seemed to appreciate hearing about why another organization didn’t share their point of view.

The biggest benefit to the software team?  We got resolution on a bunch of requirements and the developers can plow ahead with their coding.  We are definitely going to do this again in the future, maybe even do a Town Hall meeting prior to the planning meeting for each release.

How about you?  What do you think of our experiment?  Have you participated in a crowdsourced event or project before?  If you participated in the Town Hall meeting, what did you think?

Our work included:

• A fresh, and engaging Web site design, promoting AOPL as the expert in fuel transportation, and an environmentally aware organization.
• Implementation of a Content Management System (CMS), allowing staff to make Web site updates with no programming background.
• A color-coded, interactive map, where visitors can scroll over each state to see the location and the type of major pipelines in the US.
• Web site integration with MatrixMaxx, Association Management System (AMS). A comprehensive web-based solution, allowing AOPL to seamlessly link their Web site to their membership databases.
• Hosting and Maintenance

Visit the Association of Oil Pipelines

At first blush, it just doesn’t make any sense:  organizations expend time and effort needed to put out an RFP (request for proposal), participate in meetings and demos, review proposals, check references, yada, yada — and then sit and don’t make a decision. 

So why doesn’t the CEO just make the decision? After many years of selling to organizations of all sizes, in all industries, here’s why I think  CEOs don’t/won’t make a decision their staff is dying for them to make.

The initiative doesn’t have support from the top. Sometimes, the initiative to redesign a Web site or put in a new back office has a lot of middle management support, but not top support.  Middle management has the okay to research and evaluate but no commitment from the top that resources will ultimately be made available.  So if you’re asking your boss if it’s okay to research new phone systems, you need to know that your boss believes a new phone system is needed, has money in the budget and will make a decision.  Otherwise, he’s just humoring you when he blesses the research effort.

The CEO doesn’t think he needs to make the decision right now. This is a tricky one.  Your CEO might believe with all her heart that you need a new membership database, but she isn’t convinced that the issue is urgent, which means she can delay a decision.  You need to make the case that a decision is urgent and necessary.  Prepare a cost-benefit analysis, point to pain points, and illuminate the work arounds you’re living with.

The budget can’t support the investment. In some organizations, budgets are super secret and the CEO can’t/won’t tell you that the budget can’t really support new servers this year.  If you can’t get a hard number, at least ask for a range.

The CEO is still shopping the solution and budget. Often, CEOs will use the RFP process to conduct research about what’s out there, to get an idea of what she should put in the budget, etc.  If this is the case in your organization, it’s best to know that a decision may be far off and use the RFP process to educate your CEO and team.

The CEO is looking for outside validation. It happens all the time: the CEO wants to make sure the solution proposed by staff is sound, so they bring in a consultant.  If your CEO never trusts staff recommendations, you have trouble.  But it’s also legitimate for a CEO to want third party validation of a solution to cover his bases or because the organization’s governance requires it.  Remember that at some point, the Board will ask the CEO why the heck xx decision was made; he’s going to need talking points he can rely on.

So if your CEO is sitting on an important decision, ask yourself what you can do to make a decision urgent, necessary and defensible.

How about you?  How do you get your boss to make a decision?  What tactics have worked best?

Tonight’s focus group was amazing.  Nearly two dozen people gave up two hours of their day to discuss why they are members of an organization, what they like about the Web site, and what would make their jobs easier.   Some of the ideas were mind-blowingly simple, while others were flat out brilliant.  If half of the product ideas prove economically feasible, this organization has a product road map for the next year.

Speaking of product road maps, I am in the habit of calling a couple of customers after each release of our association management software, MatrixMaxx.  I call to check-in, get feedback on new features, and, most importantly, ask them for  the one thing they would like to see in a future release.  For the 9.1 release, the suggestions were all spot on, some were so easy to implement we wondered why we hadn’t done the work earlier, and some proved to be blockbusters.

But what do you do when you have zillions of customers and you get a flood of customer requests on a regular basis?  Google Moderator allows communities to post suggestions/questions and then vote on all ideas submitted.  President Obama used Google Moderator to accept questions for an electronic town hall meeting; citizens submitted and then ranked questions; the President answered the most popular questions.

Dell’s IdeaStorm allows customers to submit and rank suggestions to the company. The most popular idea as of tonight is to allow consumers to purchase a computer without an operating system.  Presumably, Dell will act on the most popular ideas.  Both IdeaStorm and Google Moderator are terrific ways to capture, validate and rank customer desires. I’m thinking of using Google Moderator to allow customers of MatrixMaxx to suggest and rank ideas for future releases.

How about you?  How do you solicit direct feedback from your customers? And how can you use a tool like Google Moderator to generate user feedback and validate the ideas via voting from the community?

1. Your Browser as the New Operating System. The Web browser is increasingly the platform for mission critical applications, like association management systems, intranets, document management systems and e-mail.
2. Conversation is King. We used to talk about creating a communications strategy.  Today, we need to create a conversation strategy because customers are interested in engagement, in two-way conversations.
3. Unified, Integrated Data. I call this the Amazon Effect.  Our customers expect us to know who they are, communicate with them in a personalized way, and give them personalized offerings.  We can’t do this unless we have a unified view of their activities and interactions.
4. Zen Tech Warrior. These warriors want information on specific topics, when they want it, on the device(s) of their choice.  Take me, for example.  I might want my magazine in print, news via e-mail, and alerts via text.  Can your database handle these preferences and can you execute on this information?
5. Green Computing. We all know that we need to do our part to reduce energy consumption and save the planet.  Data centers represent 1.5% of the electricity demand in the US.  Think green when you buy computers and peripherals.

Since my session was an Idealab, I got terrific comments and questions from my audience.  The liveliest discussion centered around creating a communications strategy because it intersects with the need to create a social networking strategy.  My top tips here?

• Monitor what is being said through Google Alerts and Twitter searches (that you can RSS).
• Create a social networking response team.
• Have a blogging strategy.  Even if your organization does not host a blog, what should you do when your organization is mentioned negatively in a blog?

Here’s a link to the handout from my session.  What about you?  What big trends are coming your way and how you are dealing with them?