Feb 1018
I’m watching the Women’s Downhill competition during the 2010 Vancouver Olympics this evening. I saw several women crash on the course, their Olympics dreams and year of preparation, go up in smoke. Business books are full of sports analogies, but for my part, I’m glad that the world of business is not really like the Olympics. Here’s how:
The Olympics are for the Young
Although there are a few 30-something and 40-something athletes, the Olympics are dominated by elite competitors in their teens and 20s. After a dozen years of competing, their careers are over. I’m grateful that after 18 years in the online business, I still have many years ahead of me. Perhaps I’m a late bloomer, but I feel like it’s really only in the last five years that I’ve really hit my stride and seen Matrix Group really thrive and expand.
In Business, Teams Rule!
Although there are a few relay races, the Olympics are dominated by the talents and achievements of individuals. In business, you can’t complete projects of any significant size and scope without a team effort. Take any redesign project at Matrix Group; these projects involve a project manager, an information architect, multiple designers, at least one front-end developer, at least one developer, and at least one tester. The work of one person affects every other team member and if one team members screws up, the whole project is threatened.
In Business, You Want a Lot of Winners
It’s easy to compare the world of sales with the Olympics: lots of competitors, one winner. But I would argue that the true race or competition begins once the sale has been made and implementation begins. Paradoxically, at this stage, you don’t want any losers. You want the client, the vendor, the third party partners, and the customers to all win with whatever widget, Web site or product you are building. Read the rest of this entry
Jan 1014
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 (scheduled for release in early February). We could have surveyed clients via e-mail or a Web survey; we could have conducted a focus group; we could have called a select group of clients and consultants; or we could have gone with our gut and made decisions about credit card processing, meeting wait lists, individual relationships, etc.
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.
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Aug 0920
After each Web site launch, I ask the Project Manager in charge what’s left to do. Why? Because inevitably, there are items that didn’t make the launch. I call this Project Overhang and it can be deadly to a firm’s profitability and productivity.
Project Overhang is what we call tasks that are left over from a project. The project, site or application can be up, tested and launched, but there are tweaks we didn’t complete, post-launch fixes or small change orders. Often, Project Overhang does not generate additional revenue and the items are so small that they can slip off our radar if we’re not careful. Project Overhang is much less likely to happen on a client account because those projects are external, revenue-generating and discussed during post launch check-ins. But Project Overhang on internal projects can linger for years! I once had a to do item to update a new staff orientation guide that didn’t get done for two years! Read the rest of this entry
Jul 0907
Last Thursday, the MatrixMaxx team celebrated a successful SCRUM sprint with a beer and cream cheese party. So what do beer and cream cheese have to do with software development, specifically SCRUM? Read on and find out.
MatrixMaxx is Matrix Group’s Web-based association management software product. For about a year, the team had been exploring agile development methodologies. Maki, our CTO and Chief Architect for MatrixMaxx, was really hot to implement SCRUM.
There is a lot to SCRUM, but here’s what SCRUM means to a non-techie, manager type like me:
- SCRUM is all about roles and process.
- There are 3 main roles in SCRUM: the ScrumMaster (who serves as the project manager); the Product Owner (who represents the stakeholders like me and the clients); the Team (the folks who do the development work).
- Development cycles are broken up into sprints, which last anywhere from a week to 30 days; each sprint has a defined list of shippable work. Complex projects are broken up over multiple sprints, but each sprint must include deliverables that the customer can recognize and use.
- There is a daily SCRUM meeting (lasting no more than 15 minutes), during which each team member answers the following questions: what have you done since yesterday?, what are you planning to do today?, and what is preventing you from making progress? (so the ScrumMaster can facilitiate a resolution).
- Tasks, or user stories, are posted on a board and each team member takes tasks off the board each day.
Sounds great, right? But for an agency like Matrix Group, SCRUM posed some problems:
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Jun 0925
Cloud computing is hot, hot, hot. Early this year, PC World predicted that cloud computing would shape up as a big trend in 2009. We all know Amazon as a giant Internet retailer, but its newest business is cloud computing; you can now buy processing power and storage from Amazon! Last year, Google launched Google App Engine, a service that lets developers write applications and host them on Google infrastructure. SalesForce has a similar cloud that lets developers build and host systems on top of the SalesForce engine.
But what exactly is cloud computing and why does it matter?
Wikipedia defines cloud computing as “a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet.” Whatis says that cloud computing is different from traditional hosting in three ways:
- It is sold on demand, typically by the hour (this is why cloud computing is often called utility computing)
- A user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any given time
- The service is fully managed by the provider (the consumer needs nothing but a PC and Internet access).
Just imagine this: your organization has 1,000 boxes of documents to scan and OCR and you need to get the work done in one week. By hosting your application on the cloud, you could have as much processing power as you need. Hundreds of servers could be deployed to your project at once. When the work is done, your hosting obligations go to zero.
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Jun 0918
In reviewing the usage reports for this blog a couple of weeks ago, I realized something startling: the majority of visitors are NOT using Internet Explorer. Check it out: since January of this year, 46% of all visitors use Firefox, 40% use Internet Explorer, 9% use Safari, and 3% are on Chrome. In the last 30 days, Safari users were 11% of all traffic, while IE users went down to 39%. Yeah, okay, this traffic is probably skewed because of the audience, but I’ve got Google Analytics configured to block traffic from the Matrix Group office where most of us use Firefox as our primary browser.
An analysis of traffic on Matrix Group client sites shows that IE is still the primary browser but Firefox, Safari and Chrome are gaining ground. For nearly all clients, IE commands no more than 75% of the total audience; this is still a dominant number, but it means that 1 in 4 users is not using IE. Sorry Microsoft, but the browser wars are far from over and any giant can be toppled (that means you, too, Firefox!).
All of this makes me thankful that my staff, many years ago, convinced me that Matrix Group should not be an IE-only shop. I still remember the staff retreat when the staff had a heated discussion about Web standards. A few of us argued that writing standards-compliant code was expensive because the dominant browser, Internet Explorer, was mostly not compliant, which meant we had to do double html work to make sure our sites behaved properly in IE, Netscape, Mozilla, etc. But the vast majority of the staff rightly argued that standards compliance was the right thing to do, it would give us a competitive advantage, our sites would stand the test of time better, and someday, Microsoft would come around.
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May 0914
All day long, I sit in meetings where my staff, clients and I try to intuit what customers and members want. We look at usage reports, search logs, customer feedback forms, guestbook entries, and survey results. All of these sources give us insight into what customers do, seek and want. But after conducting a focus group for a client this evening, I’m reminded that we need regular face time with our customers and we need to just ask them what they want.
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. Read the rest of this entry
May 0912
What do the iPhone, Facebook, Twitter and Google have in common? They have great platforms that have contributed greatly to their success! What’s a platform and why does it matter?
Wikipedia defines a platform as “a place to launch software. It is an agreement that the platform provider gave to the software developer that logic code will interpret consistently as long as the platform is running on top of other platforms.”
I’m convinced that Facebook zoomed past MySpace because it launched a developer platform earlier. The developer-friendly platform lets developers create zillions of cool apps and suck more of our time, energy and loyalty. How many quizzes have you filled out on Facebook?
The iPhone is no different. Apple opened up its platform, hosted a user-friendly store and nine months later, iPhone users had downloaded 1 billion applications, most of them free or under $5. My husband says he can purchase or download apps for his Blackberry but it’s not easy and the apps are on multiple sites. No fun at all.
Twitter’s platform lets developers capture streams of data from the millions of tweets posted every day. Born from these streams are apps that let us visualize tweets, manage tweets, search tweets, map tweets.
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