I have a nice corner office at Matrix Group, but I haven’t seen it in a while. Why? Well, it’s been a busy couple of months at the company and I’m spending most of my days in the War Room. We don’t really have a War Room like the White House. At Matrix Group, any room […]
Just over a year ago, I blogged about how the MatrixMaxx team was using an agile software methodology we’ve dubbed “beer and cream cheese.” 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, […]
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 […]
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; […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]