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?

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.

In Business, I Get to Win Gold Every Week

If Shawn White hadn’t won gold in the Halfpipe competition, he’d have to wait another four years for his next chance. Sure, there are other competitions, but only one Olympics every four years. Me? I heard from two prospects last week that we didn’t make the final cut. But this week, we landed a new account and heard from another prospect that we made it to the next round. More important, we get to “win gold” pretty much every week when we launch new Web sites and apps or solve problems for clients.

The Whole World Isn’t Watching

Can you even imagine doing your job while millions of people watch? Imagine how it feels to be a figure skater and take a fall in front of a crowded auditorium and a worldwide TV audience. Thank God that my team and I get to do our work (mostly) without an audience.

I love the Olympics, especially the Winter Olympics. I’m a couch potato for two weeks as I cheer for my favorites, hold my breath and hope nobody takes a spill. When the Olympics end, I’ll be happy for the winners, and glad that I get to be a winner, in my own way, in my day job.

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?

After each Web site launch, I ask the Project Manager in charge what’s left to do.

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!

Which is why I’m trying hard to make sure we have no overhang from our recent office move.  We moved 2 1/2 weeks ago, we’re up, we’re running and nearly every box is unpacked.  Notice I said “nearly” every box.  It’s the last few boxes that take forever to unpack.  I have two boxes at home from a move back in 2001 that are still waiting to be unpacked.  So back at the office, we are continuing our SCRUM process to get all move-related items done by the end of the month.  In fact, by Friday, I plan to have my office “done,” all prints hung on the walls, and all boxes in the kitchen and supply room put away.  The remaining Project Overhang will be to unpack the CTO’s office, but that will be the topic of another blog post. :-)

My tips for dealing with Project Overhang are:

• Acknowledge and catalog the overhang so that it stays on everyone’ s radar.
• Set-up designated times to deal with overhang.
• Give prizes to people who clear out the most overhang. I like gift cards, extra time off, iTunes cards.
• As with clothes you haven’t worn in over a year, ask yourself (or your boss, co-worker or client) if a task is still needed. If the answer is no, delete that task forever from your to do list

How about you?  Do you have overhang at work or at home?  What’s your most ridiculous overhang item?  What are you doing to clear out the overhang?

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:

• We have one person who serves as BOTH the ScrumMaster AND Product Owner.  Why?  Because I wanted one Director who would be fully accountable for the team’s progress, revenue goals and customer satisfaction.
• At the end of the day, we’re still an agency and we need to be able to respond to urgent customer requirements; yes, these requirements screw up development schedules and sprint goals.
• It wasn’t an option to NOT use our intranet and bug tracking system since we need a detailed record of our work, including specifications, related projects, testing notes, etc.

So we decided to create the Matrix Group version of SCRUM. Team members read Agile Software Development with SCRUM by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle, long considered the bible of SCRUM.  Our version of SCRUM includes:

• A daily SCRUM meeting at 2pm; yes, it’s a little late, but we wanted to accommodate a team member who only works afternoons.
• Our sprints are 60-90 days long to coincide with the software release schedule, which is quarterly.
• We don’t have a SCRUM board.  Instead, we add release numbers to all tasks in our intranet and then use a canned report to define our project backlog for each release/sprint.
• Sometimes, the daily SCRUM meetings are followed by tech meetings used to work out issues and solve problems together.
• The sprint list gets modified every few days, sometimes daily, to accommodate urgent requests from clients.

So where do the beer and cream cheese come in?  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.”

The challenge was on.  As is often the case at Matrix Group, we took a methodology and made it our own.  To celebrate the 9.2 release, a half dozen staff members scoured the Internet and found yummy recipes that combine beer and cream cheese.  Last Thursday, our Beer and Cream Cheese feast included: cream cheese dip with heffeveisen, and cupcakes with Guinness and cream cheese frosting.  I brought in pumpkin bread with Guiness and cream cheese + cheesecake made with a maple syrup and Guinness reduction.  Check out the photos from our Beer and Cream Cheese fest on Flickr.  We have dubbed our version of SCRUM “Beer and Cream Cheese SCRUM” and are considering blogging about it.

Beer and Cream Cheese SCRUM really worked for us. We plowed through more tasks and bugs than ever before, the bug list is down, and we prevented major communications snafus between team members.  Most importantly, MatrixMaxx 9.2 was released on time with a huge feature list.

How about you?  Is your team using SCRUM?  What’s been your experience?  And have you created your own version of SCRUM?

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.

Or this:  your organization issues a monthly report that is hugely popular. By hosting your site or report on the cloud, you can have as much bandwidth as you want during the one day a month when the report is in demand.

There are inherest risks in cloud computing that are still being worked out by the vendors, including:

• Programs are cloud-specific, meaning if you want to host your dot com on the Amazon cloud, you need to write to the Amazon cloud’s specifications.  (There is a standards project underway, however.)
• Security issues abound when you have confidential information, particularly data protected by HIPAA, hosted in an unknown location.
• At least one consulting company (McKinsey) reports that companies are better off hosting on their own.

I’m excited about cloud computing because it could level the playing field between the big and little guys.  Small business will have the opportunity to do big things on infrastructure they no longer need to own.  Don’t you love the Internet?

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.

Don’t get me wrong.  I still grumble when testing shows that one of our sites is behaving differently in IE vs. Firefox because I know it’s costing us and the client time and money.  But IE8 is supposed to be the most standards-compliant browser ever and it’s really great knowing that our Web sites and our association management software, MatrixMaxx, not only look great across browsers, all the functions behave consistently.

How about you?  What are your thoughts on the browser wars?  What’s your favorite browser?  And are you on the standards bandwagon?

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?

What do the iPhone, Facebook, Twitter and Google have in common?  They have great platforms

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.

Finally, the Google  app engine lets developers build and host applications on the Google infrastructure. Here at Matrix Group, we created a Google Earth app that lets us visualize where network traffic is coming from and we use the Google Maps API to plot the location of association members, George Washington portraits, and more!

There are lots of other companies that host platforms, but to me, it’s been interesting to see how a company like Apple, a company NOT in the phone business, redefined the mobile phone.  The open platform movement also feels like an extension of the open source movement; both capitalize on the skills and interest of lots of dispersed developers to create a larger, more dynamic and more interesting whole.

So how did I become a cool kid?  I had been coveting the iPhone for a long time but I refuse to switch my service to AT&T.  For Mother’s Day, my husband and son got me an iPod Touch.  Yep, I spent part of Sunday downloading apps for my sleek, new Touch.  Yippee!  I’m officially a cool kid.  Don’t forget to send me your favorite iPhone apps.