What do you mean everything is working?

Ches Hagen — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:57:31 +0000

You’re a consulting company and one of your primary objectives is to satisfy your customers with software that lives up to expectations. Software the delivers the expected return on investment. Software that makes a difference. Software that works! When you hear positive feedback from your customer’s top C-level personnel on the project that you’ve been working on, it feels good. When he hears there are no known issues in the integration with back-end systems, application performance is good, actual user feedback is positive, network load is in check … he feels good. And when he says (and I’m quoting 2nd hand, but its close), “what do you mean everything is working? That’s not normal!“, it feels good.

As odd as that statement may sound, it’s exciting and motivating for the development team to hear feedback such as this. Since the first days of VendAsta Technologies in early 2008, teams of dedicated software architects, designers, developers, testers, business analysts, integration specialists (and more) have been working diligently on several projects that have really come together nicely. Some are completed, some are well on their way, and some are in early stages. All – in our opinion – are going well. We attribute our early success to teams working closely together, dedication by each team member towards a common goal, and the execution and commitment to a disciplined agile approach in software development.

I hesitate to make this post sound like a sales pitch – cause we’re blogging folks! (forgive me if it does) We’ll call it “praise to the VendAsta team” … but if you’re a company that we’ve approached (or haven’t approached) and you’re interested in speaking to us about high quality consulting work – we’d like to talk with you.

Collaboration - See How They Scrum

Brendan King — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:49:35 +0000

When we first started up we were all working on our personal computer. We didn’t yet have any hardware or software. We needed to work. I don’t know if it was Allan or Jason but someone fired up Google Docs so we could at least get to work. That seemingly inconsequential act may well turn out to be one of the best things that have ever happened to us.

Let me point out that no matter how good a product is, change is difficult and usually people have trouble committing. We had no choice. We had nothing else. I will be the first to say that Google documents lack much of the advance functionality of word. Google Spreadsheets, while quite versatile, lack sophisticated graphs and presentations and Google presentations while good is certainly memory and CPU hog. However, Gmail with its lightening quick awesome search and essentially infinite size and the Google Calendar certainly put outlook to shame.

In any case, we had nothing else so we used Google Docs. Certainly not as sophisticated as Microsoft Office. Certainly lacking all the bells and whistles. But as we sat around my living room each working on our own notebook building our business together, something happened. We discovered the true power of collaboration. You might think that eight people editing a spreadsheet or a document at the same time sounds like a nightmare but that is likely because you are thinking about the ”track changes” nightmare that makes you want to throw out a MS Word document and start over. Google Docs just doesn’t work that way.

In the end it’s nothing you can put your finger on at first but rather a number of things that make Google Doc’s brilliant. Things like:

Easy intuitive instantaneous collaboration.
No worries about multiple versions of spreadsheets, documents and presentations everywhere.
Global version control for documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
Easy presentation and sharing of documents, spreadsheets and presentations with people outside your domain (like VC’s).
No worries about backing up.
No worries about space.
Great Calendar.
Awesome Email.
Integration.
Transparent and easy configuration.
Easy access from any PC from any location at any time.
No software to install, no licence keys, no costs.
Constant innovation and upgrades but without the upgrades.

So when we purchased our first set of notebooks (yup notebooks for everyone) we purchased them with copies of Microsoft Office, but a funny thing happened. Hardly any copies of Office got installed. It turns out that we are hooked on Google Docs and hooked on collaboration. If you own Microsoft stock I have a word of advice for you – sell now!

This new paradigm also seems to dovetail extremely well with our new working method – Scrum. Notice I didn’t say “development” method. Scrum isn’t just for developers. It works for business development, requirement building, project planing and marketing too!

Here is how I sum up my feelings why Google Doc’s will overtake Microsoft Office within the next 18 months: Easy, Real, Convenient, Collaboration ALWAYS trumps Configuration, Complexity and Non-Intuitiveness even (maybe even especially) if it is in the name of Security and Control.

Oh and today Google added “Google Sites” their reincarnation of the Jotspot Wiki. I added it to our Google Docs this morning with a simple click. Thank God we will never have suffer another installation of Sharepoint!

See how they scrum:

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What do you mean everything is working?

Collaboration - See How They Scrum

Posted by: Brendan King