Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

I was first introduced to Tom and Mary Poppendieck at a software conference (ASWEC) earlier this year. Lean Software Development is a continuation of the themes that they touched on at that conference. With their familiar analogies from other product development disciplines, Tom and Mary provide thought provoking ideas and practical exercises to help increase the value of software.

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While I was overseas in Europe on a three month backpacking holiday, I decided that I didn’t want to go back to university this year. I wanted to do something real in the world of IT and get some practical experience during my final year. I was either in Madrid or Barcelona when I received an email from the Information Technology and Electrical Engineering school at UQ that was offering exactly what I was after. When I arrived back home in Aussieland, I applied for the Professional Information Technology Placement Scholarship (PIPS) and before I knew it I was sitting at my own desk (not in a lecture theatre!) at Global-Roam.

For the next three months I was in charge of my own project. I was given the task of building a system that automated the building and distribution of a report for the National Electricity Market (NEM). After scoping out the project with my supervisor at Global-Roam, I spent the first three weeks here researching, trying to find a tool or API that could put together a detailed report. Once I had found a suitable tool, I started designing and implementing each component. I built a database, two data processing applications, a secure website, and a console application that builds the report. In the final weeks of my project I started to pull together all of these components and after much testing and debugging the system was actually working! There are still a few loose ends to tie up but it shouldn’t be long now before this new product is revealed to the world.

When I started at Global-Roam I knew nothing about the NEM and nothing about the .NET framework and the C# programming language. I appreciated the fact that Global-Roam was willing to take me onboard and was actually looking forward to absorbing all this new material. The guys working at Global-Roam always found the time to listen to every annoying question I had and send me off in the right direction. In the beginning I spent a lot of my own time reading a great book they purchased called Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform, Fourth Edition (Windows.Net) by Andrew Troelson. I also spent some time reading the NEMMCO website to gain a basic understanding of the NEM.

The interesting thing about working at Global-Roam is that everyone is their own boss. Therefore, the company is run not so much by an individual, but by a team of people that collectively make decisions on a weekly basis. This was a fantastic experience, and one that I did not expect to come across. read more »

Part of the weekly life here at Global-Roam is book reviews. Each employee is given a constant supply of books to read and every few months we review what we have been reading. These books cover any number of topics such as psychology, selling, programming skills, selling, project management, data analysis, business theory, and self-organisation.

Over the years a key part of our book reviews is the “binary review” – a 0 or 1 for if the book was good or bad (we are a bunch of nerds after all). We’re also keen to learn practical ways in which we can directly improve the processes in our business.

On this blog we’re going to post a few of these reviews to give you some insight into how we work. We also have a secret, sinister motive of helping us to think about what we will say before our meeting… read more »