Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

Here’s another back-dated post, with a date chosen shortly after Joel’s post to which it refers.  I’ve done this to ensure that these comments are read in context.

My apologies to those for whom this practice offends – as noted before, I believe ICT is an enabler, not an ends in itself (or, to put it another way, I am not interested in form without substance).

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1)     Introduction to Joel’s Post

Back on November 1st, Joel Spolsky made a post for Inc magazine entitled “Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?”.

One of the guys in the office found this, and it stimulated a bit of discussion internally about where our bus is headed (on a restricted post).  This was good, as we had commenced our Autopsy 2 process. read more »

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One of our central focuses back in our Business Autopsy in July (which we’re now starting to think of as Autopsy 1 - as distinct from the current Autopsy 2), was the fact that our software development processes were not up-to-scratch. read more »

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In recent times we have been exploring various software development methodologies to correct some of the issues that have arisen.

As Shane noted with respect to the development of NEM-Watch 8, we screwed up, and caused clients unneeded angst, and ourselves unnecessary stress.

When the company started (10 years ago now), we sort of “happened upon” an iterative development methodology that worked for us, much of the time.  However with employee turnover and a lack of specific focus, we were not religious in its application – leading to issues such as these.

This is one book of many on Agile that we are in the process of reviewing as one step in our strategy to refine our approach to development.

1)  Binary Review

The Book	What we thought
“User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development” by Mike Cohn	Very good content (and well written)

Read most of this book within a day out of the office, so it is an easy read – and very worthwhile.

read more »

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Whilst there is some debate about the order in which they should be ranked (i.e. is it customers-employees-shareholders or employees-customers-shareholders) it is fair to say that employees are central to any business’ success (including ours).

With all the changes we have had on the go in the company since the autopsy, I have been very conscious of the need to ensure that all employees are still engaged and aligned (despite the fact that I might not do a great job at this at times).

1)  Binary Review

Hence this book was of great interest to me:

The Book	What we thought
“People Glue” by Ian Hutchinson	A great framework

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Read this book in spurts, but all together, it probably only took a couple of hours to get through it all.  Definitely a framework to apply in our company.

read more »

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Will add more details here, as time permits.

At this stage, this is just a placeholder for my view which is that a model can certainly be of some value, so long as the users of the model (whether it be economic, technical, behavioural or other) recognise that it is a model of reality, it is not reality itself.  Hence it has limitations.

Unfortunately, it seems, this is all-too-often forgotten!

read more »

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In the book “The Myth of 9-to-5” the authors note that it is a mark of growing maturity when an individual can reconcile the truth in two apparently paradoxial points of view.

Given this is aligned with my own personal philosophy, and the fact that I’m likely to need to refer to this point again-and-again, I thought it would be easier to extract this point to a separate post (here). read more »