Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

Frequent readers to this blog will have noted an organogram included in a post made back in January that identified the organisation structure and responsibilities that existed at the start of the year.

Since that time, our business has been evolving fairly rapidly – with a fair number of changes already completed (and a number still to go) in order to ensure that we really can deliver on our primary core value of “Customers First!”.

When I have a bit more time, I will post in more detail about some of the other developments that have been completed, or are still in progress – in this post I just wanted to ensure you were aware that last Monday (22nd March) we were delighted to have someone start with us as our new General Manager for Discerning, Developing and Delivering the Software our Customers Want.

The title is a bit of a mouthful, so he will shorten it in most cases – but he will certainly be specifically focused on delighting our growing customer base with the software we develop.

I will let him introduce himself in his own time, so stay tuned for more …

On Friday 5th March, we began a process of brainstorming about what it means (to us) to share our primary value of “Customers First”.

The following Friday (March 12th) we continued this process – to talk about our 2nd Core Value – that being a Relentless Drive^{(see note)} to learn more, to improve and grow as people – and hence to deliver ever-increasing value to our customers.

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Stephen sent me a link to this presentation by Geoffrey Moore at the “Business of Software” conference in 2009.   Thanks for that!

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We were going to attend this conference in 2009, but it clashed with the commencement of our Autopsy 2 process, and as such we had to give it a miss. Geoffrey Moore is a well-known author that I was particularly looking forward to hearing present, and I am happy that this teaser was made available online. Perhaps the 2010 conference (October 4th, 5th and 6th in Boston)?!

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On Friday last week (5th March) at Beer O’clock, we brainstormed about what it means (to us) to share the primary value of “Customers First”.

We will continue this process in subsequent weeks with the aim of identifying the specifics of what each core value means to us, and how we (and others) can hold ourselves accountable.

The following is a shortened list of some of the points made during the brainstorming session (a fuller list is here as a restricted post).

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As alluded to in Adam’s recent post on the next steps in our Agile journey we have taken the liberty of reorganising our JIRA workflow to better suit our new practices. We want to use JIRA as much more than a simple job tracking tool and begin using it much more as a part of both our organisational memory and as a key part of our work flow. I had also been getting irritated at the large number of useless or redundant jobs in the system. Thinking back on it now, I realise that the irritation was my brain sending me a signal that our processes were not alligned with our work flow.
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* out of all blog posts ever written by me, excluding me’s in other parallel universes

Hi, I’m Ben and I just completed 7 months of work experience as a noobie software developer at Global-Roam.

I have to be honest: this is the first blog post I have ever written. It’s probably not very good and I know that it’s too long. Nevertheless, I promised I would compile a post on my experiences at the company, and when I make a promise I always deliver (at least 50% of the time, and anyway, Todd threatened to mark my “post on the blog” task as failed if I didn’t). Hopefully this chronicle of my adventures at the company (a tragedy, mostly) will be at least mildly entertaining, capture some of my insights, and give a sense of what it’s like to be a Global-Roamer (at the moment anyway – it’s changing fast). It is a great place to work if you are motivated, open to learning and trying new things, love customers and have a burning desire to be remarkable (like my colleagues, who seem to believe they are a collection of spies, wizards and gods that make it rain – just check their business cards).

My journey began on a sunny day in November 08 when I walked through the glass doors of Global Roam’s office, and into my first real job as a software developer. On my desk sat my two new widescreen monitors, a quad-core desktop, my very own business cards, a copy of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (by Stephen Covey) and a requirements document. Not bad! A sheet of glass separated me from the rest of the development team (5 developers at the time, though most of them were either on holidays or working from home that day).

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Food for thought, this morning, when I trundled along to a breakfast event hosted by the AMI, featuring Dr Don E Schultz of Agora fame, and author of a number of books (none of which, it would seem, we have previously added to our shopping cart).

Don’s main thesis is that:

1)  The “modern” approach to marketing emerged in parallel with the industrial age of society, and hence is based on similar principles (e.g. a Taylorist view of the world – which leads into a “command and control” focus internally, and a top-down mentality in terms of push-based marketing to “consumers” (how I hate that term).

2)  Given that we’re progressing from this Industrial Age into what’s been termed by a number of people as a “Customer Age”, Don’s view is that marketing also needs a transformation.

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The Tipping Point - How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

The Book	What we thought
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell offers a compelling theory into what makes ideas, products, fashion trends, crime waves, or in fact any phenomena in society, transform into wide spread epidemics within a short amount of time. For example, Gladwell explained how the American Revolution was started literally overnight by one man on horseback spreading the news across the country that the British were coming.

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Beginning in early March, I have been progressively posting about each of our core values.

A.  Why focus on Values?

To provide context – i.e. to provide the reason why we do what we do.

Increasingly in future, we will be referring back to these core values to provide us a grounding as our business grows – they will define the basis for our culture (the way we do things around here).

It is through reference to these values that we will be able to rapidly grow our number of clients with only a relatively small growth in the size of our team.

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