Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

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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This morning I was the most casually dressed person at a Thoughtworks run seminar called “Emergent Design and Evolutionary Architecture”. The seminar itself was extremely well planned and executed, despite the lack of effective air conditioning. The speaker was an American named Neal Ford, who Thoughtworks had flown out to Australia to speak at these events (there are two more, which you can catch for free in Sydney and Melbourne).”
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Dear valued clients (that means all of you),

This week we have had new business cards printed and I have personally changed my email signature. My new job title is “Magician, Miracle Worker and Mind Reader”, which is so much more fun and interesting than my old title “Product Manager”.

Of course I am not actually a magician, do not read minds or work miracles. I do, however, seek to understand your needs better so that I can better serve you and grow myself as an individual.

When I say I seek to be a mind reader, what I mean is that I wish to understand and learn about your needs. When I say I seek to be a magician, I mean that I desire to be able to conjure the best solution to your problems. When I say I seek to work miracles, I mean that I wish to provide you with service so exceptional it will appear miraculous.

Obviously I have a long way to go and learning how to do these things is a large part of my professional growth. I would be particularly interested in any comments or suggestions that you have in how I can better accomplish my goal of being the best product manager around. Please let me know what you think, I’d love to hear from you.

Sincerely,

Stephen Hurn
Magician, Miracle Worker and Mind Reader

A friend linked me this amusing video on the power industry, so I thought I would share it here.

After a mere five hours sleep and with a nose that was running faster than Usain Bolt I really should not have gotten out of bed, let alone drive an hour and a half to the Gold Coast to attend an all day AIM seminar. Yet I am somewhat masochistic and managed to drag myself out of my warm, safe bed and drove the hour and a half to the Gold Coast. After getting lost in Robina for half an hour I finally found the AIM office and managed to make it just in time for the first of seven presentations.
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	Book: Adversity Quotient Author: Paul G. Stoltz Phd Binary Review: 1
Full Disclosure – yes, that’s a tracked link to Amazon shown above. We buy quite a large number of books on a wide range of topics, all relevant to our business in some way. If you did happen to purchase the book from Amazon, they’d throw a few shekels our way, which would help us to buy (and hence publish reviews of) even more books. Thus, benefits would return to you…

If I had $40 for every time I heard the words “I can’t do this, it’s too hard,” I would be a high school maths tutor. Which I was. For seven years. And my response to every single teenager who uttered those words at me was to tell them point blank that they were wrong. They could do it, and would one day find it easy. By the end of the first term of tutoring all bar two of my thirty or so students had shown a drastic improvement in their grades. Little did I realise but when I was instilling in these students the principles that are fundamental to having a high Adversity Quotient, which is the subject of Paul Stoltz’ book.

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Di Bella Coffee

Phillip Di Bella, in 2002 started a coffee business with $5000. The empire that he spawned was listed in the BRW Fast 100 three years running, which would have been four years except his accountants forgot to file the paperwork on time (d’oh). He recently turned down a $28 Million offer for Di Bella Coffee. Suffice to say Phillip knows how to do business.

I did not really know what to expect when I went to the presentation as I had no idea about any of the information listed in the previous paragraph. All I knew was that this presentation was going to be made by someone who had a successful coffee business. Coffee being essentially a commodity market in Brisbane today (think of all the coffee chains and independents around the place - Coffee Club, Zaraffas, Gloria Jeans and even McCafe), I wanted to know what it was that he had done to make his business successful. In the end I took five pages of notes, which I think is about the same amount of notes as I took in my whole time at university. While I would love to expound upon every single point taken I will take mercy on you, the reader, and only highlight the points that really stuck out.
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After the internal restructuring of global-roam, somehow I ended up with responsibility for managing the deSide product (and ez2view Ontario, ez2view Australia and ez2update Australia). This means that I am now responsible for understanding everything about energy users. How they think, what they do, what keeps them awake at night and what brand of toothbrush they use. This means attending the occasional conference that is put together for energy users.

The first of these conferences was the EUAA Climate Change Briefing. Now I have attended a number of climate change briefings before (mainly around the time that the government told Tarong to switch off because Queensland was running out of water), but this was the first one that I had been to that was tailored for energy users.

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Please Understand Me II: Temperament, Character, Intelligence

Please Understand Me II is the most fascinating look at interpersonal relationships that I have ever read.  It deals with a plethora of issues ranging from parent/child relationships to marriage, and does so in a way that is both understandable and enjoyable to read.  From a business perspective, the book deals with two key areas that every company should be aware of – intelligence and leadership.  The primary focus of Keirsey’s book is the four temperaments - the Artisan, Guardian, Idealist and Rational.  In it he explores how these temperaments have been described through history (as far back as two thousand years or more) by various authors and expanding on what the temperaments are and how they interact with each other as partners, parents, children, leaders and subordinates.  Most importantly, Keirsey discusses intelligence in great detail.

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The time was half past seven in the evening.  It had been dark for an hour outside.  My stomach was empty, but I pressed on.  It was quiet in my study at home, the only activity - my feverish typing away at the keyboard.  I was almost done, joy within sight.

You see I was finishing the design specification for the latest iteration of ez2view.  This version was going to be the most ambitious version of our products yet and, after heavy internal debate, we had finally decided on where the product would go.  I spent the last week researching the technologies that we needed and designing the core structure of how the program would work.

Who am I?  My name is Stephen Hurn and I am the Product Manager of ez2view Australia and its companion product ez2update Australia.  I have been with global-roam since 2006 and have seen the company grow threefold over the last three years.  I will occasionally be pontificating on this blog about my times at global-roam.

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