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 …

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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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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As you may be aware, we’re in the process of recruiting a General Manager for Discerning, Developing and Delivering the Software our Customers Want (Need).

Up until this weekend, we have been receiving proposals from a small number of candidates shortlisted from the large number of applications we received in the first 2 weeks after the position was opened on 24th January.

Given the importance of this position (for us, and for the candidates) this has entailed investing many hours of time in getting to know each other, and to ensure the candidates could gain a clear view of our company (where it is now, and where it is headed).  We want them to come in with their eyes fully opened – both to the opportunities and the challenges!

This week I will be reviewing these proposals to determine which one is the best fit for where our bus is headed.

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This is the 2nd post on the topic.

The first post was made almost 2 months ago, and remained incomplete whilst I focused on higher priority issues (such as the recruitment of our GM DDD WCW).  In the meantime, we have had several conversations internally with respect to the implicit responsibilities of the position.

This post is intended to be a starting point, from which further refinement can be made once our GM DDD WCW has started with the company.

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Have seen this posted about before, but never taken the time to look – it was an Anthill article “The best three-minute video about leadership you will ever see” that prompted me to hit play.

A bit weird and wacky, but relevant to us – even in an industry that could be thought of as boring:

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Not sure about “the best” tagline – but this video is very instructional, and entertaining at the same time.

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Fuelled by Stephen’s glowing recommendation of the Thoughtworks presentation “Emergent Design & Evolutionary Architecture”, I went along to Neal Ford’s repeat performance in Sydney this morning.

The talk presented some very sensible sounding ideas on software “design”, and few more on “architecture”. Stephen has covered some points that stood out for him in his post, and here are a couple more that I consider worthy of mention or additional comment.

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You don’t have to of read much of this blog to realise that over the last few months Global-Roam’s software development practises have been changing as we adopt a more structured, and more agile, approach.

As has been made clear by a recent visit by Steve Hayes from Cogent, and our other attempts to learn more about agile, there is a thousand ways we can improve. This makes it easy to be stunned, like an animal caught in headlights, and instead do nothing.

So last week, Stephen and I worked out what the next level of low hanging fruit was, and have put together this plan to reach it.

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