Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

Over the 10+ years we’ve been in business, we’ve been lucky enough to gradually stumble upon a formula that provides us our own measure of stickiness with clients, and potential clients, in the electricity market:
1)  We have products, such as NEM-Watch, that have proven sticky products (the manifestation of ideas) in their own right
2)  The way our clients perceive us (in terms of “making the electricity market understandable”) has proven to be understood by many (though not all) people who come into contact with us – as we have been told by those who responded to our recent survey.
3)  In addition, we’ve had some (though far from all) of our communications prove to be fairly sticky.

Given where our bus is headed, we have a keen interest in building on this base to make ourselves much stickier in future – in the above ways, and more

1)  Binary Review

It’s for this reason that this book was of great interest to me…

The Book	What we thought
“Made to Stick - Why some ideas Survive and others Die” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath	… and it did not disappoint

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When you see a job advertised with a title like

General Manager for Discerning, Developing and Delivering
What the Customer Wants

it is hard not to be curious.  In particular, I’d never had a job title that needed an acronym before - “GM 3D WCW” has a sort of geeky attractiveness about it, so I had to come and have a look.

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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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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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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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I have previously written about how we need to be focused on delivering value to our customers in order to achieve our vision for the growth of our business.

A relentless drive to deliver real value to our customers is one of my Core Values.

I know that this is not the way every company approaches business, but it is where our bus is headed.

Hence it was with great interest that I had a chance to read through Roger Martin’s article “The Age of Customer Capitalism” in the HBR Magazine for January-February 2010 – as this provided another reason to do the same.

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