Top 3 Needs
Recently a friend of mine asked “what’s your top 3 needs right now”. Here is my respond,
Top three things? These 3 things are always true, but as we get into a different stage, they take on a different meaning.
1. Focus. Focus is no longer, heads down and get the release out. Focus now means don’t get side-tracked with the day-to-day but make sure we are marching toward the right goal 6-10 months from now.
2. Cash flow. It’s rather easy to make financial decision when you have absolutely no money. When we are getting money in and need to spend some money, any small financial decision is critical. It’s far easier to spend money than to make them.
3. Growth/Scalability. As we grow, we start taken on different jobs. Starting to be managers rather than workers. Starting to put in process rather than just getting it done.
OK.OK. More concert needs:
1. Legal support. I am going to engage the lawyer soon.
2. Resources. We have been hiring and will continue to do so. Key is the get affordable and effective resources.
3. Slow down. As we gets traction, it’s very easy to think that we are invincible and thus go too fast.
Sze
iPhoneDevCamp DC Demo
For those of you who will attend my presentation in the iPhoneDevCamp tomorrow, please do the following in advance to follow along in the demo:
1. Download exZact Lite from the App Store.
2. Goto the Setting screen, key in the following:
Email Address: ipdcdc (Yes, it’s not really an email address, it will work, trust me.)
Server: zerioninc.com
3. Hit Sync Data With Server
See you all tomorrow.
Vote Report Wins the Golden Dot Award
Yesterday I went to the Politics Online Conference in Washington D.C. for the Golen Dot Award. Since so many of my friends ask “What is that?”, I’m going to talk a bit about the project and the award itself. I will then post a follow-up blog on my experience yesterday in more detail.
The award is the Golden Dot Award from the Institute for Politics, Democracy, & the Internet at George Washington University. Every year, they organize the PoliticsOnline Conference in Washinton D.C. and announce the best internet projects related to politics. This year, our project, the TweeterVoteReport and Inauguration Report, won the Best Mashup category.
The projects, VoteReport and InaugurationReport, are Crowdsourcing Political Journalism projects. In plain English, it’s using social network technology and allows the public to document political events. During last year’s election and the inauguration in Jan, we use the same technology and allow people to share their experience. The result is huge amount of data (text report, photo, audio, video) with geo location information. We collect data through Twitter, SMS, Filckr, Youtube, iPhone and Android. We then open up this stream of data and allow any media outlet to mashup in anyway they want. The project is completly open-source. The project was organized by NPR, Tech President, American Univeristy and CBS News. There are over 20 developers participated in these projects, including Sanford Dickert from Contagious Conversations, Dave Troy from TwitterVision, Andrew Turner from GeoCommons, Sze Wong from Zerion Software, and Nathan Freitas. Full contributor list of the vote report project can be found here.
You can read more about the projects in my pervious blogs or the following links:
http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/vote-report-wins-golden-dot
http://afine2.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/twitter-vote-report-goes-to-india/
http://blog.twittervotereport.com/
http://www.npr.org/blogs/inside/2009/01/inauguration_report_is_live.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99395388
http://www.inaugurationreport.com/
Like I said on the Panel yesterday, it’s been a great honor working on this project. From both the social data collection and development collaboration perspectives, this project was a great success.
Sze Wong holding the Golen Dot Award
Developers Hate J-RAT
One of my team member told me that she saw another team using our J-RAT method. I said “Great! How they like it.” “All developers hated it,” she said. “They didn’t like being watched and couldn’t actually code when sitting with everybody.” Well, that is a classic misuse of J-RAT. Every J-RAT sessions that I moderate have been loved by developers, testers and users a-like.
J-RAT stands for Joint Rapid Application Testing. It is meant to replace either functional testing or user acceptance testing. The goal of J-RAT is to change the testing culture from bug centric to product centric, and remove the wall between the test team and the development team. The idea is to set aside a period of time for testing a particular module(s) and all related parties (developer, testers, business analysts, end-users) in the project should all sit in the same room and focus on testing. One moderator will be assigned to the room (usually the test manager) who’s job is to control the pace of the test and how many concurrent threads are running within the room. The room should have at least 2 white boards and ideally 2 projectors. The development team should control one projector and the test team should control the other projector. The moderator will control one white board where test cases are written on the board and everybody in the room should know which case(s) are currently running. The other whiteboard is for discussion.
For a successful J-RAT, the moderator must be trained to run J-RAT and must be respected by the team. Since the moderator is pretty much the boss during J-RAT and if people don’t listen, the process will breakdown.
J-RAT also calls for no senior management in the room, preferably not even the project manager (except when it is for user acceptancce test, then the PM must be there), as the goal is for the team to freely express their concerns and thoughts to get the product out the door without worrying about ‘politics’.
J-RAT done right will result in dramatic reduced in testing duration (usually 1/5), higher overall quality and much high team spirit.
The team that my team member told me about probably saw us running a successful J-RAT session and want to replicate that. However, without proper training, all they have copied is ‘putting everybody in the same room’. The result is a crowded room with a senior manager in it; everybody is nervous, and not much got done.
Sze Wong
Zerion Consulting
Ownership
My story on Verizon (see below) is actually a story about ownership. I am going to use this in my staff training going forward. This is a classic story about lack of ownership. Throughout the story, nobody from Verizon did anything wrong (some were nicer than others but they all follow the book) but somehow when combined, it makes a miserable experience for the customer.
That is the same thing when development and testing just ‘do their part’ and don’t take ownership of the whole thing. I told developers “Your bug is not fixed until confirmed by tester and it is your job to ensure that they can verify your fix.” I also told testers “Your testing report is not done until the developer truely understand what you meant and know where to start.”
Most project puts the ownership on the project manager, while this works, it’s not scalable. In my Verizon story, had there be a project manager, a point-of-contact, everything will be much better. However, I think a better solution is for a company to have a culture of ownership throughout the organization. Everybody is expected to take the job beyond their boxes. I usually explain this by telling people to tag on 20% of work on either end of the box. They are expected to do 140%. That is why people love to work with us and why we win. This is ownership.
80% of IT Infrastructure in the cloud by 2015?
Lately I’ve been in the cloud a lot. From Google’s app engine, sales-force.com, Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (E2C), to Microsoft’s Live Mesh, we hear about the cloud a lot. More and more people are signing up for on-demand applications (We, as a small business, also use on-demand applications) and almost every other IT start-up that I talked to is a Saas of this or that. So the trend is clear, the question is are you ready?
What does IT Consulting looks like in the year 2015?
At the app layer, it will be like the VB world at a massive and enterprise level. VB was very successful as a component based development platform were almost everything you need, you can buy a component and plug into your program. With simple code, you can link these components together and make your own application. What VB fails on is what we IT guys like to say, lack of scalability, security, and portability. Well, by year 2015, you are going to have a world where basic business building blocks are available online on a subscription basis. You pay $5000 a month (inflation, everybody) to use the Bloomberg stock component and $20K a month for the Google editor component, you then put them all together and create the killer stock prediction engine and sell for $60K a month.
Problems to be solved between now and then? A universal, cross-vendor, open security and data-portability model. So unless you are working in a company creating components, we general IT consultants will essentially become business consultants. Instead of solving technical problems, business consultants are there to help companies solve their business problems. Help them put these business components together in ways that they want.
Now at the hardware layer, by the year 2015, computers will likely become cheap commodities like a phone and your DVD player. In fact, every appliance will be a computer and in each house there are multiple terminals to connect to them and get to the web. Other than a simple OS, everything runs on the web. If you need a new application, you either buy it online or call your phone company, it will then show up on your screen and you can start using it. Things that are different than now: you don’t upgrade your machine (get a new one), you don’t install new software (they are all online), you don’t install new OS (new OS’s are push to you automatically) and you buy a new machine every 2-3 years.
Problem to be solved between now and then: make the OS lighter (opposite to Microsoft’s direction), have high-speed connection everywhere (we are almost there), have sub-hundred dollar computers (almost there if windows is light).
Now how about general IT support, like help-desk, networking, installation, setup, etc. Support will always exist, but at a different level. By then no one will call you to setup a network in their office or setup/maintain their email server. No one will call you to backup their data either. Essentially IT support as we know it will not exist anymore. They are all controlled by infrastructure providers like phone companies and giants like Oracle, Google, etc. Businesses will no-longer have their own IT department.
Did I just say IT is dead? No. Just like every evolution step, there are things that are eliminated but more things are created, along with more opportunities and challenges.
Networking
It turns out that the best networking venue for me are the SBA classes that I’m talking. Most people there have the same goal of selling to the government and all want to talk. I am going to hang out in SBA more going forward.
RFP
In one day I have two people independently telling me not to bid on the RFP that I’m looking at. Alright alright. But I’m still not giving up, I will just try to write it up as if I’m bidding as I know it takes 20 RFPs to win one.
Insider help
People say if you have no insider help. Submitting a proposal is a waste of time. Well, I am still going to try it. Because I know I won’t win until I submit the 100th proposal. Got to start some where.
Using Excel as your business development platform
I have been promoting this idea to our clients a lot. I have always know that there are cheap Excel conversion programs out there but they don’t do the job of creating buiness components. Well, recently I came across a company that have created the exact same concept 6 years ago. When I found it, I thought, great, that company must be doing really really good (As I believe 80% of all business applications are in some shape or form Excel based). To my suprise, they are actually smaller than my little tiny consulting business.
What does it mean? Does it mean my concept of using Excel to develop business component is wrong?
Upon further research, here is what I think. The concept is not wrong. Otherwise you wouldn’t have so many companies trying to create some kind of Excel conversion tools (I found more than 10). The reason none of these solutions become big, I think, is that they all trying to charge for the tool. In order to charge for usage, some of them end up creating locked binary code that the users cannot see and have to use their runtime engne to execute. Being an architect myself, I understand how much people fear about vendor locked-in. So my guess is that when IT sees that the solution is a potential vendor locked-in, they rather code it themselves.
Therefore, in my opinion, in order for this idea to go mainstream, the solution has to be open, portable, and free.
