OVERSING – SERIOUS QUESTION – GO TO MARKET? (thinking in public) (long) (busines

OVERSING – SERIOUS QUESTION – GO TO MARKET?

(thinking in public) (long) (business questions) (oversing details)

QUESTION: Will the WordPress/Craigslist Strategy Work for our product Oversing?

WHEREAS (challenges and opportunities)

– Oversing is a huge and fairly complex product, it’s an ERP.

– It is bigger than Jira by an order of magnitude, because it addresses the needs of the entire business not just development and help desk.

– It is easier to use than Jira and MS-CRM and Sharepoint.

– it is relatively easy for us (me) to customize oversing for and organization’s use.

– It is possible for someone with experience with CRM’s or ERP’s to configure oversing for use in an organization.

– It will take someone with experience with Jira or a less advanced product to configure it for departmental use.

– It will take users some time, and administrators more time to learn all of it.

BUT (handling challenges)

– We can turn features on and off incrementally as users need them by simply assigning features to roles, and flipping a switch on a user’s profile granting the user access to that role’s features.

– Jira is notoriously unintuitive and complicated, and for that matter, so are Salesforce and MS CRM. Complexity and learning curve are not a challenge for market leaders. However,

WHEREAS (current conditions)

– the product is in beta state, and we have spent the summer with clients, and only half our efforts or less focused on the bug and usability issues.

– The bugs are standard fare. But the little usability issues in this complex a system can frustrate users. And we did not predict many of them – simply because it’s so large.

– There are three areas that concern me: (i) we need a lot of help and tutorial work (ii) we have improved the performance of the ui, but we can still improve it, and possibly need to. But my decision was this: given the rate of advancement I should design the app for a decade or more, not for current limitations. (iii) the gantt view doesn’t work well enough because honestly it is just too big and heavy. It will handle more records than any competitors products. But I feel it is not yet usable in mutli-project businesses that I want to address in agencies and consultancies. So I want to write something custom and light. (iiii) We can migrate workflows just fine, but we haven’t written code to migrate between organizational structures.(v)

– It will take us three years of additional versions to complete the vision we have for the program. This involves (i) the future of email messaging, (2) the addition of financial accounting to our existing management accounting, (3) custom properties, (4) changing our database searches to rely on Elastic Search technology. (i viewed it as something I could push until later since it’s not important until we have custom properties.).

THE VISION (Goal)

– The vision is that we provide both web and desktop equivalents, and provide an alternative to the Microsoft platform stack (although not the document creation suite).

– But more importantly, that Oversing captures much more detail about you and your organization’s behaviors than do google and Facebook combined. But instead of selling this information to marketers *against your interest, and against your will* we will provide this information about you and your organization back to you – and provided it in the context of similar organizations in the marketplace.

This is our long-term objective: to provide continuous career-enhancing feedback to users, managers, and executives that reflects the needs and wants of individual personalities (characters and goals), while producing reputations for people in the workplace that are independent of political and personal bias.

We want to disrupt the business sphere as much as Facebook has disrupted the social sphere – but for entirely different reasons.

THEREFORE (hypothesis)

Given that we need to incrementally expand the product over the next two or three years, How do we enter the market now?

Originally we had thought that we would take the enterprise sales route, and grow slowly. But this creates a fairly high barrier to adoption since it’s a huge commitment on the part of a customer.

On the other hand, if you have ever run a services organization in tech, marketing, or advertising of more than 200 people (I have) you really stop caring about the cost of learning, because without that information it’s really hard to maintain operational profitability.

The reason we were (wildly) successful at our business is (a) we had Microsoft as a cash-cow, (b) we could overpay for talent to serve them, giving us room to experiment (c) even if we were creatively weak, we were operationally excellent in ways that only the big six firms can match. And the reason we were operationally excellent is we used the internal precursor to Oversing to run the entire business under the agile model using weekly sprints for project management and resourcing.

Now you know, the truth is, most management doesn’t manage the organization, but instead, tries to (a)contribute in say, sales; or (b) play with financial information – meaning they have lousy systems, because your systems should tell you everything every moment without investigation, or (c) do anything they can to shirk management by pushing it off on someone else. When the answer is working people as a process of continuous improvement in them, the work, and the relationship with the customer,and of course, reaching profit goals without sacrificing people, work, or relationship with the customer.

So the challenge to this model is that Oversing is designed to allow you to manage an EXCELLENT business, not a lazy one. I built it to duplicate our agile management of the entire business.

Then we thought we should create a community edition without financial and administrative features – purely project and program-centric, and then allow users to purchase (license) their own database instances (like Asana etc), all of which run off of the same web server instance, but different database instances. Yet all reputation and statistics are promoted to the main server database, giving you a superior reputation to that of say, LinkedIn. This is how Oversing works today.

But again, we feel we need a lower barrier to entry.

This summer we started working with one of the online talent marketplaces, (freelancer and contractor type work). These sites take a commission on arranging work between buyers and sellers of talent in all sorts of fields – particularly technology. Becuase the workforce has gone global. Particularly for even moderate English speakers.

We’d originally designed oversing for in-house use, then for public use, but we hadn’t addressed the issue of freelancers bidding on work. But adding the freelancer marketplace to Oversing was just a matter of a few additions: (i) creating a few new panels (talent market, work market), and modifying the Skills panel so that it updated both of those market panels if they’re open. (ii) creating new entity types to add to the workflow engine for bids/bid-requests, bid-invoices, and bid-invoice-payments (there are 30+ types of tasks you can add to a project, and this adds three more. you can think of a project as a combination of a task list, project plan, and project accounting journal). Then hooking into the payment processing system. (iii) updating our various reporting views (there are really just a few of them) to include the new entity types. Sure we can do more, but that’s the minimum necessary. So we set about doing that.

This seemed to us that it might be the right level of barrier to entry – because it’s free. Yep. Free. Just as WordPress sites are free unless you want customization, and just as Craigslist is free unless you want to post a job ad.

So we can run the site overhead on (low) fees; charge for custom instances for those who want them; charge for setup and integration services if customers want them.

Fees in the business work about like this:

(i) – The “dating service’ between talent and project manager: 20%,10%,5% depending upon the size of the customer relationship. Basically after 10k, you’re just making 2.5%.

(ii) – Outsourced project management of freelancer projects for customers: 20%.

(iii) – Outsourced work at agencies and consultancies: 50%.

(iv) SAAS Licensing Fees for instances: $5-25$-$50-$300 per user per year depending upon which product we’re talking about. In my view we want to be at the bottom end of that. Even though we will offer a combined stack that is far beyond what established companies provide. (100 people 6k-60K per year). (It’s cheap really if enterprise software costs you one admin headcount per year there is no way it’s not a wash.)

BUT IS IT ENOUGH?

Entry points at different levels of the application allow users to get exposure to the features they need without feeling that they need to master the entire thing from the beginning.

We need entry points for end-users, so that they create profiles, and reputations, and bid on and post work. In house or out of house.

We need entry points for the various kinds of leads, project managers and department managers

We need entry points for the executive team that decides upon which package to implement.

If you told me as an exec of a large services business that I could modernize without much risk, and really cut my licensing, and software costs, and probably cut my headcount costs, I think I would at least give it a shot assuming the analysts were paying attention to it.

Now, if you told me that, as an exec, I could use Oversing for free, and that the only price I’d pay was a commission on freelancer deals, then I would say that was pretty cool. Most of the time it’s 10K+ for the software, then 10-100k for the configuration and training.

If you told me as a department manager that I could get an enterprise platform for free, I think I would find that pretty interesting – certainly, I would take a look at it.

If you told me I could use another project management site, I don’t know why I would pay the high learning costs without having a client request I use it.

If you told me that I could sign up for another freelancer site, I doubt that I would bother unless someone invited me to in order to get work.

If I saw advertisements suggesting I try oversing versus Jira I think that would be a pretty interesting choice. But you know, most of the expansion in dev tools has been at the low end, and for them, simple things like Basecamp are fine.

So the customer is really not the casual user but the professional that is accountable for performance: project, program, department, operations, and execs.

I mean the difference between oversing and Jira is the difference between internal support and consulting, agency, and freelance businesses.

SO, REPEATING THE QUESTION

If we can make enough money (we can) on transactions, why not make it free, and only charge for private instances? Can we make the same attack on the mainstream platforms over time the way FB, WordPress, Craigslist, and to some degree, Jira has?

OUR BUSINESS PROBLEM:

AWARENESS VIA ENTRY CLIENTS ->

…..TIME FOR EXPANDING FEATURES ->

………COMPLETE MAINSTREAM CORP STACK COMPETITOR

OVERVIEW OF OVERSING FEATURES

====================

OVERSING SYSTEM SERVICES

—-Workflow System

——–Users

——–Contacts

——–Companies (customers)

——–Invoices

——–Programs

————Overhead, Cost Center,

————Revenue,

————Vacation/holiday,

————Personal

——–Program Task Types

————Strategy (Management initiatives),

————Sales,

————Recruiting,

————Career(hr/mentoring),

————Delivery (any kind of other project)

——–Operational Periods (‘Revenue Sprints’)

————–Timecards

——————-Work Logs (Timeslips)

————–Expenses

————–Adjustments

————–Transfers

————–Commissions

————–Proposals(bids)

————–Proposal-Invoices

————–Proposal-Payments

—-Reputation Systems

——–Skill and Reputation System

——–Awards (Gamification) System

——–NPS Survey System

—-Accounting Systems

——–Currency System (real time, fully preserved)

——–General (Project) Ledger

——–Project Accounting System (no accrual services)

——–Costs allocation system

……………….(to individuals giving real p&l per person)

—-Security Systems

——–User Authentication System (access to app)

——–Access Roles System (access to features)

——–Workflow Automated Permissions

——–Permissions System (access to content)

—-Support Systems

——–Internationalization (translation) system

——–Scheduling (cron) System

——–Queue Manager (‘Ratchet’)

——–Workspace State System (‘Redis’)

——–Websocket Publishing System

USER SERVICES

My Organization

—-My Org Structure

——– My Workflows

——– My Chart of Accounts

——– My Rate Sheets

—-My Users

———My Workspaces

———My Favorites

———My Programs / Projects /Tasks

———My Skills and Reputations

———My Files

———My Rates

—-My Customers (Organizations)

——–My Contacts

——–My Contracts

——–My Invoices

——–My Programs

————-My Program Accounts

————-My Projects / Tasks / Xactions / Files

——————Deliverables / Tasks / Xactions / Files

——————Documents

———————- Sections / Articles / Scrivenings

———————- Citations, Definitions, References

1) FINISH TALENT MARKETPLACE WORK

2) OPERATIONAL TEMPO WORKSPACE

(Not yet)

allows you to manage the different time periods more easily

3) REPLACE HEAVY GANTT WITH LIGHT TIMELINE

4) WORDPRESS INTEGRATION

(not yet) Easy but not done.

5) FULL FINANCIAL ACCOUNTING

(not yet)

6) Elastic Search

7) Point to point secure messaging and mail.

If you made it through this, thank you. I always appreciate feedback and the opportunity to air my ideas in public.

I’m aware that most anyone who reads this probably is not working in an executive capacity. And oversing is too much for you as an individual or small business member.

Affections all

Curt Doolittle

(h/t: and many thanks to my good friend Kevin Dillon for the WordPress Strategy)