—“You work on a computer. You’ve never done a day’s worth of work in your life.”— (ex girlfriend), And, —“Curt, You’re no farmer”— (grandmother)
lol…. Maybe, But I have ORGANIZED a great deal of work in my life, and we are paid by the number of people we affect, not the labor we perform. Marx had it backwards. lol
Source date (UTC): 2016-01-17 03:40:00 UTC
OVERSING UPDATE
Getting down to the wire for v1 beta. They have fixed almost everything open but the problem with the Gantt Chart, and the ‘sprint accounting’. Still not ready for reports.
We spent most of December and January so far on Usability Issues and minor bugs and it’s really come together nicely.
OVERSING: *A SOCIAL AND AGILE ERP*
Oversing is the only ERP that we know of that allows you to drive your entire business using the Agile Method. We use at least these four kinds of sprints.
Strategy Period (‘Long Sprint’)
|<-Plan->|<–Forecast–>|<—Perform->|<–Measure->| (repeat)
Executives establish goals.
Accounting Period (‘Medium Sprint’)
|<-Forecast ‘Costs’->|<–Open Period–>|<-Perform->|<-Lock Period->|<-Update with Actuals->|<-Close Period->| (repeat)
Accountants forecast costs and then adjust with actuals. This allows us to calculate the ‘real’ profit and loss from operations, so that we can target net profit rather than just gross margin. Why? Incentives.
Operational Period (‘Short Sprint’)
|<-Open->|<–Forecast–>|<—Perform->|<-Close->|<–Measure->| (repeat)
Just as we ask sales to commit to sales goals, we ask project and middle managers to commit to revenue goals.
Project Period (‘Variable Sprint’)
|<-Estimate->|<-Plan->|<-Perform->|<-Measure->|(repeat)
Just as we ask staff sales and management to commit to goals, we ask individuals to commit to completion goals.
WHY? Because over time we improve our collective ability to accurately predict and forecast our futures, and undesrtand our risks. So the most important property of the agile business is constant training of everyone in the organization.
This process creates an agile organization that can adapt to any market shift, any strategic change.
Source date (UTC): 2016-01-17 03:09:00 UTC
RELYING ON YOUR DEV LEAD
I love my business partner Kirill, and we work pretty well together.
I am more emotional, he is more steady.
There are some things that are just matters of understanding the user.
There are some things that are important to keep consistent so that the user will understand it. And I sort of carry weight with the former, and he the latter.
But we are very similar otherwise.
I rarely if ever say ‘well, we just gotta do it this way’.
I find that as in most things if we agree we should do it.
If we don’t agree we should wait until we do to do it.
And at this point he understands the application better than I do.
Alexey is sort of like the adult in the room. He humors us. Lets us babble, then says its logical or not, or that we’re not thinking clearly. It’s kind of interesting.
So if you watch us work, I submit issues. I rarely assume I am right. I just expect that these issues must survive team criticism. Which is the scientific thing to do.
Now, most of the time there is an analyst on a project (business rules), and a UI analyst (user experience), and these people try to minimize the impact on the development team.
But we can’t find those people here in this part of the world (and I think in many cases we’re much better at UX anyway even if our detail design isn’t often there – an artist problem not a UX problem).
So this is how we work. I say something insane, Kirill makes it compatible, and Alexey finds the limits and contradictions and corrects us and that seems to work pretty well.
There are some very old UI gaffs in there that I just don’t like. But we’ll fix them sooner or later.
Thanks for listening.
Curt
Source date (UTC): 2016-01-17 03:08:00 UTC
YOU SEE, YOU GOTTA KNOW WHAT YOU”RE TALKING ABOUT…
Test of Meaning: “Can you understand this analogy to experience?”
Test of Reasonableness: “Can I get away with saying this relationship exists?”
Test of Rational: “Can this survive rigorous scrutiny?”
Test of Rationalism: “Can I construct a non-contradictory proof of this?”
Test of Empiricism: “Can I demonstrate and observe this in reality”
Test of Science: “Do these demonstrations and observations survive criticism”
Test of Testimonialism: “Has this statement survived criticism in every dimension possible?”
Source date (UTC): 2016-01-17 02:54:00 UTC
WHY DO PEOPLE WANT TO EXIT THE CONSULTING BUSINESS?
(OVERSING UPDATE)
Everyone who builds a consulting company always seems to want to exit. There are a lot of reasons for this. First, it is a low capital investment industry that is easy to get into and exit even if exit is at low multiples (1-2x). So it attracts people who work overly hard, and get tired of it. Second, it is an extremely volatile business full of constant risk, because there is no way to entrench yourself in a customer other than relationships and knowledge of their business. It is very hard to raise rates. Skills are rapidly perishable and subject to swings. Employees are not sticky. Receivables very high, and credit on receivables difficult and constraining to your growth. And it is the first business to feel recessionary pressures. It is a very mercenary business. And that is because it is largely impossible to collect rents. (which I find fascinating really. it is an example of how all of us seek rents, because the constant productivity of consulting is like the constant productivity of hourly labor, except you’re working in a higher paid white collar capacity. So by inversion that means most of us seek employment where we can seek rents.)
You start get enter the safety zone as you approach 500 people, and generally get somewhat safe after 1000, because even if you halve the business, you can halve the staff, and have the cash flow to rebuild.
SOLVING THE PROBLEM
The only way to solve the problems of the stressfulness of running a services business is BRAND, SCALE, PORTFOLIO, and PROCESS.
Build a reputation for excellence that feeds you leads.
Get large enough that you can tolerate volatility without causing doubt in the staff. (maintain your ‘other’ customer base of employees).
Look at portfiolios of either customers or offerings or both, and plan two years out at least, if not three.
Create a process of continuous training (education) for your employees.
WHY CAN SOME PEOPLE NOT DO THIS?
Because actively managing your business is pretty hard. And investing in your employees skills is not expensive, but it is a constant effort.
****So the best way to create process of continuous improvement is to treat the company as a university that does paying work for clients rather than unpaid homework for the professor.****
And instead of relying upon the professor’s or management’s opinion for your grades, you rely upon the reviews of your peers and your customers.
If you grasp this. That this is probably the business model for all businesses in the 21st century. That we have passed the era of lifetime careers. That we have passed the era of decade long careers. That instead we are in an era of continuous education of our staffs, and that we need processes to achieve that continuous training at lowest possible cost, then you will understand why we built oversing.
***BECAUSE ALL COMPANIES ARE TURNING INTO CONSULTING COMPANIES AND ALL LABOR INTO PROFESSIONAL WORK.***
Whether we have made oversing powerful enough yet to achieve this is certainly debatable. But that we have made it powerful enough to do much of it is not.
Oversing is a platform of the management of human capital in the 21st century.
It’s a Social ERP for The constant Improvement of human beings.
And the data we will give you about your organization after using Oversing will blow your mind.
Source date (UTC): 2016-01-17 02:45:00 UTC
Natural law, Common Law, Property Rights. Testimonial Truth. Jury.
These are the properties of the discipline of science.
We did not develop our tradition of natural law because of science.
We developed science because of our tradition of natural law.
We did not develop natural law by design.
We developed it because the voluntary organization of professional warriors in battle required us to.
Source date (UTC): 2016-01-17 01:36:00 UTC
Curt Doolittle shared a photo.
Source date (UTC): 2016-01-16 16:58:00 UTC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H37JIKFVp7MHOPPE AT HIS BEST :
Source date (UTC): 2016-01-16 16:20:00 UTC
Now I have to write a whole section in my Lying chapter on the use of ‘reasonableness’ and ‘weasel words’ in order to show how people justify whatever they want to.
Source date (UTC): 2016-01-16 16:03:00 UTC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_wordWHAT ARE “WEASEL WORDS”?
What is the test of ‘Reasonableness”
Walter Block is the champion of using weasel words and reasonableness to construct immoral arguments by presenting a series of examples that appeal to moral intuitions, but do not evoke immoral intuitions that we would use to test them.
Hoppe does not do this. He relies upon justificationary rationalism and the HOPE that there are enough good people in the world to construct a normative contract on top of NAP/IVP.
Source date (UTC): 2016-01-16 16:02:00 UTC