Curt Doolittle

Theme: Productivity

  • One of our Billable / Non-Billable Time Entry Controls. Opens with 15 minutes. B

    One of our Billable / Non-Billable Time Entry Controls.

    Opens with 15 minutes. Because of 15minute minimum increments.

    Press the clock position from 1-12 and set it to that many hours.

    Press the +/- minutes to add or subtract 15 minutes at a time.

    Press the +/- hours to add or subtract an hour at a time.

    Press the TIME value to save the time.

    Starting the timer sets the time to 15 minutes.

    After 15 minutes have past, it adds another 15 minutes, and so on.

    C1 – CASE DATA ENTRY

    C1.1 Display a time entry field [ ___:____ ]. User selects the field. Time entry control is displayed (transparent background). Clock displays 15minutes. User taps + once, and value increases to 30 minutes, taps it a second time, value increases to 45 minutes. User taps time value, control closes, and entry field is set to 45 minutes: [ ___:45 ].

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-06 16:35:00 UTC

  • THE “BIG FIVE” WORKPLACE TRAITS IN CONSULTING People are not a commoditized “mea

    THE “BIG FIVE” WORKPLACE TRAITS IN CONSULTING

    People are not a commoditized “meat” that is reducible to P&L Numbers. It takes a variety of skills to produce excellent service work. And Oversing measures (at least) those five different properties:

    —TRAIT————————-Measurement———–

    1) “Like-ability” (Peer 360 system

    2) “Soft Skills – Trustworthiness” (Skill System by Peers)

    3) “Revenue value of hard skills” (Skill System / Peer Skill Ratings)

    4) “Customer Trust and Retention” (Net Promoter Score)

    5) “Profitability” measured as:

    a) Utilization and b) Chargeability (Standard financial metrics)

    So, any individual is always represented by oversing using all these ‘metrics’. Their “Personality Profile” so to speak.

    THE WORKPLACE AS EXTENDED FAMILY RATHER THAN LABOR POOL.

    We found that feedback from PEERS was MORE ACCURATE and MORE RESPECTED and produced GREATER BEHAVIORAL CHANGE than all feedback from management combined. In fact, management opinion of any staff member was usually a CONTRARY INDICATOR of the individual’s value to the business.

    So, our use of these measures helped us create a culture of a ‘family’ by giving honest feedback, the purpose of which was to ‘advance the individual and the family’ as a whole. Not through threats, not through incentives, not through pressure, but through advice and counsel. Humans want to do the right thing to fit into groups. And you just have to give them to tools to do so. Reliable information is the best tool.

    Like the original meaning of ‘confession’, almost all feedback is publicly visible. Your sins are public, as is your heroism.

    ONE OF THE SECRETS OF ANY BUSINESS IS NEED FOR EACH OTHER.

    One of the secrets is “IDLE HANDS MAKE ILL WILL”. And people will naturally free-ride and rent-seek, which creates animosity in the ‘tribe’. The best way to prevent bad behavior is by minimizing the potential of it. The best way to minimize potential, is to always be marginally short of staff, so that everyone has to chip in to keep everyone else successful and happy. Furthermore, the incentive to overstaff is usually crated by the most populous RENT SEEKERS in any business : middle management. Oversing reduces the ability of middle management to rent seek, hide information for the purpose of obtaining political power. Our experience was that we needed only talent leadership, not ‘management’ per se. Because the feedback and ‘management’ of individual behavior was democratized into a marketplace of voluntary exchanges of assistance, appreciation and complaint.

    Oversing is revolutionary if you use it as we intend that you do. It will transform not only your ability to manage your business by looking forward, and by increasing utilization but it will transform you business by making the ‘family’ manage the business, and thereby feeling PART OF IT, and able to INFLUENCE IT.

    Management hierarchy is, just like government, little more than rent seeking and obfuscation of facts.

    And just like government, management hierarchy is the primary reason why individuals feel resentment toward the business.

    Make them LOVE IT INSTEAD.

    IF TALENT IS YOUR BUSINESS, THEN USE IT, AND TAKE CARE OF IT.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-06 06:29:00 UTC

  • IT’S THE CUSTOMER, STUPID In my (many) years of experience, building companies u

    IT’S THE CUSTOMER, STUPID

    In my (many) years of experience, building companies up to 100M in the space, the failure of technology projects is due to the following causes:

    1) Irresponsible incompetence on the part of the customer management team: 90% of failures.

    2) Insufficient talent for the scope of the problem. 50% of failures.

    3) ‘Whoring’ on a predictable catastrophe for money 25% of the failures.

    I still couldn’t talk my partners out of one #3 at one point. And then we had a clown at Microsoft basically steal 2M from us by lying. Tried to get him fired. But he was too protected.

    WALK AWAY FROM BAD DEALS.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-30 03:34:00 UTC

  • COMPARISONS ; OVERSING VS ???? (biz) (markets) So, as you can see, our market is

    http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/13/atlassian-earned-150m-in-revenues-last-year-but-competition-intensifies-with-collaboration-providers/MARKET COMPARISONS ; OVERSING VS ????

    (biz) (markets)

    So, as you can see, our market is certainly above $10M, and probably above $50M. The number of organizations that use INTERNAL tools is larger than the number of organizations that bill by the hour. So we probably can’t hit the 150M mark as it stands. But it isn’t unreasonable to hit the 50M mark pretty conservatively, largely because we can serve the largest organizations.

    You CAN use oversing as a single site out of the box without modifying it much. But you can also organize a multinational corporation with it, over multiple jurisdictions with crazy reporting structures and business rules.

    What may not be obvious to the rest of the world is that the shift to iterative project management has passed critical mass and the mature tools on the market are the old school. Secondly, it probably isn’t obvious that the financial products let you analyze your business but not DRIVE IT.

    OVERSING DRIVES YOUR ENTIRE BUSINESS: sales, recruiting, and delivery by looking forward. You can control your business, You can control it going forward, not looking backward.

    BUT!!!! — The old guard isn’t really growing and the new agile systems are. SO there is an OPENING here in the market that isn’t getting filled. The empirical question is, how big is that market. And really we can do a lot of surveys (and the’re very positive) but that doesn’t mean much.

    THE FIELD

    -Microsoft Dynamix AX + Project Management- ??

    “…estimates that Microsoft’s ERP business grew 4% in 2012, “mainly driven by Microsoft Dynamics AX”. “Gartner puts Microsoft’s ERP revenue at $1.1 billion in 2012, up from $1 billion in 2011.”

    (Now, most organizations in our market use Dynamix. ANd those that don’t should. We designed Oversing with the intention that larger customers would use AX in finance and buy Oversing for running business operations (sales, delivery, recruiting). Nothing better really that you can do than that.)

    -Atlassian– $150M

    (Jira workflow, Confluence collab)

    http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/13/atlassian-earned-150m-in-revenues-last-year-but-competition-intensifies-with-collaboration-providers/

    Aging product. Not good architecture without major rewrite.

    -Github (collab and source)- ?? (but it’s profitable)

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/07/09/cash-for-code-github-raises-100-million-from-andreessen-horowitz/

    Good for devs. Does nothing for the business end.

    “GitHub Inc is a flat organization with no (middle) managers – or in other words, “everyone is a manager” (self-management). As at Valve Corporation, another flat organization, employees can choose to work on projects that interest them (open allocation). “

    –NetSuite– $92M

    “NetSuite reported a 32 percent jump in revenue to $91.6 million”

    (Favorite quote from their Q3 report: “These two divergent results show that as mission-critical software moves to the Cloud, it is far

    safer for customers to turn to committed leaders like NetSuite rather than bet on the PowerPoint presentations of last-generation providers like SAP, Microsoft and Sage.” (Customers have lost faith in the old line or products. And the new generation is shifting.)

    -CA Changepoint (IT Portfolio Management)- $48M

    “For FY ’12, Changepoint increased total revenues by more

    than 20 percent to $48 million, driven by growth with existing nameplates and adding new customers. 15 percent of this year’s

    software license billings were delivered via a SaaS model.

    -Tenrox- $10M?

    Glendale CA / Private / 50-200 Employees

    -Workamajig- (creative workflow management)

    14021 NE 20th Avenue Suite 2208 Vancouver, WA 98686 United States / Privately Held / 1-10 employees (That number doesn’t make sense to me)

    $38/user

    -FunctionPoint-

    200-1622 West 7th Avenue Vancouver, BC V6J 1S5 Canada

    Privately Held / 11-50 employees

    (I can find 22 employees on linked in, so I guess the’re about 30. They won’t give me revenue numbers. If I play it out as 6000 users x $20, that’s not a lot of money. Maybe a 2M bottom and 30x100K/employee = 3M top. Although it sure looks like a 5M company to me.)

    “Over 6000 users”

    http://www.functionpoint.com

    15 / 20/ 30 per user.

    –BIgTime–

    Nice product. Light. Feature. Not PSA. Not our market.

    -Targetprocess-

    about 40 people. Russian. NY sales offices.

    No revenue numbers.

    Feature. Just a feature. Very nice board. Thats it.

    We tried to keep oversing away from the Targetprocess style of UI for a variety of reasons. MOst of them training and using spatial memory. We wanted to keep the ‘wall’ feeling. If you put Oversing on a projector or big touch screen it’d be awesome.

    — Wrike (new) — (trivial workflow) Yet they just raised 10M (ack!)

    Boring.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-29 16:36:00 UTC

  • OVERSING : STATE OF THINGS : THINKING OF VALUATION Right now, as it sits in its

    OVERSING : STATE OF THINGS : THINKING OF VALUATION

    Right now, as it sits in its current state of development, Oversing is about three times the scope of Jira’s functionality.

    It will have something like ten times its functionality when we are complete. Plus our Workflow interface and engine is, orders of magnitude better. Our Agile planning, and working boards are radically better. And it’s not difficult to make the UI better. Jira’s is…. terrible. Really. It’s a bug tracking system that grew into an agile development system because of Greenhopper. We used it. It was the best available. But that doesn’t mean we like it.

    So, that scale of 10x is just useful for putting our work in context.

    I think the closest product would be TenRox, which is probably the previous generation of software for this industry. But Tenrox is a bit antique in terms of project management features, and is traditional in its resource management. I mean, we couldn’t buy it for my company in the last decade, and we are already in a new one. Good product though.

    The product that’s customer base is quite large is Compuware’s Changepoint. Which, with some development work is pretty good for IT centric organizations in the old WBS model. We couldn’t make it work for us. Too much custom development would have been needed to get it to handle Oversing style of resourcing.

    FunctionPoint is a product I’ve always loved. It’s for smaller agencies and tech shops. But it has a good UI and most of the features you need for small firms.

    The most popular agency-ware I think is Workamajig, and it’s a bit old but it does most of what you want these products to do. I’m not sure about adding media buying to Oversing. I think maybe as a later add-on.

    Really, nothing at all has our feature set. Some products have pretty good agile boards (they are a dime a dozen now – the world has pretty much taken the agile method as the defacto workflow model. And if anyone in the world hasn’t they should. Our model collapses the two so that your agile is always sitting on top of a WBS that’s either visible or not, at your discretion, but allows you to meet contracts (WBS management) for delivery as well as manage your workflow in streams (kanban) or sprints (agile).

    And we have tried to keep it ‘creative friendly’ for the agency market. And that is something I hope to work into the product in ‘the win without pitching’ sort of way of thinking. And to push collaboration even harder.

    Oversing is sort of like Facebook with the option of working on stuff with your friends in agile or wbs format, for customer who is also on FB and where you can work together to get your projects done. While at the same time, there is someone in charge of those projects to drive them, and someone above that person to drive all of them.

    Microsoft Dynamics of course, is a full financial system. And Dynamics PSA is very powerful – the most powerful in my opinion. And the’re our sort of benchmark target. The problem is that most of us want something that works like FunctionPoint, that has the power of changepoint, and that integrates with financial packages as well as Dynamics PSA. And Dynamics is freaking hideous and painful to ask your staff to master.

    Oversing does not have the ability to add dynamic dimensions yet (which is what drives up development cost of any ERP system exponentially.) I wrestled with it. But that takes the product from one that can do almost everything except financial accounting, and sort of invades the turf of financial accounting, breaking the barrier between management accounting (how well we run the business) and financial accounting (how well we finance the business). And it takes it from a product that you spend some time configuring, into one that you spend a lot of time planning and installing. And, that jus doesn’t make sense to me. I think financial accounting is an art, and I think management accounting is an art, and neither should be compromised. If you bundle them together you start to get extraordinary compromises. And we have worked too hard to insulate the user from the sense that he’s in an accounting system to fall into that trap.

    Oversing can easily integrate with Dynamics (or SAP for that matter). But with Oversing and even a Peachtree product you would probably have every thing possible of value to your international business.

    My original take was that we could build oversing for 5M in the states if I was very careful, and we’d get no less than a 20M business out of it at 60%. So, 5M in, and no less than 4x, means 50M out. So that’s a good turn. 10x in under 5 years.

    But building it here, at 1/5 the cost, changed the multiplier a LOT by cutting the costs of development by 80% – Albeit I had to move here to make it happen.

    The thing is, that I think, it’s turned into a product with +50M in annual revenue potential just at the conservative end. And that market is there, pretty easily really. I mean, like anything, we can screw it up. But I think we probably hit the feature / functionality / price point / sweet spot. And we didn’t make crazy financial promises to worried investors. We just focus on the product. Which I gotta say, is a lot more interesting than focusing on managing the expectations of others.

    It will be pretty difficult to compete with Oversing. At least by V2.

    So it’s looking pretty good right now. Normal stuff. “This looks ugly this way”, and ” why are we making all those SQL calls here?” and “Did you think to TEST that before checking it in?”, and “You know, that might sound intelligent in russian but in english it means….” and “Um.. where is the currency selector on this form? Is it like dryers and socks? It was there yesterday!”.

    Like I said. Normal stuff. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-28 12:26:00 UTC

  • HAYEK : PROFIT IS INFORMATION “By pursuing profit, we are as altruistic as we ca

    HAYEK : PROFIT IS INFORMATION

    “By pursuing profit, we are as altruistic as we can possibly be. Profit is the signal which tells us what we must do to serve people whom we do not know.” ~ F. A. Hayek

    “…civilization begins when the individual in the pursuit of his ends can make use of more knowledge than he has himself acquired, and when he can transcend the boundaries of his ignorance, by profiting from knowledge he does not himself possess.” ~ F. A. Hayek

    (reminder from a friend)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-23 03:37:00 UTC

  • TO FIGHT POVERTY? CAPITALISM. Halving destitute poverty by getting government ou

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzmxQOonnGEHOW TO FIGHT POVERTY? CAPITALISM.

    Halving destitute poverty by getting government out of the way.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-22 16:01:00 UTC

  • “…. the last time the female labor force participation rate dropped as low as

    “…. the last time the female labor force participation rate dropped as low as 57.1 percent was in February 1989—24 years ago…..”

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-22 13:55:00 UTC

  • COMPANY / GREAT PRODUCT : SITECORE I have talked quite a bit about the amount of

    http://www.sitecore.net/GREAT COMPANY / GREAT PRODUCT : SITECORE

    I have talked quite a bit about the amount of money I invested in nCompass both before and after Microsoft Purchased it, turned it into Microsoft CMS, which I saw as, along with Microsoft CMS, the platform system that microsoft needed to compete in the application market in the middle tier. But, the envy of the office team, and their fascination with Sharepoint forced a bullet to be put into Microsoft CMS, and then foolishly killed it.

    A very smart couple of very pragmatic guys picked up on the market opportunity and right now, they have what nCompass/Microsoft CMS should have been, and what Sharepoint never can be: the best .NET platform available.

    Microsoft ceded the app platform business to Oracle and IBM and open source leaving a career problem staring into the face of .NET developers, as potential candidates for COBOL level extinction.

    I’m not really a supporter of using Microsoft technology any longer for web development, until ASP, JS, PHP, and Python become are added to the core of Visual Studio, and Microsoft puts out a dedicated web server (if ever). Given the (terrible) quality of most IDE’s, and the problem debugging code on these platforms by comparison it doesn’t make sense.

    Maybe, someday, when there has been enough of a shakeup, someone in redmond will understand that this company is worth to Microsoft easily 10x revenues, if not higher.

    ‘Cause if someone (we know who) adds a windows emulator to their OS and sells cheap high quality desktops, and IBM, Oracle and Open source continue to squeeze Microsoft in the middle, the empire of RENT SEEKING on the NETWORK EFFECT of Windows that is the Redmond campus, will find itself without the ability to play IBM and retreat into ‘the money’. Left behind by gaming platforms. Left behind by phones. Left behind by tablets.

    Microsoft is a vast rent-seeker on the pc platform. And eventually the market punishes companies that hubris.

    SITECORE is one of the obvious ways back into credibility. Sitecore, CMS, Dynamics, .NET, and script friendly changes to the OS.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-22 10:33:00 UTC

  • TECHNOLOGY UNDERMINE THE UNIVERSITY SYSTEM? EDUCATION WILL REMAIN THE SAME Highe

    http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/arena/result/the-future-of-higher-education#comment-1091995003WILL TECHNOLOGY UNDERMINE THE UNIVERSITY SYSTEM?

    EDUCATION WILL REMAIN THE SAME

    Higher education filters us and produces signals. It does not teach us very much. And that’s just what the evidence says. There is very little chance that higher ed will be replaced by technology. Technology is not a high enough cost to perform any filtering, and if it was high enough cost, then people wouldn’t use it.

    THE EXAMPLE OF FLIGHT SIMULATORS

    Pilots joining the armed forces usually must have a considerable number of hours in at-home flight simulators to compete against their entry level peers. Technology may have the same effect on entry into those institutions. Technology may be the way we ACTUALLY LEARN SKILLS instead of are filtered and sorted, and stamped with approval for signalling purposes. But it is unlikely that without the high cost of education, the personal associations that form in educational institutions, the cultural conformity and behavior that comes from working in a college environment, meeting expectations of the professor, and cooperating with peers, that individuals would learn what businesses actually hire them for: not their knowledge, but their ability to understand, solve and execute problems regardless of industry in which those problems occur.

    UNIVERSITIES ARE VALUABLE FOR FILTERING NOT FOR TEACHING

    In that sense it matters very little what we learn at university. We are being schooled in the one thing that matters: problem solving and execution without supervision. Because, the human pay scale is determined by the degree of supervision, or lack of it, that is necessary to perform different levels of work given decreasing amounts of known information about how to do it.

    For these reasons, technology CANNOT REPLACE the classroom. It is not what we learn but how we learn and how hard the assignments are (from social sciences in the trivial, to computer science, economics, mathematics and physics at the difficult end).

    College is an obstacle course for testing and eliminating performance. It doesn’t teach you much, we don’t remember much, we don’t apply much, and we won’t even apply it if we have the opportunity to. (see Caplan)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-22 08:10:00 UTC