Business Initiatives are a Form of Art

Leonardo da Vinci once said “Art is never finished, only abandoned.”

Whenever we’re attempting to develop a new project, refine an existing product, reorganize a department, re-envision the brand (really any business initiative or project), execution requires significant creativity. These sorts of projects, like art, are never finished, only abandoned.

You might be saying “no.” If we reorganize the department, the project can be called “done”, we can move on. I argue that if you analyze WHY you reorganized, you’ll uncover an underlying unachievable ideal. You reorganized the sales department because you wanted to MAXIMIZE THE EFFECTIVENESS OF YOUR SALESFORCE, an initiative that is perpetual.

You redesigned your website in order to IMPROVE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE. An ideal that cannot ever be fully realized.

Very little project management software supports this worldview, that projects are never finished, only abandoned. So I’ve been thinking about how software like that might work.

Products are like Fireworks Shows

Products are like fireworks shows. If you put on a good fireworks show, people expect you to do it bigger & better next year. To meet their expectations, you need to plan an escalating annual budget.

Products should be work the same way. If you spent $50k on a product in 2008, plan to spend $75k in 2009, and $100k in 2010. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that there was some upfront investment in year 1, and that year 2 can require 1/2 the investment.

Yes you can skimp in year 2. However, your “fireworks” are not going to impress anyone—your audience will see that you cut your budget in 1/2. And YOU FAILED TO MAXIMIZING YOUR INITIAL INVESTMENT.

The metaphor is getting strange, and I know nothing about the real business of fireworks shows, so I move on to a better metaphor…

Project Portfolios Require Gardening

Smart business people are charismatic and results-driven, and sit in leadership & management roles. They tend to generating lots of great ideas. Let’s call these “seeds”.

They influence the organization to act on many ideas. Let’s call these germinating change initiatives “seedlings”. Taken individually, the idea was sound, the cost to get it started was low. It was a no-brainer to allocate resources to get started, to test out the idea a bit.

The problem is in aggregate. The resources required to tend the rapidly growing garden greatly surpass the organization capacity.

It’s FUN and seems very productive to grow a seed into a seedling. Unfortunately, that’s where the problems start…

The Overcrowded, Decaying Garden of Too Many Plants

The problem with many small businesses is that we often plant many seeds, grow many fragile seedlings, and then don’t dedicate adequate resources to continue to nurture these seedlings into maturity. Creative executives move on to the “next great idea”.

The landscape becomes crowded. And important initiatives of yesterday are temporarily dropped in order to focus on germinating some new idea. Decay sets in. What can we do?

See the Landscape

The software would need to help expose the landscape. What investments has the organization made? What is the state of those investments? Which important initiatives are being underfed? What initiatives should be terminated? Which need to be be pruned or changed?

IS THIS A PROBLEM YOUR BUSINESS FACES?

I’m curious if this is a generally universal problem, or perhaps I’ve just been exposed to a subset of industry where this problem seems to be most pervasive (web software companies).

Perhaps ERP software covers this off? I’ve not been exposed to ERP software, nor have I seen anything tailored to Small- and Medium-Sized Businesses (the market segment that I’ve spent my career focused on.)

So I was talking with Michael Guterl, about the lack of a true Ruby user group in town. Rather than complain about it, I whipped out http://cincinnatirb.org/.

There are some well-known Ruby people in town; I’m not one of them. Despite my lack of credentials, I do love Ruby and don’t totally suck, but more importantly, the time has come for a Cincinnati.rb.

Come one, come all, it’s open hacking night every night—we’re going to let the meeting drive itself to wherever it wants to go.

P.S. We’re flexible about meeting space, but we’ll kick it off at the RecruitMilitary HQ in Loveland on Nov. 17th for meeting #1 at least.

Drop us a note if you want to show up :)

I just blocked Barack Obama on Twitter… Felt good ;)

The past few months, I’ve been straddling working for two organizations at the same time. Phasing myself out in one, “trying out” for the other. From The Devine Group, Inc., I was transitioning from a VP/Information Technology role of the 20-person company. To RecruitMilitary, LLC, as Chief Experience Officer of the 55-person company, a position I accepted last week.

At Devine, my role was somewhat limited to IT. At RecruitMilitary, I will ensure that the experiences the organization delivers its stakeholders are a strategic advantage, not a liability. I’ll work to map out both present-day and ideal experiences, seek to understand experience expectations, identify “pain points”, and determine how to deliver better experiences for improved ROI. This will involve analysis & implementation of solutions to minimize/remove “choke points” in our processes. I’ll also be responsible for establishing and continuously improving core metrics for our online business model & products.

I feel fortunate to have been given the opportunity to design my own job, for the most part, and that I managed to make the transition without any loss of income at all. All while trying to recover from reconstruction surgery on my Achilles (which has been very trying, both emotionally + physically) and a new baby! I look forward to the possibility of a run of non-eventful months ;)

Morals of the story:

1. Blog—it creates visibility (the CEO of RecruitMilitary found me through this pathetic blog)
2. Design your own job—Good employers want you to be happy in your day-to-day work, they know your productivity is tied to it.

1. SPAGHETTI FLOWS FREELY: The codebase is large enough to require some refactoring, but very little of it has ever been done.
2. OUTDATED PLATFORM: The site is using outdated technology that no good developer really wants to touch anymore (i.e. Microsoft ASP, data-processing-centric Java, VB.NET, etc.)
3. EXPERIENCE SUCKS: The site is ugly, hard-to-use, etc.

If your app passes on any of the three, it may be worth salvaging the app. 3 strikes, it’s out.

Side note… who is to blame for an application to get to the point that it needs tossed out the door? If resources were unreasonably constrained by non-IT management against the recommendations made by IT, then the non-IT management is to blame. However, if IT never asked for additional resources to avoid the 3 strikes, then it must take full responsibility for the impending death of a codebase.

It’s been 6 weeks since surgery, 8 weeks since the rupture.

I went to see my doctor today. Here’s what I learned:

• I am allowed to put as much weight on my left foot as possible without major pain.
• He told me to go down to one crutch when I feel ready for it.
• I got my “prescription” to begin physical therapy.
• I’ll get to ditch the boot in 4 weeks, and so will end “the summer of the boot.”

It’s still a long, long road back, but each stage is getting more bearable.

I’ll never take for granted the “miracle of walking” again :)

So ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 is about to hit the streets. I have been watching, waiting, hoping that the ASP.NET effort at copying Rails would be so compelling that I could stomach investing in .NET programming again.

The new preview 4 features:

• filter interceptors (before + after hooks for controllers)
• outputcache filters (action caching)
• handle error filters (custom error page)
• authorize filter (role-based authorization)
• accountcontroller class (wrapper to ASP.NET membership API)
• minor improvement to testing
• some ajax stuff

They are incorporating community-driven features, which is good. But I don’t think the project has anywhere near the velocity it needs. It’s taken them 2 months to get this new functionality out the door… I’m not very excited, because it’s hard not to compare what’s going on to present-day Rails, which is years ahead.

The big concerns I have about ASP.NET MVC are:

• still not opinionated enough. Rather than simplifying .NET web development, they are giving more choices
• the names they are giving features… ugh! Give me the silly Rails “plugin_fu” and “sexy_plugin” names any day vs. filter, filter, filter
• documentation not at your fingertips—maybe it’ll get there, but I bet there will never be a docs site for ASP.NET MVC as simple + easy to use as RailsBrain
• no plugin system that I’ve heard about
• not Restful… /:controller/:action/:id is so 2005. And I suppose for webservices, they still want developers to use SOAP?

I actually want the project to succeed, because it’s tough for organizations who have invested in .NET system to consider switch. And I want my .NET friends to be happier. They truly don’t know what they’re missing in the amazing Ruby community—Rails, Github, Merb, nginx/thin, Sinatra, Radiant, Shoulda, RSpec, and literally dozens of other interconnecting projects.

About a week ago, I was googling (I don’t remember what) and on multiple occasions bnet.com results popped up. Site looked nice, content was relevant to my search. Honestly, I don’t even know why I registered at the site… but I did. Maybe there was some protected content that required account. In any event, I signed up.

A successful conversion! Their web + SEO team should feel proud.

July 8

I got 3 email from the site—pretty cool, pushing out some information to me. I note that perhaps it’s “over communication” but a couple of the articles interested me.

July 9

Just one email. Fine.

July 10

4 email! I get enough email in general, and the stuff they’re pushing to me really isn’t relevant, so I decide to unsubscribe. Plus the emails are quite laced with ads. The unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email didn’t work, but finally I figured out how to unsubscribe from the 4 categories of messages. End of story, right? Wrong.

July 11

Today I still got 1 email, so I figure out how to unsubscribe from all CNET email, from a link on the original unsubcribe page, which bnet.com seems to be affiliated with. They say it’ll take 10 days to process my request!

Total brand experience == sucks

My point of all this is how shitty an experience it’s been as a new user of bnet. What it tells me is that the business has not managed the balancing act of “serving the advertisers” vs. “serving the audience.” Their website looks nice, and I had a good experience with it. Their email strategy was horrendous, and I judge them on the “total brand experience.”

Update

Since I started writing this post, 2 more of their email have hit my inbox. I just made my first Gmail filter to automatically delete emails with subject line starting with “BNET Alert”. Side note, the Gmail filter setup process was a great experience. All hail Gmail!

The current “logo” for anotherventure.com is actually just from a free css template. This knowledge was nagging at me, so I gave 99designs.com a spin, after Clark saw great results on his new company’s logo. So I started up a $200 contest, an a week later, after 77 submissions, I chose the winner.

Very cool process, and great way to get creative done, in my opinion.

I got invited to private beta of Dropbox and it’s very cool—beta account has 2GB storage, and you can share files across computers, mac + PC, etc.

I dropped all the family photos on my computer on it, shared with wife, she’ll delete the ones that are junk, organize into folders, touch up, and then I can just upload to flickr from my computer. The files are sync’d instantly, and it was a very quick install.

I have 10 beta invitations I can share, let me know if you’re interested. First come first serve!

Our 3rd child Camilla Josephine Walker was born on Thursday. She’s awesome, super cute, strong :) It was a little stressful for me to be full-time dad to Emerson and Isabella from Wednesday to Sunday, but we made it through it. I did my first driving since my Achilles rupture!

And on that note, I get my cast off on Thursday – I’m still pretty much pain free, crutches suck, I’m getting a little nervous about physical therapy. Right now my foot is wrapped in it’s protective cocoon. I’m going to feel like a snail out of it’s shell at first :)

Why is it that the Firefox 3 mac UI looks so much better than PC UI?

click to zoom in

Obviously the mac UI looks much closer to OSX Safari – and I guess they couldn’t also take the PC UI closer to OSX Safari without a lot of griping. But show 100 “non-religious” people the two UI options, I’d say the Mac version would be chosen 2 to 1 or more…

Quick update: I’m feeling pretty good. Went out to work @ client location past two days, good to get back out and get off the couch :) Good thing is that if I’m lying or sitting, my foot doesn’t hurt… Crutching around is killing my armpits, and my foot throbs a little when moving around, but at least I can move around. I’m off pain medication for the first time in a few months.

Now my focus turns to taking care of my clients and hope they forgive me for being less than 100% past few months. Oh and of course we have child #3 due to arrive in a week or two! One thing I can say with certainty is that I’m not suffering from boredom :)

Thank you to everyone who has offered help and support. People are great, my spirits are up. Randy Pausch has been an inspiration for how to handle the curveball’s that life throws at you; I really can’t complain that I have it so bad.

My surgery yesterday involved:

• First they gave me a nerve block behind the knee that blocked pain for 24-48 hrs after surgery. A lot of needles while I was semi-conscious—I don’t remember anything about that, but they said I was basically responding to all their questions with sarcastic jokes… I guess the “true me” was coming through :) Then I was given general anesthesia and was out.
• Removal of haglan’s deformity—irregular bone growth on my heel that is the result of my years of achilles tendonitis.
• Flexor hallucis longus (FHL) tendon transfer—they harvested a tendon behind my big toe to lace into the achilles tendon. Basically they drill a hole in my heel and pull that tendon through, which serves as the new anchor. The bone will grow around it to secure the connection.
• Achilles debridement—small cuts are made to the tendon, which stimulates an in-growth of blood vessels and results in a healing response.

I vomited about 6 times after waking up, went home about an hour later. Went right to sleep for about 5 hrs. Watched the Celtics-Lakers game, then the trouble began.

I tried to fall asleep at midnight, but could only sleep for about 30-45 minutes before the pain woke me back up. I took some of the percoset they prescribed @ 5am, but it didn’t help too much. I struggled through it until 6am when I had Shannon go get valium prescription filled, I was writhing in pain waiting for her to get back. Once I got that stuff in my system, I fell asleep until 9am, and my pain level was lowered.

I called the doc, he called me back around noon and he told me a lot of the post-op pain I’m feeling is attributed to the bone work he did. He said today + tomorrow are going to be rough from a pain standpoint, but from there it should slowly subside.

I go in to see him in 2 weeks to get staples out, and then he’ll recast me for another 2 weeks or so. Then I’ll be in a boot for a few weeks before starting physical therapy, around week 6. He thinks there’s a good chance I’ll get back to 100% percent strength, but that’ll be about a year(!) out…