“There isn’t a shortage of developers and designers. There’s a surplus of founders.”

He makes a compelling argument as to the “why” :

The cost of starting a company has collapsed. It’s now just (minimal) salaries. For entrepreneurs, desks are free, hosting is free, marketing is online, and company setup is cheap.

Raising the first $25K for product development is easy – join an incubator. Raising the next $100K is easy – investors are following the incubators with automatic notes. Building a product and launching a product are easy – develop on Open Source Stacks, host on Amazon, launch on Facebook, Android or iOS, get your early traction.*

Getting real traction is hard. Raising millions of dollars is hard. Building a sustainable, long-term company is hard.

Basically, he makes the point that if you’re pre-traction, you have to expect to give up a lot more equity to grow your company than if you’ve already got traction.  In the microcosm of the overall market that I see, in professional services, you could easily argue the surplus of founders argument. If you consider all the individual contractors as “founders” that haven’t gotten traction yet.

We’ve always felt that it was important to hire people who valued being part of a team, and building something bigger than themselves.  Being part of a team enables us all to execute at a higher level for ourselves and our customers. It makes it easier to take a vacation and still sleep well at night.  It makes it easier to get health insurance.  It is a long list of benefits to being part of a firm.  Including, building value that is sustainable even after the point when you’re ready to move on to another phase in your life. For builders, this is an attractive proposition.

No related posts.

The article lays out some very good reasons why top talent gets frustrated with big companies. But the focus is still too much on secondary effects.  My thoughts on a few of the points:

#1 : Bureaucracy. “No one likes rules that make no sense. But, when top talent is complaining along these lines, it’s usually a sign that they didn’t feel as if they had a say in these rules.”  Actually, there are just too many rules.  Big companies have the resources to actually have bureaucracy that makes the lives of top talent easier, not harder.  But they don’t take advantage of that capability, because it shows up as a hard expense that can be cut.  When the economy is strong you see startups and smaller firms offering free dry cleaning or laundry service (or if not free, convenient in-office pickup).  There are free meals and caffeine at the office.  This is convenient for employees and saves them time out of their lives.  But for some reason most companies cut back both on the perks, and on the benefits of large size, as they get bigger.  Instead of requiring employees to fill out a lot of paperwork for expense reports, make it easy for them to send in their expenses and pay lower-skilled labor to process them.  Or set policies that require fewer receipts for reimbursement and thereby reduce the total bureaucracy.  Use per diems.  Have a travel group that adds value in booking and rebooking flights and hotel reservations.  Have administrative help that helps produce critical paperwork without a lot of barriers to entry and TPS forms to fill out. These are trivial examples, but wherever you can reduce the exposure your team has to bureaucracy or administrative work, the more productive and happy they’ll be.

#2 : Finding the right project.  “they usually don’t have people going around to their best and brightest asking them if they’re enjoying their current projects or if they want to work on something new…” This item in particular seems hopelessly vague.  It almost sounds like the idea is that the top talent shouldn’t have to do any of the tough, dreary projects.  Who wouldn’t want to opt out of the project that takes them to Ottawa in the winter? (No offense intended, Ottawa!)  But there’s a kernel of truth within this point:  big companies have really interesting jobs to offer high performers.  But they (typically) don’t.  Those top performers aren’t afraid to ask for a better assignment or put their name in for promotion.  But they’re told they have to wait – “we don’t promote someone twice within one year.”  Or “you can’t get a raise of more than 3% a year”.  So they realize that to move up, they have to get some experience and then move out.  Possibly getting hired back in later on.   It isn’t that no one gets these fast-track promotions and assignments at big companies, but the percentages are vanishingly small.  The top 1% not the top 10 or 20 percent.

#3 : Poor Annual Performance Reviews.  “You would be amazed at how many companies do not do a very effective job at annual performance reviews.”  Actually, no one with a job would be amazed by this.   Performance reviews are a broken process at nearly every company I’ve heard of, let alone worked at.  There are companies trying to fix that, like Rypple (now part of SalesForce), but the fix isn’t actually about annual reviews.  The fix is more feedback.  Reviews are largely a waste of time, and condescending to the employee.  The employer or manager sits in judgment and the employee is judged and much good feedback throughout the year is saved for an annual review instead of happening spontaneously.  The Annual Review becomes a marker around which unrealistic expectations get set – employees expecting golden reviews and promotions, employers disappointing them with perhaps neither.   The review process can make employers look quite petty.

So what’s the fix?  When you have negative feedback for an employee, tell them right away.  Tell them what they’re screwing up.  While they can still do something about it.  When they’re doing something great, tell them quickly, while it is fresh on your (and their) minds.  Make sure other people hear about it so that good behavior becomes infectious.  We don’t do “reviews” at BP3, but our team communicates.  They can call to talk to me anytime, and I don’t hesitate to hit them up on Instant Messenger or the phone.  We don’t do raises on an annual schedule, we just do them when we think the timing is right.  We do regular bonuses which force us to acknowledge good or bad performance monetarily, in case our words – spoken and typed – aren’t getting the message across – good and bad.

#4 : No Career Development.  Well, this is actually nearly impossible in small companies to do in a structured way. The promise a small company can hold out is that as the company grows, opportunities for employees will grow as well.  A lot of the career development is personal growth and attacking ambiguous problems (filling in the white space).  At a large company, I’d recommend managers talk to their top talent about their own aspirations for those people.  What do you want to help them achieve?  Don’t expect them to come to the table with an answer when they may not have a sense of what is possible.  But experienced executives and managers do know – and can help lay out a path or ladder that actually motivates talented people. But keep in mind, there are always some people who aren’t motivated by a ladder, or competition.  They’re good at what they do, and they know it, but they don’t care about your external validation of that performance.  These are the toughest people to keep happy on a purely professional basis.  If you have one of these high performers on your team, make friends.  Friendship and loyalty may be the only thing that keeps you two working together. And someday you may want to get a job working for them instead of the other way around!

#5 :  Shifting Whims.  “The challenge for most organizations is not setting up a strategic prioirty, like establishing an incubator, but sticking with it a year or two from now.  Top talent hates being ‘jerked around.’”  Well, this one is spot on.  What’s worse than not having a good recruiting program?  Setting one up and then stopping it 3 months in.  It takes time to recruit the right talent, develop a talent pipeline that works.  When you shut it down for more than a week or two, starting up again takes another 3 months or more for the pipeline to pan out.  You’ve lost all the momentum.  Having the rug pulled out from under something you’re excited about sucks.

#8 :  The Missing Vision Thing.  This one can be hard when you’re smaller.  It is helpful to have a humble or modest bearing in general.  Under-promise, over-deliver.  But as you grow, as things start to fall into place, you can share the vision with your early conspirators (your team!).  Eventually you step out and communicate with the world at large.  The same approach works well for team-level vision at a company.  But big companies can have bigger visions of how they’ll change the world or the landscape.  Then the real trouble coming up with something that is expansive without sounding too trite or generic (I don’t have to name names, we can all think of a few in this category).

It is just a matter of using your size to your benefit, and to the benefit of your top talent.

No related posts.

The Genome Report is 68 pages of great reading.  Lots of details go into the general conclusions that you see in the info graphic.  It is included at the bottom of this post as well.  Interestingly, they go even farther than just producing a report. There’s an a survey you can fill out, the startup compass, which will help determine how your startup compares to other startups they did their research on for the Genome project.  I went partway through this survey myself, but at some point it becomes apparent that it is not really a good match for services businesses, it is really about product businesses.  And that’s fine – it is still far and away the most interesting pattern-matching tool I’ve seen for startups.

And the key finding seems to be exactly what Austin Startup focused on:

One of the big findings amongst the data was that almost 7 out of 10 companies failed due to premature scaling or inconsistency. Peeling back the data, the lessons seem really simple: don’t act like a big company.

Fascinating stuff… or scary stuff, if you’re running against the statistics they’ve collected… The statistics definitely back the idea of the lean startup.

(Side note for BPM practitioners… how can we apply this kind of data and thinking to our own BPM efforts as we grow them from projects to programs and beyond?)

Startup Genome Report 01

Related posts:

1. Startup Austin
2. Lean Startup SXSW: Introduction
3. Austin Chamber of Commerce backing a Startup District

Fabienne: Whose motorcycle is this?
Butch: It’s a chopper, baby.
Fabienne: Whose chopper is this?
Butch: It’s Zed’s.
Fabienne: Who’s Zed?
Butch: Zed’s dead, baby. Zed’s dead.

- Pulp Fiction

There have been raft loads of articles and blogs written about “Millenials” over the last few years (not to mention Generations X and Y).  Chris Taylor has decided to take his shot, on BPM for Real-  “Does Generation Z have a ’2-second advantage’”?

What happens when a whole generation that has lived their entire lives with the ability to feed information to themselves (and at a time and format of their choosing) becomes the dominant group in the workforce?

My bias against these generational stereotypes is well recorded, but let’s review this one.  I expect predecessors to Generation X wondered what would happen when kids showed up at work who grew up their whole lives with a computer at home.  Of course, only a minority of kids at that point – but still more than in any previous generation.  Maybe it is because I was one of those lucky kids that I’m not particularly concerned about the changes this will effect on our society or workplace.

Chris Taylor explains:

I recently read The Two-Second Advantage, a Malcolm Gladwell-like book about how we learn and build mental models that predict what will happen next based on experience and data that arrives so quickly it would overwhelm–if not for our learned ability to work through it. Most of Generation Z has been living in a state of information overload longer than any human beings before them, and the result should be a capability to handle a complex world even better than we do. They should have more complete mental models for the workings of the world due to their ability to know whatever they choose, whenever they want. If you buy into the ideas of this book, they are likely developing a “two-second advantage” that should give them a leg up on the older generations.

Perhaps the new generation will be better equipped than the previous.  However, the world will change fast enough to make them feel as ill-equipped for the next transition as many of of those writing about Generation Z appear to feel now.  By objective measures, the rate of change appears to be increasing.

But the way information-technology-adept people deal with the world is not by addressing its complexity, typically.  It is by simplifying it.  Rather than having more complete models, they technologically adept will have meta-models that don’t require completeness.  We just had the Austin City Limits Music Festival here.  In the complete model world, I’d know pretty much all the acts performing, and that I was interested in, and on which of 8 stages they’re playing, and at what time.  I’d do my research before the concert and figure it all out in advance by sampling songs by various artists that are performing.

In the simplified world, as I’m walking to the concert I download an iPhone App that tells me what bands  are playing on what stages at what times.  I can quickly browse the bands and see if any of them appeal.  I can group-text my friends to find out what they’re listening to (more than one stage is active at the same time) – and that’s built in to the app if I don’t already use a group-texting application.  You can guess which of these two approaches describes my ACL Festival experience…

Think how “getting directions” has changed since GPS and maps have become so ubiquitous on cell phones.  You don’t really need directions, you just need a destination.  The only directions someone needs to give you are the little bits that never show up in a navigation system or map: “don’t turn in the first drive, use the second driveway”.

So the software and hardware is delivering the results of increasingly complex interactions with other systems.  Let’s face it, my iPhone computing directions to a destination using maps and GPS is much more complicated from a systems view, than someone scribbling directions on a piece of paper.  But the end-result to the user is actually simpler than the old way of doing things. I think that’s actually the metaphor to use going forward. The touch interfaces today give even infants a chance to interact – because the cause-and-effect is more clear.  So the interaction isn’t just the tactile (as it might be when they play with a physical keyboard), it is direct manipulation – something their brains are already wired to learn from.  The systems of the future (software and hardware) are likely to appeal more directly to the way our brains already work – and thus feel more natural to us, even as they get more complicated in principle, behind the scenes.

It isn’t really an issue of generational advantage- if you buy into Malcolm Gladwell’s thinking on practice – it takes about 10,000 hours to become an expert at something.  Any one, of any age, can become an expert if they put in that 10,000 hours of purposeful use with technology.  There’s no reason to let your kid be the only one in the house with a “2 second advantage”.  I watched my own parents leapfrog technology shifts.  They both bought iPhones before most of my friends.  They still have trouble using Microsoft Windows.  But they use their iPhones and iPad, and Kindle, just fine.  Don’t let these generational tags define you, or your views of others.  Besides, the idea of “2 seconds” being a short time is already a sort of generational bias, isn’t it?  But it does roll off the tongue better than a 2 nanosecond advantage.

Related posts:

1. Management of the Facebook Generation?
2. Another Year, Another Post on Millenials
3. Wait, is this a Positive GenX Reference? #startups

The company, which launched its service last year, received the funding from InterWest Partners of Menlo Park, Calif., and Austin Ventures. It has raised a total of $16 million.

Spredfast’s software lets clients manage campaigns and conversations on social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and blogging platforms. Rather than going to each social site, Spredfast lets users publish and monitor social activity from one central platform.

[...]

“This is a big step for us, and we’re ready for the next stage of growth,” said CEO Rod Favaron, who joined the company in February. Favaron was previously CEO of Lombardi Software Inc., which was acquired in 2010 by IBM Corp. for an undisclosed price.

It is both a vote of confidence in Spredfast, and in Austin.  In 2010 it was common to read about the dearth of funding in Austin, but almost ever since then, we’ve been seeing more news about funding in Austin than I can remember since the ’90s.

In a followup to the previous post about recruiting talent to Austin, I think news like the above fundraising does more to recruit industry veterans to Austin than the recruiting trip they recently embarked on.  The coverage on MarketWatch wasn’t flattering:

In fact, I have to report that the Austin group’s recruiting night in San Francisco was something between a bust and a learning experience for the group.

It sounds like the two main events were, basically, a tough learning experience.  But hopefully the CEOs took advantage of the trip to prearrange a bunch of meetings with likely recruits rather than just depending on the group events.  Still, the target and the optics are all wrong.  Instead of getting a story about what a great place Austin is to work, and that people are coming here to work at our high tech companies, we got an article essentially about indifference in the Bay Area and how hard it is to find talent in Austin (which isn’t quite as dire as the article makes it out).

Imagine if these same CEOs had gone on a tour of Universities in California (or other states) to recruit talent?  To put the idea out there for college students to think about Austin as a destination.  University is the right place to strike.  The experienced industry veterans don’t need to go to a job fair to find companies in Austin – they’ll leverage their connections to find a job.  Its the college kids who need some help discovering Austin and Austin companies as a place to land.

The rest of the article focuses on “solutions”… and here’s one perhaps the 30 tech CEOs could get behind – an Austin-funded scholarship at several universities – giving us some press out there on the coasts.

Update:  This article on Austin startups finding funding via Angel List is probably relevant as well.  It just speaks to how the world of fundraising is changing, and there are fewer barriers than ever for Austin entrepreneurs:

Even for Austin startups that aren’t actively raising money, AngelList is becoming a way to get on the radar of potential investors, partners and customers.

Bill Boebel, an Austin entrepreneur and angel who has invested in 15 companies, calls it the “LinkedIn for startups.”

“It’s a startup’s resume,” he said. “Just like when you’re recruiting an employee and want to learn a little more about that person, it’s a great way to find out more about a company.”

And further, Ravikant says:

“Entrepreneurs inside Silicon Valley already have access to investors here, but it can be harder for a promising startup in Austin to break in,” he said.

“We have helped Austin startups get exposure to Silicon Valley and New York investors, and we also give those investors the lay of the land in Austin.”

Has there been a better time to invest in people and talent?

Related posts:

1. Investing in Austin, Investing in People
2. Austin is a Great Place to Start Your Company
3. Investing in People Revisited

“These events are about Austin making a pretty loud statement in the Bay Area,” said Julie Huls, president, Austin Technology Council.  “Texas is a New Economy State, and we have a killer combination to support it: high-paying tech jobs, fast-growing companies, a low cost of living, and a relaxed way of life.  Over 100 of our area CEOs were together in May at an ATC CEO Summit and one key call to action was to bring more tech talent to Austin.  We are proud to deliver on that idea in a couple weeks in San Francisco and Sunnyvale.”

Some of the best companies in Austin are represented in this trip – and some great CEOs for sure.  These are people that Austin has a lot to be thankful for.  I may not be sure that sending the CEOs en masse is the best way to recruit tech talent to Austin, but I certainly don’t blame Austin CEOs for recruiting in other markets.  From my time at Trilogy and Lombardi, and now BP3, I know a thing or two about recruiting talent to a firm.  I think this event in the Bay Area is more about news cycle than actual recruiting.  Hoping to plant the seeds for the future.  Clearly there is a need for more skilled people in Austin:

Austin currently has several dozen technology companies hiring 40 or more new programmers each.

Integrating new talent into Austin is clearly good for the local economy and ecosystem.  I was part of one of these waves of immigration to Austin back in the mid-90′s – and the imports are now the CEOs and hiring managers at literally dozens of local companies.  But the long term solution to this problem should be a mix of approaches – recruiting and retaining talent from universities, industry, and various locations inside and outside of Austin. Too many of the startups in Austin have stopped college recruiting and really developing their own talent – which is easy to understand when a company has a horizon to exit of less than four years. But it isn’t just college recruiting – it is also hiring people with experience who have the potential to do more – and then challenging them to do it!  Don’t just hire Ruby on Rails experts and developers – hire people that you believe can become Ruby on Rails experts.

The strategy we take at BP3 isn’t to import talent – but to hire our talent where they live – so long as they’re willing to travel to customer sites.  If they live in California, that’s where we hire them and where they base out of.  If we hire them in Minneapolis, that’s where they’re based out of.  It is actually part of our goal to have geographic diversity, and it means that we can hire people that other companies can’t touch as easily. But it has a bigger benefit for our clients-  as we add staff, we’re more likely to be able to serve our customers with local staff rather than a team that has to travel to be there in person.  High touch, high value, we like to call it.

Vivek Wadhwa’s article in the Washington Post was a brilliant assessment of the “talent shortage” in the USA – first by calling out the objectives of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness:

The council is holding a series of meetings to find ways to fix a perceived national problem: an engineering shortage. Otellini and the council claim that such a shortage seriously threatens America’s ability to create jobs, and that the U.S. risks losing its innovation edge to China and India, which are producing a million engineers per year — 12 times as many as the United States.

But next, by explaining what is wrong with this logic:

The graduation statistics most commonly touted then were: China graduates 600,000 per year, India, 350,000, and the U.S., 70,000. We found that, in 2004, when comparing apples with apples, the U.S. had graduated more engineers (roughly 140,000) than India had (roughly 120,000).

Wow.  Wadhwa’s analyis just does not agree with conventional wisdom.  Wadhwa predicts that great numbers of engineers in India and China will face unemployment or jobs in fields unrelated to engineering.  This is where he cuts to the heart of it:

Then there is the question of whether there is a shortage of engineers in the United States. Salaries are the best indicator of shortages. In most engineering professions, salaries have not increased more than inflation over the past two decades. But in some specialized fields of software engineering in Silicon Valley and in professions such as petroleum engineering, there have been huge spikes.

So, there are shortages in a few critical areas, but overall there is not a shortage of engineering talent.  Again, this matches with the data that I’ve been seeing.  It also better reflects the proliferation of engineering-derivative majors in US universities.

If I were these local Austin CEOs, however, I’d also be shopping in other parts of the country outside of Silicon Valley and Austin, and I might also focus more time on universities – graduates are more likely to relocate and take a chance on a place like Austin.  But that requires a long-term strategy toward staffing that not all companies have.

I’m hoping that companies in Austin, and in general, will start taking the time to invest more in the people they’ve got, and hiring more people with potential, rather than just looking to find someone who has done it all before.

Related posts:

1. Investing in Austin, Investing in People, Part 2
2. Good News, Bad News for Austin Employment
3. Investing in People Revisited

• 77% of respondents agree that there will be a shortage of technically skilled talent in the future.
• 71% of respondents agree that there is a shortage of technically skilled talent at the present time in Austin.
• More than half of respondents believe that talent issues have limited their organization’s productivity and efficiency.

Future Talent Shortage:  I think the overall concern for the future is valid – but overstated.  Technology and productivity advancements often have surprisingly dislocating affects on employment.  In the 1990′s, VLSI and CAD tools got to the point where 4 Electrical Engineers could do the work that had required 100 engineers just a couple years previously.  I watched my fellow class of ’94 graduates in EE go into software companies instead of working for Intel and the like – there just weren’t the number of new jobs in electrical engineering and chip design that there had been in previous years.  In Austin I’ve followed the chip business with some interest – and I would venture to say that the number of chip designers employed here probably declined into the early 2000′s… until the market changed.  Now there are a lot of different chip applications – mobile devices and analog applications have created opportunities for a lot more applications – and for more engineers.  And, with the tools at our disposal today, it may make economic sense to tweak chip designs for much smaller volumes than in 1995.

What’s my point?  Technology employment is volatile.  That results in under-representation in STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) majors, and it results in people with little STEM education joining STEM-related fields in boom times… and it results in people with STEM backgrounds exiting these fields when the boom eventually turns to bust.

When I was entering college I heard and read the same concerns about there not being enough engineers.  Somehow we made it to 2011 anyway. All I know is, STEM majors are going to be good choices for college students for many years to come.

Shortage of Talent in Austin Right Now:  I don’t see it.  I was just talking with someone today at a local software company who commented how hard it was to find the right people in Austin.  I expressed sympathy – after all, BPM is a bit of a niche business,  so I can relate in that not everyone is an expert in BPM software.  But his complaint was that people don’t spend enough time retraining themselves to be prepared for the technology shifts – learning a new platform or language.  He has a point – if you’re in high tech and you’re not willing to invest in your own skills you’re making a mistake.  But it seemed clear his expectation was that his company shouldn’t have to make an investment in someone ramping up.

But, on the other hand.  This reminds me a bit of companies who hire interns but don’t expect to teach the intern anything.   If you’re hiring high tech workers, you have to be willing to mix it up.  Sure, hire a few people with expertise in the relevant technologies.  But don’t be afraid to hire people with varying degrees of learning curve required to be proficient in the job.  We hired an intern this summer who didn’t know how to do what we wanted him to do this summer.  And he figured it out.  And I dare say he probably has a bit more confidence that the next time someone asks him to just figure something out, he will.

Talent Issues Limiting Growth.  All I can say here is – developing talent and growing costs money.  For many years, many companies have gotten by with minimum investment in people.  I don’t mean training classes.  I mean investing in real opportunities for people to learn by doing as well as training.  And then investing enough in retaining talent so that the investment in education and self-improvement pays off.

I have to quote a telling paragraph from the original post:

Brooking’s analysis opens up several discussion points. With diversity and the educational pieces presumably in place, what then are the  obstacles to acquiring the right talent? Are companies just terrible at recruiting? Are all the good engineers are in Silicon Valley or overseas? Perhaps even more provocative, are companies really investing in people and training their employees to become more highly-skilled instead of sourcing things out to get the razor-thin margins necessary to sustain their models? Whatever the case, the NYT surfaced data from the National Employment Law Project [below] showing low-end jobs are actually the ones making a comeback, again leading me to question how aggressive some companies are really approaching the recruiting process.

Great work.  By next summer, I’ll report on some of our own talent investments at BP3.  Maybe it is just the lack of VC funding that allows us to look further out for our investments than just the next year.  We have time to invest and grow with the team we hire.

Related posts:

1. Another Take on the Talent Shortage
2. In the End, it is All about People
3. Takeaways from Driven 2009: Leadership and Talent are in Demand

I know I’m getting repetitive. It is with great intent. Whatever amount you’re getting out and talking with prospects, customers, employees, recruits, competitors, press, investors, potential investors … it’s never enough. [...]

For almost everybody else I work with I know that a little more dedication to coffee meetings would have a positive impact. Your biz dev discussion that goes nowhere today will plants seeds in somebody’s mind 18 months from now.

Yet most of us resist the coffee meetings seeing them as a distraction from: shipping our release, refining our business plan, working on our new website, etc. You have to do both. Wake up early. Turn coffee into late-night drinks. Never eat lunch alone.

I couldn’t agree more.  Early in my career I didn’t understand the value of eating lunch with colleagues and friends other than as entertainment.  I didn’t understand the value of meeting with people outside my firm.  But I learned. I learned that these incidental, accidental contacts can be very valuable.  So I started behaving in a way that increases the odds of these happy coincidences.  Meeting people for coffee, organizing lunch meetings, meeting with people in various cities when I travel, and making sure I meet with people outside my own business and my own industry. Also, being open to take meetings from people when I don’t see a direct relevance to my business.

On the whole, it has paid off handsomely.  At a minimum, I’ve become much better informed about Austin, about my industry, and about other people’s businesses.  At best, I’ve formed connections that will help BP3 and my own career for years to come.  I’ve certainly managed to hire some fantastic people on the basis of personal and professional connections made over coffee (and lunch).

So get out there and buy some coffee.

(disclosure: the author owns a few coffee-related stocks, and he is definitely talking up his own book! )

Related posts:

1. All-Hands Meeting: We should have done this sooner!
2. This Captures Exactly How I Feel About Lunch
3. Stop Working at Starbucks

It’s an important hurdle for the vendor. It’s an important hurdle for the customer.

Attitudes change. Tensions evaporate. Management and end-users are happy. The euphoria kicks in.
Pink tinted glasses get put on again. Life is lovely

“Go Live” is probably the most interesting time in the life of a project.

The future looks bright. People start talking about replicating success, excellence centres, rolling it out to the whole organisation, to their customer’s organisations, to their customer’s customers… world domination.

But for a developer, “Go-live” is just a formal milestone in the project. You get the pat on the back from management, enjoy 5 minutes in the sunshine, and then back to the drawing board.

I think that one of the great failures of many consulting firms and IT groups is that they don’t celebrate enough at go-live.  Although, as Adam puts it, the real milestone for developers is dev-complete-  at BP3 we always reward Go-Live. Because dev-complete isn’t the finish line.  It is close, but it isn’t the finish.  And getting software to production in Fortune 500 companies is hard.  It is worthy of celebration.

Do software developers celebrate finishing a product release?

Do sales people celebrate making the sale?

You bet they do.  It is important to keep this culture of celebrating success in consulting as well.  Don’t let Go-Live just be another day on the calendar.  The team that got you there are your heroes, celebrate accordingly.

Related posts:

1. Bruce Silver: Process Mapping Training for Blueworks Live #bwlive
2. In-depth Review of IBM Blueworks Live
3. Sandy Kemsley’s Coverage of BlueWorks Live

Seriously? 106?!

We have a process improvement case study.   Someone scheduled our all-hands meeting for BP3 in the midst of a heat wave that has set records all year long in Austin, TX.

A quick analysis was performed – corrections for the next process run were clear – schedule later in the year (October), pick a different location (Minnesota for example).  But the real question is how to fix the immediate process failure.  Sure the meeting itself was in the air conditioned confines of the fabulous Stephen F. Austin… but outside was an oven.

Not to worry.  Process improvement yielded a sure-fire way to cool down, with a low probability of failure:

Sure, not everyone jumped in the lake, but many of us embraced this process improvement with gusto, as you can see.

If the lake didn’t work, we could call in reinforcements.

Related posts:

1. All-Hands Meeting: We should have done this sooner!
2. Case Management Mentor Meeting
3. Good Process Collaboration Case Study