Thank you Tokuna! Your support is greatly appreciated.
With your tutorial Memonic is now usable in Japanese, too. The Memonic site is currently not (yet) available in Japanese, but a quick look at that tutorial and our friends in Japan may use our service, too.
May be you would like to volunteer to give us a hand translating the site to Japanese (or any other language). Get in touch with us!
Next week Patrice will give a presentation on testing at the renowned Internet Briefing Group here in Zurich. He will address a wide variety of testing issue from frameworks, to unit and functional testing and his experiences with testing here at Nektoon and previously at local.ch.
Register directly on the Internet Briefing website (Site and presentation in German)
For people not able to join discusses on his private blog testing in a series of posts covering almost all aspects of web testing.
“When our first parents were driven out of Paradise, Adam is believed to have re-marked to Eve: ‘My dear, we live in an age of transition’.” (Inge 1929)
We started out a couple of months ago with this series on scalable startups with a reflection on organizations as lump of butter in a sea of milk. Organizations are social arrangements. Hence our next focus was the core constituent of any organization: Its people. A well-crafted strategy is worthless without a committed crew. The focus on people is core to what we do. Nonetheless, an organization is no end in itself. The fuel that drives the engine forward is customer needs. We cherish users like nothing else: They come first.
We argued forcefully for smaller organizations. Instead of large anonymous corporate monsters we made a case for smaller and nimbler units. We also outlined how to maximize involvement and reduce the useless part of management: Let people decide. To put these decisions into action we rely on a project methodology – Scrum – that finely aligns overall goals, immediate tasks, people and resources.
A particular issue we dealt with is how to get work done. Instead of word wilderness and excel wasteland we draw on the advantages of Wikis for documentation and a powerful task tracking tool. Both tool sets are completely web-based and accessible from everywhere.
In terms of actual setup and operation of an online platform we learned a lesson or two from our previous engagement at local.ch. A must is a shared nothing architecture plus automated building of the software application. To ensure consistency and reliability we made testing a daily priority.
The virtualization options available today are essential for a startup. We can cut down very considerably on our asset investment in servers and other bulky infrastructure items.
The outlined setup of a scalable startup is very much the realization of what Peter Drucker sketched out in his essay on The coming of the new organization over twenty years ago:
“The typical large business 20 years hence will have fewer than half the levels of management of its counterpart today, and no more than a third the managers. In its structure, and in its management problems and concerns, it will bear little resemblance to the typical manufacturing company, circa 1950, which our textbooks still consider the norm. Instead it is far more likely to resemble organizations that neither the practicing manager nor the management scholar pays much attention to today: the hospital, the university, the symphony orchestra. For like them, the typical business will be knowledge-based, an organization composed largely of specialists. … For this reason, it will be what I call an information-based organization.”
A little over two decades later, the startling development of the Internet has driven much of the transformation from an industry-based economy to an information-based economy. Multilevel hierarchies have given way to clusters of business units coordinated by market mechanisms rather than by layers of middle management. The large enterprise structures designed for the business environment of the 1950s and 1960s – firms that typically sought economies of scale through central planning and control mechanisms – are quite likely not the most adroit forms at meeting the current competitive environment that demands both efficiency and effectiveness. Companies track opportunities and resources on a global scale. In an attempt to maximize return on assets, firms perform only those functions for which they possess or can develop expert skills. Activities that can be performed quicker, more effectively or at lower cost by others are outsourced. An intricate network of formal and informal relations ties the firm together. The momentum is paced by information technology.
Back in 1978 Hiltz and Turoff summarized this phenomenon as follows:
“We will become the Network Nation, exchanging vast amounts of both information and socio-emotional communications with colleagues, friends, and ‘strangers’ who share similar interests. ... we will become a ‘global village.’ ... An individual will, literally, be able to work, shop, or be educated by or with persons anywhere in the nation or in the world.”
True.
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Series Overview
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Drucker P.F., “The Coming of the New Organization”, Harvard Business Review, January - February 1988, pp. 45-53.
Hiltz S.R. and Turoff M., The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer, London: Addison-Wesley, 1978.
Inge W.R., Dean of St.Paul’s London, Assessments and Anticipations, London, 1929.
Project fiascos usually have managerial consequences, and it was only a matter of time before the ripples from the great computer revolution produced a metamorphosis in the way large and complex IT projects are managed.
Luckily for us, this happened well before we were born.
That was back in a time when computers were the size of a truck. Beasts such as Univac and IBM 700s or on the other side a URAL-2 computer from the Soviet Union.
The invention of computers was closely followed by its Siamese twin: IT project failures. The history of information science is littered with such examples.
Back in the fifties and sixties line managers would perform the work required by his line organization and then throw the “ball” over the fence hoping that someone from IT development would catch it. Once thrown over the fence the line manager would wash his hands off any responsibility. In case something went wrong because the ball was no longer in his yard. The IT people claimed that the requirements were subpar and threw the ball back. However, the real problem with this approach was that the actual customer had no single contact for their questions.
This debate generated some notable books. One I like particularly is Fred Brooks’ “The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering”. It is based on his experiences at managing the IBM OS/360 project.
Back in the nineties a couple of people started to look over the fence to Japanese product engineering and software development techniques. One such technique is called Sashimi. Out of this technique grew Scrum.
The basic issue with the traditional waterfall models of project management is their focus on quality and low cost. The scrum inventors realized that software projects need in addition speed and flexibility. And they observed that there are people actually doing the project work and there are others with a more casual interest in the project’s outcome:
A pig and a chicken are walking down a road. The chicken looks at the pig and says, "Hey, why don't we open a restaurant?" The pig looks back at the chicken and says, "Good idea, what do you want to call it?" The chicken thinks about it and says, "Why don't we call it 'Ham and Eggs'?" "I don't think so," says the pig, "I'd be committed, but you'd only be involved." (Quelle)
The “pigs” are committed to building the software, while everyone else – “chickens” – is just interested but sort of indifferent to the outcome – they never committed themselves fully. This distinction plus the particular agile setup of the methodology are the distinctive marks of Scrum. Today a growing body of evidence suggests that agile methods greatly improve software quality and project success rates.
At local.ch we were using agile methods, building the platform in release cycles of about 4 weeks. Over time some teams started to use Scrum. At Nektoon we set out to apply Scrum fully right from the start.
How do we do it?
First we fixed late last year the strategic goals for 2009. These goals have been broken down into a roadmap for the year. Example: We fixed last year the goal of a beta release late spring. Today we’re one two-week sprint off this goal.
The next level is our product backlog. Here we write down the big tasks. We refer to them as stories. For each story we award a point on a scale from 1 to 5 as an indication of its complexity and difficulty.
Every other Monday morning we sit together and sort through this product backlog. First we prioritize and then in a second step we pick the stories for our next two-week sprint. In turn each story will be split into tasks. For each task we allocate an estimate on the number of hours required for completion. Then we go and work.
Important: We decided to do this not just for engineering stories but for business stories, too. Example: For marketing purposes we currently are producing a brief video clip. Thus we created a story “Video Clip”. This story and associated tasks are part of the current sprint.
Then there is the issue of controlling: Every morning we sit together and quickly go through three questions: What did I do yesterday, what will I do today, is there anything blocking me? To update everybody we create a status update in our Wiki (More on that in the next blog post).
At the end of each sprint we go through each story, demo the developed features or present the business related stories. This is important to get a feedback on overall progress.
You might say for a startup with just five people on its payroll, this is a bit too much. We think it isn’t. The pace and rhythm we set now for our company will be the pace and rhythm of our company in the future. We try to achieve a couple of simple things with this approach:
Next in the series how to build a scalable startup: Abolish MS Office.
This post may be reduced to the max: Hire better than yourself.
A startup is like an extreme sports crew doing team bungy jumping in the morning, some swamp soccer for lunch and a bit of high-risk river rafting in the afternoon to get clean again.
Do it alone? No chance.
To succeed you’d better be a good team. A really good team, actually. Your survival depends on your teammates. So you better select your teammates carefully. And ideally they are better than you. Because the moment you jump, you want to be sure that your mates fixed the bungee rope well; because your teammate may mark the goal that you missed; because with your power subsiding, they may still plough the river’s rapids.
Obvious truths you chip in?
Yes, and yet I observed quite a number of organizations behaving quite differently indeed.
A startup experience is a roller-coaster ride of failure and success, of sensations and passion, a mix of persistence and perseverance. Simply, intense emotions. It’s fun, it’s tough, it’s rough, it’s highly rewarding. Who do you want to have with you on that journey?
Guy Kawasaki, a renowned entrepreneur, puts it this way:
“In the Macintosh Division, we had a saying, “A player hire A players; B players hire C players”--meaning that great people hire great people. On the other hand, mediocre people hire candidates who are not as good as they are, so they can feel superior to them. (If you start down this slippery slope, you'll soon end up with Z players; this is called The Bozo Explosion. It is followed by The Layoff.) I have come to believe that we were wrong--A players hire A+ players, not merely A players. It takes self-confidence and self-awareness, but it's the only way to build a great team.”
It’s a bit like recruiting a squad of first-rate people and get them to do serious stuff. It’s a bit like selecting and training a football team. The selection of who’s in is essential. Yet, the quality of the players is a necessary but not sufficient pre-condition. It requires hard training to get to the top league and remain there.
At a recent event we were asked how we did it. There is not a single answer. Rather a collection of bits and pieces that form our experience.
Most recruitment talks last about an hour. The interviewer and the interviewee talk about the latter’s CV and the future job. Both sides have a strong incentive to cheat. The employer tries to paint the future job as interesting, full of opportunities, full of promise, full of perspectives. The job applicant portrays his past accomplishments in a jubilant tone.
This is mumbo jumbo talk, an unaccommodating palaver. Both sides are not much better than a greasy backyard car dealer. And worse to come, quite often an offer is made without any further clarifications or any further talks to future co-workers. No wonder that this turns sour quickly.
First observation: Get recruiting right.
Recruiting is like a blind date. Before the date, i.e. the job interview, both sides often know as much about each other as two hormone driven singles on the way to their first date: A basic profile, i.e. CV, a couple of E-Mails, a brief instant messaging chat. And dating experience shows: It’s a bad idea to commit with your brain sedated by a couple of gin tonics. The chance to upgrade to the next level is minuscule.
Recruiting needs time. Lot’s of it: Several rounds of interviews are our norm, calling up references, serious discussions with all involved, and sufficient time to let the decision mature before even entering into contract negotiations. Both sides want to be sure that it is a fit. Once you are committed, though, you should act decisively and proceed swiftly to get your new employee on board.
This upfront investment may sound expensive. Yet, any dismissal and subsequent re-hiring are way more expensive.
Once your new colleague is joining the ranks, you must make sure he or she is integrated quickly and thoroughly into the team.
Second observation: Get the assimilation right.
Quite often your first day is nice: Some flowers on your table, a brief meeting with your new boss, an even briefer encounter with your bosses boss. The secretary – nowadays lovingly referred to as office manager – walks you around. Later you sit in your cubicle, a white page with your IT credentials in front of you and you don’t know what to do. You feel left out. Over there you hear an intense discussion, here somebody passing, nodding in your direction yet not stopping, your first assignment (read the company manuals) completed and no other assignments in sight. A growing feeling of frustration sets in.
A company is more than its products. It’s an essential set of values, of believes, of rules and process. How on earth can you let that pour soul alone?! Sure most companies offer newcomer training, some get-together. But that’s it. By far not enough to pass on the company essentials.
How to do it differently? Do all of the above plus much more: Do assign someone from the team as mentor and make him accountable for a successful assimilation program, do regular meetings with all involved, create follow-up course, go to an off-site meeting, etc. etc. Basically invest time.
I call it the bow wave recruitment process: We willingly invest upfront seemingly unreasonable amounts of time for hiring and assimilation. The alternative: jigsaw recruitment. You save a few hours and bucks upfront, but you pay dearly later: People quitting, re-hiring, and so on.
Figure 1 - Bow wave versus jigsaw recruitment strategy
In concluding, it’s like forming and sustaining a wining football team: The player selection is essential; the continuous training is as essential. You have a bunch of stars (Get rid of those that just think they are stars). Now get them to play well: The coach recognizes the specific talents of each team member, and should be able to tease out the very best of each of them and in combination between them. The main question is: How to contribute to a compact, dependable, focused and hungry team? How can we get the very best out of each other? How can we surpass ourselves and do that bungee jump, master these dangerous river rapids, and score that unscorable goal.
Next in the series how to build a scalable startup: Rule #1.
A lot of people labor their day away without much thought at what they do. They don’t take a particular interest in what they do, nor are they particularly proud on what they do. They exchange time for money.
What a waste of time, talent and work.
Example: on many Swiss trains there is a Minibar service. A little trolley serving coffee, tea, croissants in the morning, sandwiches later in the day. A steward accompanies the trolley. And these folks often look like a sheepdog on the sixth day of rain. Not a faint smile; not a hello when passing; conversation is reduced to basics: customer “Coffee”, the reply after serving “3.80 please”. Not an experience to repeat (even though the coffee served got remarkably better – and a lot more expensive).
There is the odd man out: a steward often doing the Lucerne Zurich line. He comes singing and praising the day and any of his customers. He wishes everyone a nice day whether you buy something or not, and if you buy a coffee the croissant is just a smile away. A superb steward with satisfaction in what he’s doing and pride in his work.
Why this difference between him and the rest of the stewards?
In the days when international rail travel still counted for something, the company was called SSG – Schweizerische Speisewagengesellschaft. Starting in the 90ties a series of mergers, acquisitions and rebranding followed. There was a co-operation with the railway restaurant owners, a rebranding as Passagio Rail together with a take-over by Autogrill, an Italian company, a merger with the Swiss part of Mitropa, a rebranding as Elvetino, recently it was folded back into the federal railways, and I probably miss an act or two of this saga.
Over a countless number of management changes the company has probably been reduced to a set of Excel sheets without spirit. People up in management simply pressed and press the lemon ever more based on tour reports and other filtered information. I am a regular train passenger. In the past years I never saw a manager accompanying a steward to get street (better: train) smart.
The consequences: shrinking turnover, increasing personal turnover, shrinking results, increasing management stress, evaporating company spirit, and at the end a devalued and run down company with a notable exception or two. No wonder that the company has been reshuffled about every three to four years.
It needs not to be that way.
A vocation can be more than just a work (V). Active interest in what you do and pride on what you do will change everything. Run the equation. Set interest or appeal in your work (I) and pride (P) each to zero and you have just work. Invest in both and the same amount of work will produce far superior results. No matter how you measure interest and pride, any value above zero will do the trick.
You say, tedious work like running a Minibar up and down a train can neither be interesting nor particularly satisfactory? Wrong. As student I earned my living doing exactly this: running Minibars up and down trains. At the time we had some superiors who knew how to instill a certain sense of mission in us stewards. We took a keen interest in what we did and were proud working for the railway. From time to time a superior accompanied us, improving our steward skills and praising us on our achievements. Success was celebrated and it was a fun atmosphere. Even on the fully packed Sunday evening Zurich to Geneva Intercity train Müller III and myself had much excitement working the aisles. On arriving at midnight in Geneva, we regularly booked record revenues. Something that counts, if you’re just paid by commission.
It boils down to a simple management ground rule: focus on people, not on numbers.
A more academic but exciting view on the same subject was Barry Schwartz’s talk at this year’s TED conference: let people do the right thing - focus on virtue, character and practical wisdom instead of rules, bureaucracy and incentives.
So, here we sit in an empty office, starting another company. Why do you found a company, you might wonder? Why not, we answer. How do you build a company? That response is longer than a mere sound bite.
The physical setup is quickly recounted. We sublet some space from our friends at liip. We’re grateful as this cuts through the laborious task of wiring a place, setting up Internet connectivity and getting a coffee machine. Thanks folks!
The toughest question is rather: On what kind of an intellectual, emotional and business footing do you want to ground your company? In our case we had the privilege to have worked together over at local.ch over the last four years. We wrote broadly on this over there.
You might question: What the fuzz? You are three guys in an office. Get your product done well and the rest you’ll see during the course of action! Well no, we beg to differ. Example: Two weeks ago we received a résumé. We were thrilled to see that at this early stage someone who we know only through the usual Internet watering holes often refered to a specific day of the week – “Web- {Day of the Week}” – wants to work for us at such early stages of our venture.
The trouble-free way is to look at this résumé, interview and if there's a fit, employ. A bit more laborious is to ask: What type of folks do you want to hire, what type of qualifications are you seeking, what is your people strategy? The first employees are of tremendous importance. If you mishandle the first appointments, you will seriously jeopardize your startup.
The first people in essence build the company together with you. In the moment your company steps into an accelerated growth path these folks are your essential leverage. The better they are, the better you will be able to sustain a high growth rate and create a sustainable longterm business.
We’re in for the long haul…
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