To the crux of the matter…I updated my latest job title and to my one at Technovated and wanted to add Technovated as a company profile. But it seems that technovated.com is already associated with Open Box Software, a South African company who Gareth and some of my previous colleagues used to work for. Because our domain is associated with their profile I can actually edit The Open Box company profile…not too good if I was malicious or a previous employee with some major gripes!

Also, for some other strange reason, the social network kindo.com which a few of us built is also associated with Open Box. What?!

So, I am unable to create a new company profile for Technovated because our domain is already being “used” and the same applies to Kindo!

I think there are some seriously bad SQL joins going on somewhere…did someone say amateur hour?

About us:
http://www.technovated.com/who-we-are/

About the position:
You’d be a category manager for an ecommerce project, or work on social media for other projects, but probably end up doing both if you’re ambitious.

This includes managing and delivering e-commerce content, really getting into a niche and understanding it, working with technical people to scale up our application, blogging, community PR, community outreach and creating, planning and realising additional marketing activities. Basically you get to grow and build something without having to fund it…

You:

1. Have a good working knowledge or experience (but at least genuine interest) of the Internet, ecommerce, social networking, web 2.0 and blogging
2. Are not afraid of keyboards – touch typing a major plus
3. Are interested in entrepreneurship (experience would be great)
4. Are fluent in English
5. Have great communications skills (written and oral)
6. Get get things done
7. Are accountable for the work you do
8. Have read this page

We offer:

1. A friendly, informal and creative environment with lots of opportunities for growth and more responsibility
2. Very little bureaucracy
3. Working with experienced people who have built, scaled and sold a global web application
4. A three month internship and the potential for growth into a full time position
5. An internship remuneration and additional bonus scheme based on achieving agreed targets

We are interested in what websites you have started, been involved in, designed or promoted or simply your favourite sites on the net.

Process and contact details are here.

We’d love to hear from you

XXXX XXXX, Dec 03 03:02 pm (PST):

Hi Stephen,

Dropbox quota is calculated based on the total contents of your Dropbox. A 2GB account cannot sync any more than 2GB, including space taken up by shared folders. This policy exists in order to prevent people from giving themselves unlimited space by stacking free accounts and shared folders.

We realize it’s inconvenient and we’re working to release a new plan that will allow better sharing of a quota pool, but that’s not available yet.

You can certainly share a single account between all your employees instead of sharing folders. We don’t restrict the number of users on an account. This solution does not work for everyone though, as sharing accounts means that the people you share with have full read/write access to every file in the account.

If you feel you were misled about this behavior, I will gladly issue you a refund. I’m sorry I can’t do more, and that the limits of our system have caused you problems. If there’s anything else you need, please let me know.

Best,
XXXX XXXX

What a great example of customer service too…

So the project looked as follows:

1. Review codebase
2. Review problems with mail delivery
3. Suggest improvements, scope and people needed to bring the project in under budget
4. Do interviews for technical people (ended up interviewing 6 people in a day for 2 roles)
5. Get all code under control, install code revision and management, get developers working on new version of project
6. Implement email fixes to get email into Inboxes
7. Project manage for weekly updates to client

One of the things that made the project manageable from my perspective was hiring the right people from the beginning, so that my work was limited to communication and prioritisation, which is how it should be. My general point of view is that if a product or project manager is spending more than 20% to 30% of their time on any one project, then something is wrong. Maybe 40% on the outside is acceptable for a really technical project, or one heavy in stakeholder communication, but then that’s really becoming an account director or similiar.

So, once the tech people were bedded down and we’d established the priorities for the project, we moved into a nice agile routine which got the project done well under time, making the client happy. Principle lesson and take away – hire the right people from the beginning, and life is easy. Do the opposite, and projects can be hell

So deliverables for this short project were as follows:

1. Review systems and infrastructure
2. Review current search engine optimisation
3. Review site usability and user journeys
4. Deliver document which outlined improvements on all of the above, as well as wireframes for primary layout and pages

The good news is that the client team has been slowly chipping away at the list of suggestions, and they’re starting to make real progress and get search engine results, which is awesome! Take home for me was: persistent, consistent effort is often the only way things get done “in house” as there are often so many competing priorities that the only way to move forward is with a little sculptors hammer – it takes a long time, but you eventually get your masterpiece!

Not doing #agile is like walking thru molasses with your hands behind your back, with blindfolds on, covered in treacle

Note they’re not all the same thing:
Robust is code that doesn’t break, is easily tested, scales well, and where collaboration is easy.
Fast is what it says on the tin, literally releasing new code fast and often.
Agile means being able to change direction, or make changes, quickly.

In my experience, Agile software development is the best way to enable the above – it’s a compromise between speed, collaboration and real results.

So with this engagement, the brief was to review everything (tools, processes, infrastructure, code) and to come up with a document that includes analysis and recommendations. My observation from this experience is that there is a fine line between agile development and chaos, but that this line gets thicker the more you invest in the right systems, processes, tools and infrastructure, which all enable and support doing *stuff* fast.

For example, in no particular order:

1. Testing is harder than it needs to be if there are no testing environments, unit tests, documentation of code, testing scripts, user outcomes (there are many examples, these are just a few)
2. It’s difficult to estimate and prioritise for business priority, when your list of items to work on is not prioritised or you don’t know what dependancies are
3. If you ask people to step outside of their comfort zones, more often than not you’ll be met with resistance. Use tools that make people comfortable
4. If it takes a long time or is difficult, to release a version of your software, then you’ll release less often and make more mistakes
5. If everyone understands the processes involved, you’re more likely to become more efficient. If those processes are changing or non-existent, efficiency is hard to gain.
6. If you’re going in the wrong direction, you don’t want to get there faster. If your code doesn’t support quick changes, you’re not going to be able to change direction quickly

The above are just some examples that were pertininent, so you should get the general idea.

My hope is that with the right motivation, we’ll fix the issues holding things back by setting up the right infrastructure and processes to support the business goals, and end up creating an environment that does indeed foster robust, fast, agile development.

The previous company has left them in the lurch, and from what I can tell from reviewing everything, has left them with programmatically correct code, but not a holistic approach that touches the other elements necessary to make sales over the web. For example, the markup (client side code) used in the site executes the design well enough, but does not accommodate or take into account how search engines work, and most importantly fails on some user interface / usability fronts too. It’s not a product company that sells widgets, but one which relies on personal contact with a salesman to make revenue, but where the personal contact could be first initiated over the web.

If people can’t find you on the web, then whatever your site is, and however good it is, and however much it cost you, is nigh on useless. So these are things that we’re going to be working on – the objective is to improve the organic search funnel to get more people to the site without paying anything, and to increase conversion so that when people are on the site, it does what it is supposed to do. To coin another phrase to explain things, “we want our site to be like 3 salespeople”….

And so this is the high level project breakdown:

1. Setup infrastructure to work fast and make changes quickly
2. Move CRM system over to new server to remove old service provider dependancy
3. Setup Google Analytics and Google Adwords; make them efficient
4. Transfer previous (old) website search engine juice
5. Fix markup sitewide for organic SEO
6. Improve homepage usability and conversions
7. Move content from old website to new website
8. Setup blogging platforms for CEO and company
9. Setup social media funnels for engagement and credibility
10. Create content funnel sites for SEO, client education and acquisition

As you can see, the work varies from development, to online marketing, and with a bit of social media thrown in to make the client acquisition funnel wider.

I’m really enjoying working with a group of people that understand the importance (after a little education) of a holistic approach to what they do on the web, but more importantly the recognition that it is a process that needs to fit in with whatever is already there and is not something that can be rectified overnight (without a huge capital outlay).

The web is too much of an ecosystem now to ignore how people interact with different utilities (google, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube), and thus how they directly affect the number of visitors to your site. Making sure you optimise for the funnel (into the site), and the site itself (generally usability on the site) will stand you in good stead.

Another update: This has also now started encompassing social media and software as a service consulting and implementation -> “How do we use Twitter?” and “What’s this Google Calendar thing?”….

Mode details here:
_ Official Google Blog: 30,000 new Google Apps business users at Valeo

This marks a significant moment for Google Apps, because Valeo has 30,000 Internet-connected employees, making this one of the largest enterprise deployments of Google Apps to date. Valeo is moving to the cloud with the support of Capgemini, one of the world’s most highly regarded technology advisory firms. This deployment across Valeo’s distributed workforce of 192 business entities in 27 countries and five continents demonstrates the vast scalability of Google Apps. Whether your company has just five employees in a single room, or tens of thousands of people scattered around the globe, Google Apps can easily provide powerful messaging and collaboration tools.

Hopefully this is something of a beachhead for web services as a whole…

We also need the following:

1. Allow emails from more than one account to be diverted to the system and converted into tickets which can be assigned to team members according to language.
2. Have predefined responses stored in a database which can easily be included as a basis for an email
3. Allow specific emails from specific accounts to be automatically assigned to individuals
4. Have various levels of importance for support requests
5. Should allow the creation of different groups with various role capabilities

If you have any suggestions or experience to share please let me know in the comments.

Update: we’re using eSupport

Check it out, you should start to see the first signs of our social direction, which sets us apart from being “yet another genealogy application”… 11 Languages helps too…

_ Kindo – Some new features & improvements to kindo

The kindo team is very proud to announce that we have released a number of new features which we hope will improve our users’ experience.

Firstly, we have added 3 new languages, namely Russian, Turkish & Brazilian Portuguese, which now brings the tally to 11.

Our family

Secondly, we have added a brand new page called “Our family”, where you can view the latest updates from all of your active family members. It also has a section with family statistics, so you will be able to see some interesting facts about your tree – the more data the better, so start updating those profiles