Do Business and Engineering Get Along?

A comment from David B on our recent blogpost on process fanatics got me thinking. He points out that there is often a “dichotomy in point of view and approach between technically focused people and business solutions folk. The more effectively you can get them to ‘walk a mile in each other's shoes’, so to speak, the better the odds of developing technical software solutions that meet--or even exceed--the needs of the end user.” So true!

I’ve been on both sides, and this is definitely apparent. Unfortunately, the solution is not as clear, but I think a respect for what each group brings to the table is a great place to start.

Business people think that engineers often look down on them because they don’t understand all the things the engineers do, and this makes them “stupid,” though in reality, they bring a lot to the table. Who would take that cool technology and turn it into dollars to pay those engineering salaries without all the other functions of a business?

On the other side, business people often think that engineers are putting up unnecessary roadblocks regarding what they can deliver and when. It’s easy to ask for the moon, but it’s not so easy to deliver it. Understanding a bit about the technical challenges of developing a new product would go a long way.

Do any of you work in a company where this problem has been solved or somewhat alleviated? What did you do?

-Judi

My New Favorite Product

Pebble Technology in California has developed a watch using the new Kickstarter funding platform to raise over $10 Million by 68,929 backers. KickStarter is a direct offshoot of the JOBS Act, which enables entrepreneurs access to money from non-accredited sources.

I find the Pebble watch fascinating because it is one of the first products to act as a portable display device enabling hands-free monitoring of information on your smartphone. It is an intelligent e-paper wristwatch that communicates via Bluetooth with Android and iPhone devices.

And beside the fact that it’s just a cool product, what’s also interesting is that the company is planning an SDK to further customize the product to meet user needs.

Just thought I'd share my latest gadget-lust. Let me know what yours is.

-Gary

A Celebration of the Fastest Growing Companies in CT

This week the Connecticut Technology Council held one of my favorite events – the Marcum Tech Top 40 – celebrating the 40 fastest growing technology companies in Connecticut. It’s so much fun spending an evening meeting such successful people and reconnecting with old friends. We have been lucky to have the opportunity to work with many of the people in the room.

The diversity of the companies is amazing: from online travel service Priceline.com, to oil-drilling equipment manufacturer APS Technology, Inc, to vaccine maker Protein Sciences Corporation, to IT Services provider OpenSky, the overall winner with 18,221% growth!

One thing I can’t help but ask myself is: what makes some companies so successful while others struggle? Listening to the speeches of each category’s winner, there was one common answer – the team. I’ve always believed that a small, talented, focused team can accomplish amazing things, and these CEOs were saying the same thing.

Congratulations to this year’s Tech Top 40, and to all those who aspire to join them – my best advice – surround yourself with the best and brightest you can find.

Build or Buy? How to know if you need custom software

I met a woman yesterday who asked me if we could build some software for her business. I told her yes, we could, but it probably wouldn’t make sense. Let me explain.

Building custom software is an investment, and that investment usually doesn’t make sense unless you’re going to sell multiple copies of the software, or it’s going to give you a significant competitive advantage in your business. And I do mean significant.

For example, I spoke with a company not too long ago that was thinking about developing some software to help them with an internal business process. They had done their research, and there were packages on the market, but they didn’t exactly meet their needs. I spent enough time with them to give them a ball park quote, and it turns out the custom solution was seven times more expensive than the off-the-shelf solution. Frankly, this isn’t even a lot. Think about it – if the vender of the generic solution spent the same amount of money developing their solution, they would only need to sell seven copies to break even. I realize it’s more complicated than this, there’s distribution, support, marketing, overhead, etc. but what if they sold 70 copies? You can see how this kind of investment could pay off. And if they sold 700 – wow!

So this company decided to buy the off-the-shelf product that met most of their needs. In my opinion, that was the right decision. It only makes sense to build custom software for internal use when you can get a significant competitive advantage. Before you think about investing in custom software, look at what’s already on the market to meet your needs. It may not meet all of your needs, or meet them perfectly, but ask yourself how much would it be worth to have that perfect solution? Would I be willing to pay ten times the cost of this package? More? Often the answer will be no, and in that case, just find the product that meets your needs the best or allows you some ability to customize.

Training our future workforce

This week there was an article in the NY Times about Gadget Camp, a workshop for girls in River Grove, IL to expose girls to the skills needed to get jobs in manufacturing. I love this idea! As one of the few girls that took (and thoroughly enjoyed) wood shop and metal shop, I wish I had something like this growing up. There’s absolutely no reason girls and women can’t do these jobs.

Through my involvement with the New Haven Manufactures’ Association (NHMA) Workforce Development Committee, I’ve seen personally how many how many manufacturers there are in CT and how many jobs they have. Yes, there are jobs in manufacturing, and not only are there jobs, these are good jobs that don’t require a college degree. They do however require skills, especially math skills, and unfortunately, our public schools are not doing a great job providing them.

Our Vocational schools, however, are providing kids with the skills they need for these jobs as well as a good traditional education. Before getting involved with the NHMA, I didn’t realize that the kids at the Vo-Tech schools took the same academic course load as public schools PLUS training in their field. The kids that I’ve met are bright and passionate about their field. Whether they go on to college or not, they have a bright future ahead of them.

Programs like Gadget Camp and even more so, the Vo-Tech system, provide much need skills and opportunities for the kids that participate in them, and critical talent for our businesses. We should do anything we can to support them.

What it Takes to be a Successful Consultant

I have not written for a while on what it takes to be a successful consultant, but lately I’ve been noticing some common trends with our best people, and oddly enough it has absolutely nothing to do with their technical abilities. I’m really not sure what to call it – grace, poise, or just plain old fashioned professionalism.

In one instance, one of our clients handled an HR problem, let’s just say, in a less than optimal fashion. Our consultants there were affected by this decision, and one of them could have been justified to be hurt or angry, but to his credit, he just continued to do his job while the storm raged around him. He happened to be in our office one day while this was going on and his comment to me was “I have a job to do, and I’m going to focus on that and do my best.” Love that!!

In the second instance one of our consultants was working with an engineer at our client’s client on an integration project. I’ll spare you the gory details but this engineer was engaging in programming practices that would make any professional programmer shudder with disgust. The stories even made me shudder and I haven’t been a programmer in ages! To his credit, our guy worked thru the issues with this engineer without issue.

Although they’re all sharp, in fact some of the smartest people I know, I think I admire the restraint, respect and professionalism our consultants exhibit even more than their technical chops. We serve at the request of our clients, and being difficult or disrespectful does nothing for our relationships. I’m so proud to be a part of this team, with these amazing engineers and developers!

A sad yet preventable story of software failure

I read an article today reporting that Nokia had announced that it was abandoning its development of its own Smartphone platforms and APIs. By itself, that’s not so sad. It’s smart to know when to cut your losses, right? The reason this story makes me sad, is that it was entirely preventable.
According to reports from insider Mark Wilcox, “there was no proper requirement spec for this new framework.” Aggghhhh! This makes me crazy every time I see it, and I see it a lot.
Companies think they can save time, or they don’t want to be “locked in” or say, “We’ll just tell the developers what to build.” In 20+ years of personal experience, I’ve never seen this work well. In the very best cases, tons of time is actually wasted by long meetings, miscommunications, and do-overs. Usually the end result is not really what the project sponsor wanted, but they settle. In the very worst cases, like this one, companies spend 2000+ man-years (yes, you read that right) developing something no one wants! In this case, they had two competing teams (I’ll have to address that in another post – just too much to say on that one!) and according to Wilcox "both teams had built the wrong thing.” Both teams! (This post may be my personal record in use of exclamation points.)
Another comment he makes is that “the engineers were incompetent. Now by that I don't mean that they're incompetent engineers – far from it. They were incompetent at designing APIs for 3rd party developers (a very specialist engineering skill) and they were incompetent at designing UIs (which most engineers are, myself included). Unfortunately they were doing both.” These could have been very bright engineers, but as Clint Eastwood said in one of my favorite Dirty Harry Movies, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” This also happens frequently and is an error made both by engineers (ego, desire to learn, fearing for their job security) and management (don’t want to hire specialists, over estimating their engineers). Again, in the best cases I’ve seen, the engineers can muddle thru and get something passable. On the other hand, it can be a train wreck as in this case.
The aspect that makes me the most upset about this story is the effect on all those engineers. They worked hard, I’m sure long hours at times, to develop basically, nothing. We engineers develop software and products because we take pride in our work and want to build things that people love to use and these engineers spent years not doing that. I can’t even imagine how unfulfilling that was.

Watson on Jeopardy

Did you see Watson, the IBM computer compete on Jeopardy last week. I did, in fact I was really looking forward to it. Obviously the geek in me was awed by the computing power.

Watson clearly dominated. In the three day match he beat the two human competitors by a margin of roughly 3 to 1. Obviously Watson got many answers right, but what I found interesting was what he got wrong. When he was wrong, he was VERY wrong! I’m sure we’ve all heard about the Final Jeopardy answer in the second match. All those people from Toronto never knew they were Americans! But some other more interesting mistakes where when he didn’t even give the right kind of reply.

For example, on the question: “In May 2010 5 Paintings worth $125 Million by Braque, Matisse & 3 others left Paris’ museum of this art period?” The answer was Modern Art, Watson said Picasso, obviously not an art period.

The use for this kind of computing power boggles my mind. We just have to remember to sanity check his answers!

Cloud Computing – Connecting People

I know of three different companies right now that are developing some sort of distributed applications, running on multiple computers and platforms. In many aspects these systems are wildly different. They’re being developed for consumers and businesses world wide. The platforms may be PC, Linux, proprietary hardware and/or mobile devices. The applications themselves, the complexity and the architectures, vary wildly, but the most interesting thing is the commonality.

All of these applications are about connecting people. Whether it’s a consumer focused social application or a global business application or a new distribution channel for an industry where distribution has been a huge issue, all three of these applications really are flatting the world and leveling the playing field.

It’s fascinating and gratifying to be playing a role in changing the way we interact and do business. It makes me wonder what I’ll be writing about changing ten years from now!

When you’re done with product development

….you’re not really done. Let me explain what I mean.

We meet with lots of people and companies that would like us to develop products for and with them. They are sometimes under the impression that when we’re done creating the product, they won’t need any technical, engineering, or software development. After all, that phase is done, right? Well, yes, but the next phase is just beginning, and faltering here can be deadly to your product’s success.

Even if your product works perfectly, customers are going to have questions. Some sort of support will be needed. Not planning for this can be fatal to your product’s success. Often times, customers will be highly engaged and wanting more features and add-ons, creating opportunities and the need for enhancements. Ideally, more customers will want your product – maybe from an adjacent market or with needs not exactly targeted by your product, perhaps creating a need for other products.

All of these scenarios require additional support and/or continued development. Hopefully your product will be so successful, you’ll never be done!

40 years of Innovation at PARC

As many of you know, Advanced Decisions turned 40 this year, but this post is not about us. I recently came across this article about Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which also turned 40 this year. I don’t know if you realize, but many of the things we’re calling innovative in 2010 found their roots decades ago. I think many of us have heard the stories about Xerox’s initial Graphical User Interface that later became the Mac interface and is the basis of how we use computers today (anyone remember using DOS? Wow – that was a different experience!). What I did not know was that in the 80’s they invented the PARCPad – a precursor to the iPad, and the PARCTab – the first PDA.

Another area they innovated in was culture. Work and play mixed, beanbag chairs were scattered throughout and shoes were optional. Sounds like the roots of the 90’s dotcom startup culture to me.

Having worked in a pure research environment early in my career, I know first hand that the most exciting aspect of an environment like this is the minds that surround you - not only the most technically elite, but wildly creative as well. The diversity is amazing, lunchtime conversations are completely engrossing, and in every lab, something is going on that could change the world. A great book about the early years at PARC is Dealers of Lightning. Full disclosure - it gets mixed reviews for technical and historical accuracy, but I found it extremely inspiring. If you have a budding engineer, scientist or inventor in your life, this might make a great holiday gift.

How to Be a Successful Woman in a Technical Field

I’m on the workforce development committee for one of the professional organizations I’m involved with. Recently there was a conversation about how the girls that were being recruited for a technical program (with the expectation they would take technical jobs in a field that’s predominantly male) were not the right girls. My knee-jerk reaction was to take offence to this comment, but when I thought about my early career for just a second, I realized the speaker was absolutely right. It’s not for everyone.

Back (20+ years ago – yikes!) when I was starting out as an Electrical Engineer, there were pictures, cartoons, and calendars in the labs that you’d get fired for today, the older engineers called you “honey”, and the VP in my organization was well known for feeling up all the “girls” he could get near. We all learned real quick to stay an arms length away.

The focus on sexual harassment has changed the most overt issues, but it still takes a special kind of young woman to be successful in a predominately male field.

I think my initial visceral reaction came from a sense of justice – it shouldn’t be this way, but you know what, it is.

Until we reach that state of utopia, what’s a young woman to do? My feminist friends may take issue with some of this, and I’d love to have a discussion about it, but here are my thoughts:
1) Have a sense of humor - Running to HR every time you overhear a raunchy joke is going to do nothing for your career, or your relationships at work. Am I saying women should put up with harassment – NO, absolutely not, but not everything is harassment.
2) Have a thick skin – Men (and women) can be rough. It’s usually not personal. Men don’t usually have an issue with this, but young women sometimes take things too personally.
3) Stand up for yourself – If you’re going to be intimidated by a big gruff crusty old engineer who yells and swears, it might not be the right field for you. If you are going to back down to the young male engineer who’s threatened because you’re smarter and work harder than him, then maybe it’s not the right field for you. Believe me, it’s not always easy to do, but it’s the only way to earn respect.
4) Work is work – Men get this. Watch them. They can argue like crazy about business issues, then go out, and have a beer together.

Remember, one of the big keys to professional success are the relationships you form, and if you’re working in a male dominated field like engineering you MUST be able to form healthy, professional relationships with those in your field – men. I’m curious to hear what other women think of this.

Making ethical decision making easy

When I was joining my firm, I spent a lot to time talking with my future partners about a wide variety of topics – compensation, benefits, division of responsibilities, growth strategies, future personal plans, and values – many, many conversations about values. I thought this was odd at first, not that we talked about it, only how much we talked about it. I don’t know why I thought it was odd, considering I had left my prior position in part because of a mismatch of values.

Five years later, I am still in awe of what a strong foundation we’ve been able to build because we share the same values.

I was listening to a speaker recently talk about when leaders have to make tough decisions, and how sometimes they make those decisions consistent with their values and sometimes they do not. He made me feel so grateful about my situation. When we’ve had to make those “tough” decisions, it’s actually been fairly easy. When one of us wavers, and it happens, the other is always there to be steady. I can’t think of a single instance where we’ve made a decision that went against our values.

In fact, we were participating in an RFP and the purchasing agent suggested we do something we weren’t comfortable with. It was not so egregious as to be called unethical, but it was not consistent with the way we wanted to run our business. He subtlety suggested we’d get more business if we did it. This was about a year ago and getting more business was a HUGE challenge! We talked a lot about that decision and in the end, we decided to stick to our guns, and if we lost the business, so be it. Turns out that was one of the best tough decisions we ever made. We did not lose any business, and MUCH more importantly did not lose any self-respect. Shared values are critical to making ethical decision making easier.

How to tell your customers they’re wrong

We often find ourselves telling our clients they’re wrong. Of course, we don’t say it like that – “You’re Wrong! Mr. Client!” No.

Sometimes they have a problem and already have a solution in mind. Our engineers can often tell very quickly their solution is not going to fix their problem. These discussions are usually easy. The engineers can come up with better solutions and it’s obvious we’re working in our customers’ best interests.

But what if you think they’re solving the wrong problem? This is a much more difficult conversation. Especially, if they are passionate about solving a problem that you don’t think is a problem. Maybe you’re not the one having this problem, but other’s are. Maybe they’d appreciate the solution. Who’s to know?

I heard a great suggestion on how to handle this just the other day (Thanks CS!). I love it because it’s open, and honest, and all about starting the relationship off right. Just ask – at the beginning of the relationship, or conversation, or wherever you happen to find yourself, just ask if they’re open to questions about their assumptions if you hear something that does not make sense. It might sound something like this “You know, Mr. Customer, sometimes I’m talking with other CEOs and they say things that just don’t make sense, they find it very helpful when I question these statements. Is that something you would find valuable?” I’d be shocked to get a no, but whether they say yes, or no, at least you know where you stand. And who know, you may just learn something.

KAUST: An Amazing Example of Project Management

As part of my experience with the Global Women's Leadership Institute, we were treated to a presentation on the creation of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) by Nadhmi Nasr, the Executive Vice President of KAUST. What an amazing story!

This incredible, 9000 acre, state-of-the-art University was built and operational in approximately 1000 days. Mr. Nasr was asked to take on the leadership of this important project by the King in July of 2006. He assumed that he was responsible for building something that had already been designed, but within a week, discovered that it was just a concept. He quickly brought in partners, consulting firms with various specialties to help with the planning, which he attributes as one of the keys to his success.

Mr. Nasr is very humble. It was apparent in his presentation that his unwavering focus on the vision was, in my opinion, by far the most important reason for the success of the project. I know software companies that have not been able to build a product in 3 years. This man was able to create a magnificent oasis in the desert, taking it from an idea to a thriving high tech community. On September 5, 2009, the first day of classes were held on schedule. Having managed many projects myself, and being here and seeing how incredible this place is, I’m in awe of what he’s accomplished.

One Of My Favorite Innovative CT Companies

I had the pleasure of crossing paths with the Dr. Moinuddin Sarker of Natural State Resources a few years ago at a Connecticut Technology Council event. For those of you that are not familiar with this company, they have discovered a method to make fuel from recyclable plastic. You can read about them here.

Dr. Sarker was gracious and generous enough to give me a tour of his lab, and I was blown away! First of all, what a brilliant idea – talk about killing multiple birds.

As noted in the article, the EPA estimates that Americans produce about 31 million metric tons of waste plastics annually and only about 10% of this is recycled. I can believe this. The “tree hugger” in me wants to recycle everything, but until just last month my garbage company took very little – only 1s and 2s, and I think this is very common. What a great solution as to what to do with all that extra plastic.

On the output side of the equation is the fuel, and at the point that I first met Dr. Sarker gas was still hovering around $4 per gallon. Natural State Resources is currently estimating they can produce fuel for as little as $0.75 per gallon. With gas prices getting ready to do their annual summer-time rise, this sounds mighty attractive!

I’m thrilled to see Natural State Resources, Inc. getting so much press and recognition. I wish them all the best. This is the kind of ingenuity that America needs! Kudos to you and your team, Dr. Sarker!

Advanced Decisions is 40!

Advanced Decisions is turning 40 this year. That’s amazing to me. I’ve been spending some time thinking about what’s lead to this longevity and the one thing I keep coming back to is relationships.

We have customers we’ve been doing business with for 20+ years. In such a crowded marketplace, they have many choices, but have formed bonds with us and trust us. Even when the individuals change companies, they still remember and call us. We recently got introduced to a brand new company in just this manner.

We also have employees that we’ve known for close to 20 years. They’re our “go to” people. When we have a tough challenge we immediately think of Brad, or Jose, or Linda, or Dave, or many of the others we’ve worked with “forever”.

We even have service providers that we’ve known for that long. In fact, the company that does our internal IT troubleshooting is owned by one of my very first mentors, way back when I was a Northeastern co-op student working at Pitney Bowes.

The continuity of these relationships is comforting and stable, but would be boring if not for the new – the new employees like Zach, Jovin and Joanne, the new clients like ClearView Edge and Wilkes, the new vendors like Response and many others who keep us growing and evolving even as we retain our “roots”.

I’m incredibly grateful for the presence of those that have been part of Advanced Decisions’ success, whether for 20 years or 2 months. I hope you all can come and celebrate with us on Thursday May 13th here at our offices. To another 40!!!

My Doubts About Social Media

I know that seems like an odd title for a blog post, but for the longest time, I’ve been hesitant about the value of social media for growing a business like ours. I can see why it works for retail or B-to-C business but for some reason I had doubts about using social media for growing a B-to-B service business. Personally, I would engage a firm like ours after getting to know the people in it or based on a referral from someone I trust, but I know not everyone does everything exactly as I do ;-).

That said, I’m putting my skepticism aside and jumping in with both feet! Those of you that got one of the 70-something LinkedIn invites I sent this morning probably know what I mean. (I just figured out how to import my contacts into LinkedIn).

We have dabbled in social media before, and even that may be a generous characterization. We realized that to be successful at this we needed help so we hired Response Marketing and have been very pleased. We’ve been reconnecting with old friends, clients, and acquaintances. I’ve already had multiple requests for conversations about how we could work with various firms. If nothing else, it’s a good reminder that we’re still around!

It’s certainly fun, and I truly enjoy connecting with people. As far as growing our business - I sincerely hope to be proven wrong!

Referral Karma

I give and get a lot of referrals. In fact, just this week I referred a company I had just met to my business banker, who has been a great resource for us. I was happy to do it, happy to be able to help my new contact, and certainly happy to give my banker the opportunity. Now in the interest of full disclosure, the new company is a prospect, but I have done the same, many times before, for companies and individuals that were not prospects.

Recently we’ve had three different people ask about compensation for referrals that lead to business. I have to confess, I was a bit surprised – I had never thought of doing that before.

I’m happy to give referrals without any expectation of getting something in return. Especially, in the kind of economy we’ve had for the past year or so, I feel like anything any I can do to help a good business prosper is a positive contribution, and besides, it just feels good! We’ve gotten so many referrals over the years, so I also feel a bit like I’m paying it forward. I also like to refer business in which I have confidence.

I wonder, is there a “conflict of interest” if you are receiving payment? I can’t help but wonder, what do others do? Do you pay for referrals? Do you expect something in return?

Stop Trying so Hard

Last year one of our big initiatives was to find strategic partners – companies we could work with, offer more to both of our clients, and help both business grow. We really did look hard and didn’t have much success.

When doing our business planning this year we decided to try other things. After all, that did not work out so well.

Well funny thing is happening – all those valuable strategic partnerships we were dreaming of seem to be falling into place. Who knows where they will lead, but it sure is funny that they’re happening now. Maybe there’s something to the theory of relaxing and letting things happen. Sure seem to be working for us!