Author: J

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Does work really have to suck?

Before I get going on my rant here, let me just point out that I am not bashing anybody here, not even my own employer. And if I am bashing anyone, it is “the man” who in this case is synonymous with big faceless corporations here everything is systemized and all actions are controlled by over-zealous managers and time sheet keepers.

So anyway, I was reading this article on my iPad earlier, which talked about why people in Seattle all of a sudden wanted to work for Amazon again.

Amazon has been a cornerstone in Seattle for more than 15 years now, but it wasn’t always seen as a great place to work.

Employees talked about long hours and a pressure-cooker atmosphere, and the core business — e-commerce — didn’t seem very sexy.

What a difference a couple of years can make.

Over the New Year’s holiday, I visited Seattle for the first time since late 2010. A bunch of people in the tech scene told me the same thing: Amazon is THE place to work now.

Here’s why….

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-everybody-in-seattle-wants-to-work-for-amazon-2012-1#ixzz1in1ItJik

Source:  Matt Rosoff @ Business Insider

amazonI have been a huge fan of Seattle’s for many years. In fact, so much so that I did part of my Master’s degree there (well, close to anyway) and married a woman from Seattle, to whom I have been married now for almost eleven years. That is still not the point though. As it states in the article, Amazon has a new HQ close to downtown, which is walking distance to pretty much everything. Furthermore, there are all kinds of Googlesque benefits for the employees, which is also a nifty thing I’ll admit. The really interesting thing though, is how the local area area has developed explosively since the move, because so many people now work there.

And so I wonder. I wonder why that kind of approach has never really taken off here in Denmark. I mean, I for one have never heard of any company that takes really makes a point out turning the HQ into a place where people actually want to spend their time. For that matter, I have never really seen any places in Denmark, where the campus has been designed to allow people to be creative or innovative.

In my younger days when I was a consultant I visited a lot of customers and I never encountered anything but standard Lenovo PCs, Nokia phones and crappy coffee.  There’s nothing wrong with Lenovo or Nokia at all, actually the both make some really cool stuff, my is this though; everything is so standardized around here. We use the same tools, we runs our businesses the same way, and we never really seem to actually create something new. Considering how we consider ourselves well educated in this country I find it a little odd that we do not have any real startup culture here.

My stipulation is of course not right. We do have start ups here, that seem to approach the whole business life somewhat different than the bigger guys. Tradeshift and Podio are really good examples of companies that do not adhere to “the rules”; companies that are not afraid breaking some norms in order to do new things, and do them differently.

Perhaps it would be easier to make the employees “live the brand”, be more efficient or even more loyal to the company.

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Come work with me

We are looking for a back end TPM for the Danish office. For some reason it is only in Danish.

Evenex leverer smarte digitale forbindelser mellem samhandelspartnere på tværs af brancher, til både offentlige og private kunder. Evenex forbedrer bundlinjen med digitale helhedsløsninger som optimerer forretningsprocesser internt samt eksternt mod samhandelspartnere, bl.a. har Evenex leveret IndFak, der er statens indkøbs- og fakturasystem. Vores løsninger omfatter en front-end web applikation, en backend løsning samt et antal værktøjs- og integrations komponenter. Backend varetager dokumet routing og konvertering.
Evenex udvikler software produkter i et teams lokaliseret i Danmark, Filippinerne og Kina.
Som Teknisk Project Manager i vores team i Birkerød vil du have ansvaret for den samlede tekniske koordinering og implementering vedrørende vores backend systemer.
Du vil igennem hele udviklingsforløbet indgå i et tæt samarbejde med den ansvarlige Product Manager (som ejer kravene til produktet), arkitekter, test samt implementerings teamet. Sidst nævnte lokaliseret i Kina. I dette forløb vil du analysere krav samt nedbryde disse til work packages som implementeres af implementerings teamet. Herudover vil du komme til at stå for Incident Management samt varetage den løbende kommunikation og afklaring med interessenterne.
Det forventes at du kan analysere eksisterende kode, designe og facilitere implementationen af ny funktionalitet samt fejlrettelser. Herudover vil du agere som vidensbase for off-shore teamet og vores kolleger i andre afdelinger. Du vil blive en nøglespiller som driver produktet frem på det tekniske niveau.
Jobbet kræver tæt samarbejde med vores kolleger lokalt i Birkerød, Kina sam til dels på Filippinerne.

Read more here.

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Is EDI moving to the cloud?

Electronic Document Interchange (EDI) is not really the cutting edge of technology these days. Most of the time we used all kinds of home made solutions to transform documents from one format into another, and then route it to a customer’s mailbox to pick be picked up later using FTP or something similar.

Granted, we still make a lot money doing it this way, but as we see the industry as a whole moving to the cloud, the next logical question is to ask when EDI moves to the cloud? Now, I know that the cloud definition varies depending on who you are talking to. I have seen people using the cloud term to describe things we have done for 10 years without making any note worthy changes.

Looking at the economics of EDI  there is little doubt that any customer is more or less bound to a single vendor, depending on the level of integration of course. In other words, it is not a simple task to move all your mappings etc. from one vendor to another without incurring substantial costs, not to mention the risk of things going wrong and messing up an entire document flow.

Granted, I am not an EDI guy myself as such, however, I do design systems that are dependent of document transformation in and out of the application, so it was not without a certain degree of enthusiasm that I noticed that Windows Azure will be supporting EDI transformations:

Windows Azure Service Bus EAI & EDI Labs provides integration capabilities for the Windows Azure Platform to extend on-premises applications to the cloud, provides rich messaging endpoints to process and transform messages, and helps organizations integrate disparate applications, both on cloud and on-premises

I really ought to have a closer look at the capabilities, but since I am currently being a lazy slob during my vacation I have not. However, it seems pretty interesting though, that creating your own transformations and routing set up via Windows Azure is  pretty simple, that everyone now can more-or-less do it. I doubt we will see a disruption in the market based on this, EDI is very unsexy, but if the increasing interest in business integration and cloud service brokerage keeps gaining momentum I wonder if we might witness a host of smaller vendors that can offer these services very cheap.

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Where does PM fit?

I had a presentation today for a whole bunch of people. These guys were from all over the company; implementation consultants, service desk employees and sales people. When you think about that is a fairly diverse group of people. As I was standing there taking the usual abuse why we didn’t do this or that, I came to realize how many stakeholders I actually have, and skewed my time table is, considering who I spend my time on these days.

These days I spend a lot of time with development team in Manila. It is a group of very talented developers and testers, but since they have no experience with this kind of application, we are spending a lot of time attempting to transfer the necessary knowledge. Unfortunately that means that I have neglected my usual stakeholders. So, just for the fun of it I decided to use my Friday evening on making a diagram of all the stakeholders I have as a product manager. I know I need a life, but be that as it may, you can see the diagram below.

I know I should have made a Visio diagram, but even I have my limits, especially on Friday evening. So anyway, what does this over simple drawing show? Basically, it shows that top management wants to develop some kind of feature. It can either be to position the product in the market or to live up to contract requirements etc. Normally, product management would have a pretty big say in these decisions, considering we are supposed to know not only the application but also the market, the users and the competitors.

Firstly, we need to coordinate with the development department. How are we going to solve this issue? How does it fit with the existing code? These discussions are usually quite iterative in nature and result in a specification, which in my case is a user story.

And this is where I believe the flow must never stop. If we are to really capitalize on our investment in the product, we need to tell the sales force what they are going to sell and why. We need to tell consulting how it works and how it is implemented. We need to tell operations how to support this new feature and finally we need to provide input to marketing about what they should say to the market.

All of these tasks make product development a complicated task, because even if the arrows above only point in one direction, they should also go the other way. Most departments have requirements to our product. It should be sexy, so it is easier to sell, it should be robust so it is easy for operations to support it etc. And this leads me to the point of this post, and the point is that perhaps the most intricate part of the PM’s job is to ensure profitability on the products. We derive profitability not only from the top line, meaning revenue, but also by ensuring that the software and services we create are easy to work with so the organization does not need to spend a lot of resources in order to make this thing work. This also means that, at least theoretically, that it will be more profitable to say no to the customer, if they request a feature we cannot sell to other customers, or that the operations are too high or even if we move beyond our product domain. Not exactly a popular opinion among all people, but nevertheless an argument I fully believe in.

If we applied general systems theory, we could draw a diagram of subsystems that are intertwined and together form the basis of our return on investment.

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Skydrive: Crossplatform app done right

Windows_Live_SkyDrive_logoLet me start by saying that I am kinda partial to Windows Live, or whatever it is called these days. I am not really a big brand guy in this respect, as long as it works for me I am happy. Lots of people are more into Gmail for instance, but it never really offered me anything that Hotmail didn’t do as well.

But this post is about Skydrive, the online storage service that is part of the Windows Live family. Yesterday the Skydrive team launched apps for Windows Phone and iPhone simultaneously. Gone are the days when Microsoft would keep their best apps on the Windows platform, enter the days when Microsoft is no longer the all dominating platform. I am not big on Apple’s products as such, but I do have an iPad and it so cool to able to use OneNote along with my Skydrive on a  non-Microsoft platform.

The really cool thing about this move is that the consumer gets the real deal, and not some watered version of an app. The notable exception being the Xbox app for iPhone, which is just a little too little comapared to the Windows Phone version.

Anyway, I can highly recommend using these apps regardless of your platform of choice.

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Resource utilization

logo-add-ons-halfLast week I went to a Tech Talk at Microsoft where we talked about Lean Product Development, a topic that is near and dear to my heart. One of the main points was that resource utilization of 100% is not necessarily a good thing. Those of you who have a project manager or two breathing down your neck every day, know that they are usually looking to reach 100% utilization, because in their world that is where we reach optimal productivity. Now, don’t take this as me bashing project managers. They also have people breathing down their necks, because they have a release to deliver.  If anything, this post should be seen as a polite reminder to top management that product development is very difficult to fit into an Excel spreadsheet.

So, now that I have gone to great lengths to be civil to everybody, what is my point? It’s very simple; the unpredictability of the software development process is so explicit that we need to leave room to fix the things we were unable to foresee when we planned the project. Don’t get me wrong, there are things we as product people don’t necessarily need in order to launch, but let’s face it, most of the time we deal with the issues that will severely impede the use of our product unless they are dealt with properly. By subscribing o this notion, I have essentially said that slacking on quality is a non-option. This leaves time and scope as the only variables we really want to touch.

I am pretty sure it is easy to come up with examples that contradict my point, however, there’s a reason why I think we avoid 100% resource utilization and why we should never compromise on quality. Uncharacteristically, the argument is an economic argument, and ties to my earlier rants about the brand. We cannot afford to have our users, and of course decision makers, being negative towards our product. The negative connotations and the reputation we encounter in the marketplace if our software “doesn’t work” will most likely impede impede on our ability to perform in the marketplace.

If we produce a Saas application, our financial model is based on an investment in a generic product, which more or less works for everyone. So, if we view our Saas application as our asset, we can calculate the Return on assets. Basically, our return will be dependent on our ability to resell the application after we have reached the break-even point. If we decrease the brand value in the minds of our users, by creating software that “doesn’t work” we are most likely not going to be able to capitalize on our initial investment.

ROA=Pnat:A

Where

ROA= return on assets

Pnat= net profit after tax

A= assets

In all honesty, I have never applied this equation to my own real work life, mainly because it is not something that is really part of my everyday tasks these days. However, I think that equations like this can work as powerful tools for PMs, when attempting to persuade management and other stakeholders why we should never go with a 100% utilization of resources.

I will update this post if my own CEO buys it Winking smile

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I hate my blog

StupidSo, I am looking through some of my more recent blog posts, and I realize that I absolutely hate 95% of my own posts. Note only have for about a year been one of those guys who write about the latest gadgets, but I have been uncritically regurgitating what the media has written.

Added to that indignity, I have been blogging in Danish. Sure, I am Danish, and it makes sense, on some level, to be writing in Danish, however, I have essentially been  limited myself from having interesting conversations with people who do not speak Danish. And believe me, there are plenty of them.

Where does this “revelation” leave me and my dumb ass blog? Well, I have decided to take a road that might land me in a heap of trouble. I will be blogging about my job, and what I do 8-9 hours a day. Well, that and some more stuff I am sure.

So why is my job so interesting? Well, to most people it probably isn’t. Being a Product Manager is like being in a no man’s land. Developer’s claim that you sit around and make pretty screen dumps, funny flow charts and basically has no clue about anything. On the other side of things you have a sales department, who think that you are sitting in an ivory tower thinking abstract thoughts about the otherness of other.

I guess both sides have valid points. I also think that perhaps there is much more to it than that, and that is exactly what I want to write about. See, I meet all kinds of people during my day. I have a development team in Manila that I have keep busy. I have architects and project managers in Denmark, who keep me busy, and then I have a large customer base, a customer base that is anything but homogenous. Believe me when I say that is a challenge when you manage a Saas application, which is supposed to work for everyone. I can give you a little hint. The Danish government does not work in the same way as global private companies do.

Anyway, I am getting ahead of myself. At Evenex, and earlier versions of the company, there has been no tradition of blogging about what we do there as individuals. It might be frowned upon by management, or people just don’t feel they have anything to share. I have been there for four years, and I know that is not true. AS far as I can tell I am the only there really blogging, so the Internet will have to make do with me, at least for now.

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OIOXML er død, OIOUBL er her

Jeg sidder til dagligt med denne problematik, og derfor vil jeg ikke på nuværende tidspunkt kommentere den yderligere, end at referere til Version2s artikel om netop denne ændring af faktura formatet I Danmark.

Dog vil jeg tilføje, at det ikke kun er faktura dokumentet der nu kommer til at være OIOUBL, det er også ordrer, kredit notaer, kataloger og ikke mindst UTS. Der er en række andre dokumenter, som også benyttes I OIOUBL, men de er ikke nær så brugte som de ovenstående.

 

Nyt fakturaformat giver virksomheder gabende hul i kassen

Det offentlige er netop skiftet til det nye, digitale fakturaformat OIOUBL. Virksomheder risikerer en slem overraskelse, hvis de ikke er skiftet med.

Af Morten K. ThomsenFredag, 2. december 2011 – 10:44

Farvel OIOXML, goddag OIOUBL.

Umiddelbart virker to bogstavers forskel ikke som alverden, men hvis ikke din virksomheds økonomisystem er opgraderet til at håndtere det offentlige nye, digitale fakturaformat, venter der en økonomisk overraskelse.

For sender du dine regninger i det gamle OIOXML-format, bliver de ikke betalt, da modtageren ikke kan læse dem.

Det vides ikke, hvor mange virksomheder, der i slutningen af december får en økonomisk lussing, fordi regningerne ikke er betalt. Men ingen af de kilder, Version2 har talt med, er tvivl om, at de findes.

Typisk er der være tale om mindre enkeltmandsvirksomheder eller små håndværksfirmaer, som ikke er opmærksom på problemet.

»Det er et område, der ikke har stor interesse. Så det bliver lidt af en aha-oplevelse for virksomhederne, når de finder ud af, at de ikke har fået betaling for de leverede ydelser,« siger Torben Ravn, salgschef i firmaet Formpipe, der blandt leverer løsning, der kan konvertere forretningsdokumenter til det korrekte elektroniske format.

Og at det er endegyldigt slut, bekræfter chefkonsulent i Digitaliseringsstyrelsen, Helle Schade-Sørensen, til Version2.

»1. december slukkede vi for den overgangsløsning, der har kørt siden maj. Så fra nu af kan du ikke være sikker på, at modtageren kan læse de fakturaer, du sender i det gamle format,« siger chefkonsulent i Digitaliseringsstyrelsen, Helle Schade-Sørensen, til Version2.

Kilde: Version2

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Nu med Windows Phone

HTC_RadarSom den ægte forbruger jeg nu engang er, købte jeg I går min første rigtige smartphone, menlig en HTC Radar. Jeg gik længe og overvejede om det skulle være en iPhone 4S, eller noget der var lidt billigere og langt mere utilitært. Vores gode venner fra TDC havde tilfældigvis fået HTC Radar på hylden, og så var den endda på tilbud. At jeg så kan bruge mit SIM kort fra min arbejdstelefon er jo bare perfekt.

Så for den nette pris af 2600 pisk købte jeg mig en Windows Phone. Indtil videre har det været en helt fantastisk oplevelse at bruge telefonen, men jeg venter lidt endnu med at fælde den endelige dom, da jeg lige skal have den igennem de forskellige rutiner.

Allerede nu kan jeg dog sige at UI virker noget sjovere end iOS, men lad os nu se.

 

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