I read a lot of books every month, but virtually no periodicals. In fact the only two publications that I read every issue of religiously are Hacker Monthly and 2600 Magazine. There is a theme here, they are both curated content from the “hacker” community. But not the negative meaning of hacker, rather the meaning that refers to those who make things work better, like “Life Hacking.” Read more
Some of my colleagues were talking about a standing desk and how nice it would be to not sit all day long. Long lists of random studies about sitting were quoted, although not corroborated, in an attempt to get a standing desk at the office. This was perpetrated by exactly two of my twelve colleagues, so the numbers were not on their side . Regardless, we had an empty cubicle station that could very easily be converted to a standing desk in about 15 minutes. Read more
Evangelizing what you do is fun and makes you feel good, but often creates a false sense of sales accomplishment. In general, people are nice and won’t outright tell you they don’t need your product or service, which is too bad because that would save us all a lot of time. Instead, they offer to follow up in a few weeks or ask for more information which starts the process of you wasting time on prospects with zero chance of ever closing on them. Read more
In previous blog posts I discussed how our development team operates an Agile development process leveraging SCRUM meetings. Lately I have been working hard to optimize our sales process and I wanted to share with you some of our techniques. While this isn’t rocket science, I feel that if we don’t document the process, it won’t be followed and we lose accountability. With a policy document, you can always just point to it and say “do it that way.”
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Our development team has been leveraging SCRUM meetings for about a year with great success. We have gone through three major revisions over that time and we’re very happy with our current process. In previous blog posts I discussed how our development team implements our Agile process through SCRUM meetings. As a follow-up to that post, I wanted to share our template and framework which can be adapted for your development team.
Our development group is small, and as such doesn’t need a ton of “process” to keep projects moving forward. However, since having no process is never a good idea either, we have adopted various Agile methodologies and added our own spins. At the heart of Agile are daily meetings call SCRUMs.