For quite a while now - as early as 2006 in fact - we have been posting on collaboration tools and how they can enhance interaction for distributed as well as local teams, including the possibilities of 3D virtual worlds such asSecondLife or Croquet.

At the same time, we have used many tools ourselves most of which we discarded as being not user-friendly, slow or not fitting to our requirements. Being in the same situation as other product development companies of having to co-ordinate people across three, sometimes four time-zones, we needed an application with a broad range of tools, the swiss army-knife of collaboration tools.

We were actually featured last year October in the Australian Financial Review and could only agree (yep, there was some shoulder tapping) that Theandb was "an example of globalisation at work and how the use of technology can compete with much larger companies". Some more quotes that i could not put any better:

"We could not have successfully moved the business to Australia and kept some of our longstanding, former clients without this technology," Ponthus says.

Theandb relies on the facility to consult with businesses across Europe and Australasia, helping them develop online strategies and implement web projects.

Theandb's work involves regular meetings to ensure everyone involved knows the stage a project has reached and what their responsibilities are."

The best thing about using this system is that there's no disagreement at the end of a meeting about what everyone needs to do for follow-up and what was said during the meeting because the project manager writes the notes directly into a whiteboard that everyone sees," Schliebitz says."

Back at that time we were using Marratech which was unfortunately bought up by Google.

Only last week we finally - after months of research and trying out way too many different web1.0 and 2.0 applications - we found the perfect replacement, an application that is even better than Marratech was and it goes by the name Elluminate. We will post more on this wonderful tool soon.

We have seen vast improvements in communication and the ability to collaborate with our clients since starting to have Elluminate. We can finally be literally on the same page again, share our desktops, write up meeting notes which everyone can read and comment on while the meeting is taking place, use the excellent whiteboarding features, paste in screenshots and doodle around on them; simply put it is like working together in the same office, only far more efficient because you can actually fully concentrate on what is at hand.

We are quite aware that using such tools gives us an advantage over other suppliers in the development outsourcing market and will continue to elaborate on our outsourcing framework and general set-up as we learn with our clients. We will post more on the framework we use and why we believe it to be unique shortly.

Whereas in Silicon Valley it feels that the same errors as in the first web 1.0 bubble are repeated (buzz, buzz, buzzzzzwords galore, geeky-sounding company names, skyrocketing valuations, ...), the hype ever growing and insiders starting to worry that it's all a little bit of history repeating, i got the feeling from talking to some startups here that things seemed a little bit more grounded overall. Being far away from the Microsofts and Googles of this world and "alone" on a large island can be good when you are trying to build something of lasting value, where long-term goals can have higher priority than short-term return.

Just my 2 cents. Certainly, our office location is not the worst.

We believed there to be a lot of value in working agile for web-development projects even before we started working on transLucidonline. But then, call it an initial lack of experience in managing a product launch ourselves, we commenced development of the portal site using a waterfall methodology. "Of course", the project did not go well. We specified something that we asked the outsourcing company to develop for a fixed price, they delivered what they believed we had meant and it turned out to be of low quality (in terms of code/ architecture) and not exactly what we had in mind. From there on, it was a back and forth that resulted in more and more "change requests" which in return increased the budget over what had been allocated before to the portal site.

Long story made short: We switched companies, started working agile with them as well as an expert (on Zope & Plone , which we use for the portal site) from day1 on and have since then always been happy with the progress made.

This was also due to the excellent people we were now working with and some of the things inherent in agile development which can be broken down into:

* Planning
We set out with a planning of the major features necessary for transLucidonline. This created the basis for our 'product backlog' which was/ is a prioritised list of features we want to develop.

* Defining the individual features
We worked down our list of features in an iterative fashion with new functionality to be tested on a regular basis. The stories were well defined but did not have the depths (=lots of work) that a "standard" business specification would have. Which meant we talked with our development team on what we had in mind.

* Technical reflection on the requirements
From these discussions, the developers reflected on our business requirements by writing up the technical tasks they believed needed to be undertaken to complete the required functionality.

* Prototyping
Once we had found agreement, the development would commence. Sometimes we were able to see prototypes early on to test and give further feedback on. Most often, the individual features could be completed in 1-2 weeks development time which we felt did not require initial prototypes.

* Testing
Once it came to testing, we would use the user-acceptance tests (UATs) as previously defined in the user stories describing the required functionality. Based on the testing, development would either continue or be "officially" defined as completed.

Overall, thanks also to our unit-testing framework, we have been able to complete quite a long list of features with very minimum up-front investment. Furthermore, this way of working allowed us to continue to run our consulting business while at the same time spending time on product development internally. There was a constant flow, rather than spikes of code to be specified, developed and tested with XPlanner providing us with an accurate, up-to-date view on what progress had been made on a daily basis.

We are never going to go back to the waterfall ways of development and i would recommend any other startup-director to do the same.

Today I think that I found one of those gems that I am sure will not stay hidden very long. The Rubicon project is a service through which site owners can manage their advertising space. No, not only Google AdWords. About any ad/ partner network the world has to offer, currently about 300 (!) of them. And they automatically adjust which ads to show more often based on their individual performance. Coupled with a great dashboard over the ad space and earnings performance, this looks like a real killer app. Someones seems to have gotten it right.

I have immediately integrated it into our private website theandb.com and we are certainly - if these initial tests prove fruitful - going to use it for transLucidonline, the simple website publishing system, going forward. What a wonderfully painless way to manage your ad-inventory space.

An interesting article at the IHT entitled "Dot-com fever stirs sense of deja-vu" brought me to the postulation of this question.

It might of course be a good thing for us with our startup activities relating to the launch of transLucidonline. What a shame though that we already have actual paying customers. That might de-value us in the face of some VCs. :)

We have worked with different agile development methodologies in the past. We've never been religious about implementing everything these frameworks recommend but rather chose what we felt really worked. We started to work with ExtremeProgramming (XP) in Seattle in 2001 at Amazon.com . I had the honour to manage the web-development technologies platform team there, which had just started using XP shortly before I arrived in the States. More recently we added parts of Scrum to our mix and have been applying it since the beginning of 2007.

I get surprised time and again that not many people seem to be aware of the concept of agile software development. Even worse, when people have heard about it they don't seem to have had very good experiences. There seems to be suppliers out there who use it to sell their services without really knowing what agile development entails. When a new client believes that we are no different, it can be very frustrating.

Let's do a reality check. Based on my personal experience, the application of agile methodologies delivers results much more consistent with the customer’s expectations than waterfall methodologies. All while increasing overall quality and lowering the likelihood of breaking stuff when introducing changes and additions to existing functionality. There is no doubt that projects with agile teams don't always succeed. But what is the percentage and overall customer satisfaction of agile-driven projects? And how does it compare with standard waterfall methodology?

I strongly feel that when it comes to building web and software applications, the only way to allow a company to increase innovation, but not downtime and bugs, is to become agile. This will mean a change in internal company culture. Implementing agile teams is much more a change management project than anything else. All of a sudden, business owners and software developers have to meet and talk. Instead of (often not so useful) business and technical specification documents that can become longer than a standard-length novel, internal customers have to slice and dice up their big ideas into many little, more digestible pieces, which will in turn be prioritised against all other internal and external demands by their software development team.

After an initial phase-in time for the business analysts that now have to create compelling and easy to understand so-called user-stories that are only "reminders for conversations" with other people within the company, the prioritisation and waiting in line until a project is started can be difficult to get used to. Although, when compared with the world before, there are no more false "Yes I understand what you want", "Yes, I read your specification document" or "Yes, we'll get it done next week, promise". Instead, the software development team should have become much more customer-centric and service-orientated. True, they may not promise to get it done immediately, but the more they learn how much they can get done in a certain duration of time (agile really helps development teams in tracking their time and estimations) the happier they will be to give deadlines for project deliveries. And those deadlines will stand the test much better I am sure than deadlines before the "dawn of agile".

With time, the internal customers of the software development team will understand that they actually get what they wanted in the first place. More and better communication will lead to a teaming-up of the technical and business teams. There will be no side-picking any longer but an understanding that both "sides" need to work together to create the best results.

All of this may sound a bit utopian to the ears of someone not accustomed to working with real agile teams. I recall very vividly an experience not so long ago with an outsourcing company that we had hired to do some product-development. Stupidly, we sent them specification documents. Didn't meet with them on a daily, sometimes not even weekly, basis by Skype. Had heated exchanges by e-mail on what we "actually meant to say“ in a certain paragraph of our specification document. And ended up receiving results far below our expectations. Why did we not do what we preach to our clients when consulting with them? Well, I guess any organisation needs to learn. We did!
Now contrast this with a new day, a new team and an agile development framework. Daily meetings to catch up on what was done the previous day, what will be done the following day and any blockers they have encountered that we might need to get out of their way (processes, tools, etc). We are getting what we want, are able to test and code-review what they build. And most importantly, everyone just seems darn happy to work with everyone else. So maybe not so utopian after all. I swear to never go back to the twilight zone of waterfall project-management.

Last but not least: A senior level buy-in - as is true with any other larger change management project in any organisation - is absolutely mandatory for the overall health of the transformation from pre-historic to 21st century development methodologies. There is no way that a team manager all by himself will be able to push through all he needs and make everyone happy at the same time without an approval from the highest ranks within the organisation. If such a buy-in exists though, there is no doubt in my mind that overall happiness and productivity will increase as a direct result from the change in software development practice.

Read it in full here. Even though both reviews, including the one review on Gizmondo had a smily written between the lines, this Japanese service did make me wonder what chances a similar one might have here in Australia. There is an ever growing obesity problem here in Australia, something I would have never thought of before coming here in 2006. A quick Google search reveals numerous services and websites dedicated to helping you loose weight. But what about ones that are focused on educating Australians how to not gain fat? Shouldn't insurance company down-under also love a concept similar to what we read happens in Japan, maybe with a spiffy website in addition to the phone service to help people make their own choices?

The first project in what we intend to be a line of different ventures for us in the future is free2tradefair. It is an e-commerce site that connects artisans and producers in developing countries with consumers in Australia. The team is made up solely of volunteers who committed their precious time and energy to the launch of this producers marketplace. "The Free2TradeFair website provides an open marketplace that supports the buying and selling of fair trade products from around the globe. It seeks to assist producers overcome the many obstacles that can be faced in relation to access of developed markets such as Australia. As such, the website provides support for the selling of their products with the aim of returning all profit made directly to them."

This will represent a unique chance to Australians in supporting people in developing markets by purchasing products directly from the producers site and featured on free2tradefair. We look forward in continuing to work with the free2tradefair team in enhancing the website and making it even better going forward. On our personal wishlist are local payment methods and to keep as much as possible of the shopping experience on the free2tradefair site in general.

Theandb has worked with the free2tradefair team in creating the business website specifications for the project and giving general advise wherever necessary on a range of topics to ensure the projects overall success. We've come far from where we started out from and still have a way to go to the official launch of the site but it's looking very good indeed.

We feel truly blessed to have worked and continue to work with such wonderful people. Thanks to (in totally random order) Helen Burrows who pulled the often changing team together - never forgetting the end goal - Sean Torstensson for his inspired designs, Michael Vullings as web-developer for working his way through the at-times difficult to understand Catgen system, Michael Fuller as our biz-guy for lending focus on critical business issues, Andrew Eagle for coming up with just the right content based on his long years of experience in the NGO sector, Ewa Potaczala for managing all aspects relating to our producers, Ewa Potaczala and Christie Hall for the superb organisation of producers and... many others whose names i must have omitted from this list who should feel very welcome to complain to us. There have been a number of people involved earlier on in the project to get it off the ground that we have not interfaced with directly as we came in when things were already in quite high gear. A particular Thanks to them for lending their positive energy in shaping the free2tradefair project (then called JustTrade) from a simple idea to reality.

See it for yourself.! The link points to the current development site which will soon be replaced by our domain. In addition, the content is still in-progress and producers are still signing up to be part of this exciting new producers marketplace.

All the Best,
The Directors@Theandb Pty. Ltd.

The CEO Symposium 2007 was an excellent event and it was a great pleasure meeting so many outstanding people in such a short time. Looking forward to future interactions.!

Here a quote from our event-brochure that gives a good overview of our offer. Please also see the complete slides in our previous post further below.

"Consultants Of Compassion, Theandb is helping its clients to succeed in the initial concept, startup and planning phases of an online-product creation with a specialisation in e-commerce, portals and marketplaces. Supported by the directors 16+ years of experience in Fortune 100 companies, including managing Amazon.com’s online assets, we will help you to save valuable time & costs before the implementation commences and ensure that there will be no gaps between business’ expectations and the final online product.

Theandb further uses industry-recognized intangible intelligence analysis in their work - created and endorsed by the Intangible Management Standards Institute – to support companies in financially valuing intangible assets such as staff engagement/ disengagement levels, knowledge, collaboration, culture, and others on an activity-by-activity basis. This results in productivity improvements of 20+ percent and considerable increases in cost efficiency for project- and risk-management, engagement with (outsourcing) suppliers and selection of strategic technology platforms."

Some excerpts below but read it yourself; time well spent. I also encourage people to sign-up for the global cost to value taskforce as passive listeners or active participants if the topic of intangible management interests you.

"Talk about perverse consequences. BP sets out to slash 25 percent of its fixed costs and ends up killing 15 workers and injuring 180 others, in the worst industrial accident in the US in 15 years. Instead of counting its savings it finds itself having to sink $US1.6 billion into a legal defence fund, facing a congressional investigation and with some of its officers exposed to potential criminal sanctions."

"General Motors reviews the real impact of its IT cost-cutting initiatives, only to discover that all of its efforts have amounted to much ado about virtually nothing. CTO Tony Scott tells a CIO summit that not only had almost no money been saved, the effort had provoked perverse consequences that proved painfully expensive."

"Traditional business analysis, with its preoccupation with breaking everything down into its component parts and then studying the parts, is useful when dealing with machines," Parsons wrote in a 2000 paper called "Productivity Measurement in the Service Sector". "In the early days of the industrial age it was possibly convenient to adopt such an approach, but such thinking will mislead, often dangerously, when applied to today's complex conditions of existence."

"By December 11, 2007, he is confident the Global Cost to Value Taskforce (see "Going Global", page 48) will provide an agreed and tested method to let managers and executives quickly and easily financially estimate intangible benefits and value to create new ways to increase productivity, reduce costs and risks, and boost service, engagement, retention, profitability and shareholder value."

"One of the very interesting things is that productivity today is caused, from the Standards Institute perspective, by intangibles, and when we look at intangibles we're looking at activities to do with knowledge, collaboration and leverage," Standfield says. "So if we look at an organization and just basically say: 'Well, this particular organization has a certain number of staff; they're doing certain activities throughout the day, all of which can be broken up into those three different categories', basically we get a time fingerprint of the organization. Now from there what we do through the more than 40 international intangibles standards is to assess that fingerprint."

More to come on the taskforce and pilot-projects. As always, feel free to get in touch with us directly for discussions.

This certification enhances our capabilities in project-management and process-analysis. It also allows us to expand into complementing areas such as risk-management. All next to the fact that we can now offer our services in ways never possible before; it literally opens up new doors of potential for us and our current & future clients. We are certain that it will convert into vast cost-savings and value creation for them through our support as Intangible Intelligence Analysts.

We have not had the chance to blog nor market our new capabilities since our certification as we have been focused on the creation our hosted knowledge-management solution transLucid. Expect us to communicate more about intangible management and its effects in the near-term future.

Why use Intangible Intelligence
"A study comparing market value to the book value of 3,500 U.S. companies over a period of two decades shows the dramatic upward rise in intangible value. In 1978, market value and book value were pretty much matched: book value was 95% of market value. Twenty years on, book value was just 28% of market value. Lev Baruch, an accounting professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, reckons that in the late 1990s businesses invested a staggering $1 trillion per year in intangible assets" (taken from The Hidden Value Of Intangibles).

Intangibles are usually invisible. International Intangible Standards make the invisible visible. They provide scientific and quantifiable answers how to measure - as in hard $ - as well as improve intangibles value and the chain of value creation. Resulting in cost reduction, time savings, productivity improvements, and risk reductions.

What it is
Intangible intelligence® applies international intangible standards through software to visually map operational reality - the costs, risks, productivity losses, efficiency, and effectiveness associated with the actual application of service resources (knowledge, collaboration, and process-engagement).

Intangible intelligence® maps visually show best practice gaps which are new sources of (1) cost reduction, (2) time savings, (3) productivity improvements, and (4) avoidable risk reductions.
When best practice gaps are reduced/removed employee stress, risk, and costs are decreased and productivity, results, and success increase. The central focus of intangible intelligence is therefore to "make life easier and less stressful for every employee" by identifying and removing best practice gaps using international intangible standards.

Areas of application
They are not surprisingly vast. In a next entry on intangible standards, I will focus on the standardized pilot projects to introduce intangible management into a company and create measurable financial improvements for a companies bottom-line. The potential results of a good management of intangibles using the international intangible standards are:

1. Improved customer service,
2. Enhanced employee satisfaction,
3. Increased expertise and knowledge,
4. Enhanced brand value, reputation, and corporate exposure,
5. Increased motivation, engagement, and relationship quality,
6. Improved knowledge quality levels,
7. Improved employee morale,
8. Improved quality
9. Enhanced leadership ability,
10. Enhanced management skills and quality,
11. Increased customer retention and satisfaction
12. Decrease in stress
13. Increased work-life balance, autonomy, and flexibility
14. Decreased “time to market”
15. Enhanced problem-solving and decision-making ability
16. Decrease in process overheads
17. The financial valuation of product/service benefits,
18. Increased competitive differentiation,
19. Increased market share and market growth rates,
20. Increased ability to identify changing customer tastes and preferences,
21. Reduced error rates and rework rates,
22. Improved data entry consistency and accuracy
23. Enhanced ability to identify and control risks,
24. Enhanced ability to lead competitors (instead of following),
25. Increased collaboration
26. Enhanced innovation ability
27. Increased reliability
28. Enhance in consistency
29. Increased product/service customization,
30. Enhanced ability to demonstrate social responsibility
31. Increase in goodwill

And most probably many others but this list should suffice to show the scope of an application of intangible standards in a company, supported by an Intangible Intelligence Analyst. As said, more to follow soon.