How entrepreneurs can ruin technology company?

Image courtesy of inc.com

The title is obvious, isn't it? how come you run a company without entrepreneurs? doesn't it good that you need entrepreneurship to keep your company in business? well, the answer it not always. Especially in company that rely on technology as its domain business and should keep innovation as the heartbeat of its selling point to the market. Technology by any means is talking about innovation that may lead into discovery and invention of something new, something different, and something that will provide advantage and better way of life for businesses or individuals. It does risks the company with business loss if the innovation failed in the market, but everything has risks and you can mitigate risks by doing market research while the idea is in incubation stage before it is out into the wild. When your company sold to bigger company who might not know what is technology and only concern the revenue gained from your existing products, then you are doomed. Your creative and innovative driven culture can be swapped into more formal, meeting-driven and profit driven culture.


Why startups company can bring many ideas and innovation into beautiful products and services? because they have small team, less leadership board, which means people do not need to hesitate to speak up their ideas, and there are not many leaders and management to be convinced to take these ideas up. They just sit together with the team as equals, talk about how to do it, what are improvements or advantages of making this idea into product, and woalah, innovation come out. Do you remember the law suit case between Apple and Samsung, and how some people talked that the top leader of Samsung wanted the Galaxy to be as beautiful as iPhone and no one could argue him to come with different idea that might be better than iPhone. That is just a small example, another example is when your startup company is growing and big venture buy your company, it does not really good idea somehow, because when the innovation culture turn into business culture that put revenue as main currency instead of beautiful innovation, then  you will regret your decision to sell your startup company.

Entrepreneurs are risking their business if they keep doing the old-fashioned management style for tech-company. Old-fashioned business, in my own words, is doing too much meetings, too much thinking, and too much leadership that will cause innovation and ideas bottleneck. Instead of following where the money flows, why don't we make the money flows to us. But how? at the old time, CEOs take action based on the markets. But now everything changed, especially for startup company. You take action based on innovation, and let the market shaped by itself and flows the money to your company revenue.

Project Delivery Crisis: Software developer issue with irrational expectation

Project delivery is important  issue that define the quality of service of a software vendor. Keeping good coordination and developers morale is prominent since they are the heartbeat of project delivery. No matter how many resources do you have, how good your managers are, if you cannot make your developers in good morale and distribute workload to its appropriate working line, then your project is considered failed before it even done. High turn over in IT industry is normally accepted, but if at the same year there are more than 10 developers moving out, it might be an indication of something miss in project management.

Common breakdown in the development department are Project Manager, System Analysts, and Developer. At the same time, these developers may be entitled as Software Engineer which role is analyzing solution to be implemented into codes by breaking down the big concept into smaller fractures so that it can be easy to do and understood before it is written as code. System Analysts are supposed to provide system requirements, sets of logic and rules, and define the standards for software development being tailored for customers. Project Managers are dealing with clients, coordinating project progress and resolving problems that occur in development area that may affect clients satisfactory and company revenue.

Do you wonder where is the missing point? it was the dualism of software engineer and somehow project manager do not manage rational expectation for project delivery. Either the PM want to keep his record good and clean, or want money comes faster without considering how complex the project will be. System Analyst cannot do anything due to pressure from top level, and just create requirements, specifications, and task timeline without buffer time. At the end, It's developer who are frustrated by pressure from all around, developer is expected to breakdown the requirements and specification into coding planning as well as implement it into code. This requires extra times and efforts, but management seems do not want to tolerance this extra time. So whenever bugs/error occur the most first person to point is developer. Bug/Error is not always come from developer side, it sometimes come from not rational project delivery expectation that impact the whole software development life cycle.

Keeping good morale of developer is simple, it is like trading with social tolerance. Company want developer to work full time for them, and keep up with the tight deadline schedule whenever project plan is not executed well as expected, then special rewards must be given without being hold. It is very disappointing if you have worked hard but your reward is being hold until next year. Software vendor does not earn money from customer, but they earn money from the sweat of developers. What if those developer who hold critical module stopped working like a jammed machine? throw that jammed machine and acquire a new one? One should remember that software engineer is human, not robot. New guys may come, but will takes another learning curve.

To cope with this crisis, we must think the opposite from bottom to top. CEO must aware that their power is their human resource, which is their Software Development Department hold the biggest stake. Software Development consists of three main working line, they are requirements gathering, coding, and testing. Later in it may be extended into implementation and integration, but that is another thing. Make the application done is something, and deliver the project done is good thing. Here are best solution in my opinion to cope with this software developer crisis:

1. Clear and complete requirements: In tight schedule there may be hard to provide fully completed functional specification and requirements, but to make software developer life easier and faster, system analysts must give a simplified technical documents that provides brief description and workflow of the project as well as the module and processes, technical breakdown that include a standard UML diagram from use cases, actors, module and classes, as well as sets of standards and rules for this specific project. Make it done first, sent it to software developer, then continue doing client oriented documents. 
2. Use generalization as much as possible: It is very useful and fastest strategy to cope with tight schedule, but to find out which one and modules can use generalization, this must be either comes from System Analysts or Software Developer. As mentioned at the first number, It should be part of system analysts because software developer must implement the code as fast as possible with less mistakes and less time.
3. Special rewards and no blaming: No one is perfect, but also to boost morale, rewards is required. Since irrational project delivery is priority, rewards must be given respectively after the project done, regardless of it is delivered or not. why? because if project cannot be delivered well, either the problem is on development side or management side. but with the time given so irrational, then it is management failure, period. Do not blame development guys (analysts, engineers, and tester) when it fails, ask yourself why plan failed. It's better to encourage rather than blaming and blind-forcing to finish this task. You don't want to lose your development assets after the project's done, do you?
4. Maintain client requirements: somehow, following what clients wants can ruin the whole project development. It is best to keep what already agreed and signed at the first requirement study, and if there are any change requests or additional features, deliver it on next phase/patch. So at least, project can be delivered first without mess, and be ready for patches and next phase. you cannot accept all requests to be delivered within the same timeline without having extended development time due to side-effect . 

When project delivery has come into critical stage, company must sacrifice more costs for keeping development team morale and wills boosted and do remember to respect whatever have been done as a team. Because if projects done beautifully, the words and awareness will spreads out affecting many potential customers. It is a bargain, to persuade people to work not in normal time and pressure, then compensation is required. If having three line of development is not enough, then consider having Business Analysts line to study user business model, business requirements, and let the System Analysts to do more technical analysis as it is supposed to be. 

IT Vendors struggle with increasing competition from Cloud services vendors

Have you seen recent trends in big-proprietary enterprise vendor solution which loses their revenue in the last 2 years? Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, VM Ware, etc these big mother-vendor are in cross-section to make big turn to survive and compete in the jungle of enterprises. 

Many enterprises has been moved their IT services or infrastructure from single-vendor solution to heterogeneous vendor solution. The reason is simple, they get more less-complex solution at cheaper cost, and less headache to control and manage the operation. In the easy words, they now at least have someone to blame if they get problem.

Open source based technology are in big shot over second decade of 22th century. recently, eBay began to moves their 10,000 physical server node into Amazon cloud service which based on open source cloud solution, OpenStack. This move may also affect their Paypal business to host over 65,000 physical server nodes into cloud. Learning from the big loss, Now VM Ware make a turn by adding hybrid cloud solution to their portfolio. It will give the advantage over cloud performance, and in-house hosted data privacy and security. 

The same thing happened to Oracle as it loses from it's competitor who offer cloud database service, Datastax. their oracle licensing which gives big portion in database revenue was dropped significantly. They are blaming their sales force, but it was not the sales that failed. in fact, Oracle is still the best database in the world, but there are better solution that less-expensive and more flexible than hosting in-house Oracle database with its infrastructure complexity, expensive licensing and increasing support cost. 

again, Cloud play vital role by eliminating the complex management of IT and open source reduces the cost of licensing into cost of service. Microsoft senses it and began to offer Microsoft Office as a service rather than buying license. This trends has advantage such as more focused business model. If your business is software service, then you don't need to spent extra-cost to hire professional network people, you just subscribe for network infrastructure service, such as PaaS (Platform as a Service).

If your business is car making, you can subscribe for software services to boost productivity rather than boggled by maintaining software license, updates, and hiring professional just to make your software run. you just paid for what you get.

although Cloud offers such great advantages at lower cost, there are still drawbacks. It is depends on how you want to model your business and the security of your private enterprise data. because the biggest enemy of Cloud solutions is data privacy. 

sometimes the best is not good enough, when there are still better options. do not get too excited to follow the trend if your existing solution still run smoothly and you have more privacy and security concern, but Cloud technology is growing rapidly and who knows if someday it will be as good as your own private machine.

References:
Oracle big miss
Oracle is bleeding from database rivals
VM Ware 80k physical server node loses