Coming back to reading, blogging, programming, doing research, listening to music, and all that stuff I used to do a lot just a few months ago. Ah, and meeting friends. Missed you guys.
That’s been a hectic period. First of all, by the end of May I was offered a position of the Director of Technology. Which I accepted, obviously. The sad thing is that someone had to be fired. But that’s how the life goes, “You’re dead too soon if the bullet don’t miss” (Biohazard).
Anyway, considering the fact that at that time I have been hired at this company for about three months, things got really cool, as this was the first time ever anyone put so much trust in stuff I do. The amount of work to be done was (and still is) enormous. My goal was a complete reorganization of the department, just of every single piece you can imagine. What is even more interesting, the company is absolutely open to innovation and new technologies, and both of the owners are visionaries with a tendency towards technology. That’s very uncommon phenomenon, especially here in Poland, that business people are curious enough to get into this geeky world. Kudos.
So what are the results? About a month ago I was asked to prepare a document describing the development strategy for my department within next few months and years. At that time I was fairly skeptical about the possibility of achieving even half of the short-term goals listed (i.e. in three months time). Apparently, we have been quite lucky and well motivated to make… All of them real! Wikis for knowledge management, checklists, deployment procedures, programming methodology and trainings, improving communication by redesigning channels and work-flow, reducing noise, moving people around offices, team building and integration, helping sales department by providing tools and documentation, introducing new technology (most of the work so far was done with .NET), starting two R&D projects and even writing down standards for CSS. All that in one month and without interrupting ongoing production and customer service!
Three main ideas behind my strategy were:
- Searching possibilities of maximizing revenue by redesigning internal processes.
- Gaining advantage over our direct competition by introducing new technologies.
- Team skills development and building a highly innovative and inspiring setting.
As you can see, as simple as you can get, but that’s what makes a good and stable business in a classical sense. And to be completely honest, I believe we are closer than ever in creating a perfect place for people who do computer stuff because they love to hack and to design, and what is most important – we are very likely to earn awful lot of money this way.