Last Work Day of Summer

The end of summer always makes me feel a little down. When I was a kid it always seemed like summer would go on forever. They get shorter and shorter (and I seem to do less and less) the older I get.

Working at a startup again (requisite plug: http://liquidplanner.com) has been really interesting. This team has gone into it with a very specific product in mind. The last startup that I was involved with could never really figure out what it was building. This is very different. For one thing, we drink a lot more coffee!

Building project management software is kinda entertaining and kinda frustrating all at the same time. So much of the software out there is so friggen bad that it feels like, "Hey, this should be easy!" And that's also where a lot of the frustration comes from as well.

My office upstairs at home has cooled off from the heat of the day. Soon the Seattle rains will start again. That'll be nice because I'll feel much less guilty about spending my life thinking about statistics, software, human interaction and project management.

See, everyone thinks that this should be an easy problem to solve. How hard can it be to figure out when a project will be done?

Well let me tell you that it is pretty goddamned hard.

Even the simplest little thing like figuring out how much time it will take to do a simple, simple task is nearly hopeless. And it isn't just because we're concentrating on solving this problem for project management of software projects. You hear all this crap about how building software is not like building houses because the houses have a plan and defined methods and blah blah blah.

Bullshit.

If you think that building a house is all cut and dried and that all of that is a "solved problem" and that there is little uncertainty in home construction then you've obviously never built a house. As someone who has personally done a major remodel (as in, I swung the damned hammer and cut the damned two-by-fours) let me tell you that you make a lotta shit up as you go along.

So what's the difference? Well, I think that like a lot of things it is the people. When you work construction you show up at 8am and work through 5pm (provided you're on schedule). It is not that construction workers are predictable robots, it's that software workers are unpredictable flakes. And I'm fine with that.

In fact, if I had to punch a clock again I'd quit. Period.

We want those people to be allowed to work however makes them the happiest. Even if it would be easier to schedule zombies to do the work would we really want to encourage that? What I want is to liberate the knowledge workers from the tyranny of their schedules. Free them to work however and whenever they want and still have their projects succeed. Hell, not just succeed, friggen ROCK. Exceed all expectations for function, cost, schedule.

The tricky thing is that we're trying to build software that predicts a schedule from the most vague information. And we're trying to do it while not interfering with the poor bastard who has his head full of Amazon Web Service APIs while rewriting the chunk of code that is going to actually get his company paid but is already looking kinda sketchy because it's a rewrite of Jimmy Foobraugh's port from Fortran-77 of the linear regression algorithm and Jimmy got fired for never commenting anything.

Yeah.

I should have drunk more rum this summer. That is my conclusion.

Hi {SalesWeenie.FirstName}...

Nice title! Feels real personalized.

Yeah almost as personalized as this knee slapper from SalesForce.com:

Hi {Lead.FirstName},

Salesforce.com is above Siebel CRM for the first time as “Leaders” in the 2007 CRM/SFA Magic Quadrant, the industry’s most prestigious and valued ranking of CRM products and services.

Previously, Siebel was the only leader, and now Salesforce.com is above Siebel. This is a milestone for the industry and shows that an on-demand service can replace traditional software in a leadership position!

"We predict that within three years the majority of SFA deployments will be based on Software-as-a-Service."
--Gartner, Inc.

View the entire report here:
http://www.salesforce.com/form/pdf/sfa_magiicquadrant_gartner.jsp?d=70130000000DFHo


Regards,
Nicole

The irony is exquisite.

Come on folks. You sell software that does CRM and I'm supposed to trust your software when I get something like this?

Please!

Isn't this exactly the kind of thing that good CRM software is supposed to prevent? But that aside, the real problem is that there is a not so subtle distinction between personalized and personal emails.

Send me a personal email. Send me an email that shows that you know me; that you know my dog's name; that you know what I had for lunch; that you know I'm partial to rum. Send me an email that lets me know that I'm important to you as a person (not just a {Lead.FirstName}).

Or alternatively, don't.

I mean it. You don't know me Nicole. Just admit it. You don't know me, my dog, my lunch, or that I am very good friends with Jerry. Just send me a sales email like every other crappy sales email but which at least has the honesty and integrity to admit that you don't know me.


But whatever you do, just don't let me know that you think of me only as {Lead.FirstName}.

That's just pathetic.

Quick Notes from Ignite Seattle

So tonight I went to tonight's Ignite Seattle event.

Dude! I mean DUDE!

The talk format is 5 minutes with automagic 15 second slide changes. The talks were GREAT!

The stand outs were Rob Gruhl's talk about "How to Buy a New Car" (strategy), "Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR!" by Dave McClure (my personal favorite), and Leo Dirac's "Venture Capital Term Sheets". These were really great, informative 5 minute talks. You can see the video from the talks and the decks (I think) on the Ignite Seattle site.

One disappointment was Werewolf Strategy by HB Siegel. While he talked about the game, he never really got into the strategy. In part it was disappointing because I guess I had really high expectations for the talk. In retrospect it really wasn't a bad talk (in fact it was really entertaining) I just hoped for more meat about strategy. The game itself is perfectly suited to this short format of talk since in the game there's no objective information that is usable in each round. Thus the game is played at a higher level by playing the players rather than playing the game. If I lost you on that one just drop me a line an we'll play it sometime.

I'm dying to do a talk at one of these. If you have suggestions for a topic that would fit nicely in 5 minutes please leave a comment.

Anyway, I'm exhausted but totally energized by tonight's events. If you get a chance you MUST go. It is one of the best geek-fests I've ever been to.

-------------------
Follow up from 8/11/2007

Dave McClure nicely posted a comment with the deck from his talk. You can find it here at Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR!.

Busy, Busy, Busy

Holy crap I've been busy!

It's been like two months since I last posted and all kinds of stuff has been going on.

First off, it's getting really exciting at LiquidPlanner! We're getting ready to come out of that highly secretive and mysterious "stealth mode" that all really cool start-ups do (well, it seems all cool at the time).

We've re-named "Team46" as "LiquidPlanner" and I've been running around showing the product to anyone who will sit still for two hours and look at my laptop. Patent drafts are about to be handed back from the lawyers and then things will really crank up.

On Friday I drove all the way up to Snohomish to pick up a server rack (well, half-height rack) to go in the office for us to configure our servers before moving them to the co-lo. After all that and dragging the damned thing back and hauling it upstairs to the office I discover that it won't fit the rails we've got for the servers. That's $40 bucks and 3 hours that I'll never get back. Oh well.

I'm SO stoked to get the servers up and running so we can start showing people what we've been building. Just a little longer and we'll start handing out logins to the private Alpha servers so that more folks can take a look and see what they think. I've got to get the forum software up and running too. We're a Rails shop so we've chosen Beast and I think I'm gonna be really happy with it. It seems simple and straightforward while still allowing most of the features that we want.

I've been reading just about everything I can get my hands on about probabilistic scheduling and some of it is at once cool, and nearly incomprehensible. As we work on this and I dig into the subject I become more and more convinced that most scheduling woes in projects are caused by Murphy's law and Parkinson's law (work expands to fill available time) colliding with bad estimates (like saying 10 days instead of giving a range like 8-15 days) and the usual way that Gantt charts get drawn.

There's this industry report called the Standish CHAOS report (gotta love that name) that says that something like 80% of projects miss their schedule, budget, or scope. I think that I understand where that number comes from and here's the kicker... it isn't bad project management. It is the system itself that is causing the misses. You want a hint... it's all about the log-normal distribution.

Writing can save your teeth!

I was going on a writing-fest today. This was only half intentional. Here's what happened...

I was going to a whole friggen big list of sites to see what they were about and how their user communities behaved and what features they had that we want to steal emulate and I found all these cool topics that I wanted to chime in on.

But the minute that I wanted to dash off a 5 minute note I started thinking about the topic, and that lead me to Wikipedia to research the topic, and before I know it about 2 hours has gone by and I've got about 6 paragraphs of research with friggen footnotes and crap all ready to post to some forum that I've only ever been to once and will probably never visit again except that now I'm getting email responding to my post saying, "That's exactly what I think" or "You're full of crap HotKatie80".

... um... sorry, that was a different forum.

Anyway, what I started to notice was that as I wrote the posts my ideas kept changing. I'd write, think about what I wrote, revise what I wrote, read what I wrote, and that would change what I thought, and...

Yeah... you can see where this is headed.

So now I'm thinking (as I'm writing this) that this might be a really good explanation for why spec reviews are so important.

What!?!?!

Okay, bear with me...

The thing is that a written spec can't "wave its hands" at a problem. You really have to think through how the thing will work and make it all simultaneously consistent. Since a written spec is random access (in a way that a conversation is not) you can compare one section to another easily to find "bugs". So the act of writing the spec is the important thing. And it can't be just for yourself, but for public consumption (or as public as your spec can be which is probably a spec review).

Talk is a high bandwidth but essentially serial access connection with another person's brain. But the written word can be jumped around in really at random. This allows you to put facts side-by-side easily and compare them to see what likely outcomes or problems might arise.

For example, when I was a kid if I had written down that I was going to take my friend's soapbox racer to the top of our (very) steep hill and ride down to stop in the cul-de-sac with no brakes and no plan for how to stop at the end I can tell you that it would have seemed just as dumb as it does now when I stare at it in print.

That's because I can put "steep", "no brakes", "stop", and "cul-de-sac" all side-by-side in a way that just wasn't possible when we talked over this "plan" for the half-hour it took Jon & Dave & my brother & I to put it together and push the soapbox racer sans brakes to the top of the (very) steep hill.

Hell, we even had a "spec review" before we went forward.

Bruce:
"Okay, I'll jump in and you push me off and then I'll drive down to the bottom of the hill and stop in the cul-de-sac."

Dave:
"Sounds good."

Jon:
"Go for it."

My Brother:
"You're an idiot... er... Yeah, go for it!"


If only I'd written it down first.

I might not have done it (okay, it's still a toss up).

I might still have most of my front tooth.