Investor versus Customer

The prosumers envisioned by Alvin Toffler are informed and conscious customers acting on a saturated market, their opinions being very important in decision-making regarding product design matters.

Toffler's analysis has been so snappy, that the prosumers have been the most powerful influencers of the software industry from its very beginning. The end-user comments are handled as valuable resources, from their opinions about "proof of concept" apps to their contiguos feed-back.

The prosumers are our ultimate investors, since by paying our services they are funding the next versions of their software tools.

In order to obtain funds for a brand new project we need a couple of key investors, usually friends and/or business partners, a bank, eventually we may try crowdsourcing. The latter supposes starting a fundraising campaign, which can be considered a stand-alone project due to its considerable resource needs and risks (building a stable community of supporters and spreading the word need time and a lot of skilled work).

And here come in the big questions: what kind of investors we really need, how to find them, and how to keep them without compromising our project?

When opting for crowdfunding, we are committing oneself to the expectations of a more or less numerous community, and in optimal case we transform them in our prosumers.

When opting for a small group of investors we need to analyze carefully their personalities and histories, otherwise at some point our project could be hijacked, or it could degrade in a battlefield for sole competitors with big egos.

When shaking hands with investors one need to consider the same risks as when onboarding employees, but when the collaboration does not work, in general it's many more painful, complicated and time consuming to change things.

In case of IT&C projects the experience and skill set of an investor may be also a delicate subject matter. As a junior analyst I've been surrounded by tech guys and I've been missing the perspective of business guys. Later as a semi senior analyst I've been missing the perspective of tech guys mastering certain technologies I haven't had access to.

When defining my own project idea, I've been thinking for a while about finding investors, who don't interfere at all in the decisions. After some time I've realized, that all the efforts put in finding investors with a predefined profile are vaste of resources, and the campaigns don't build me neither a personality nor a history.

Mature investors and project owners are looking for similar human values, and the best thing one can do for attracting and keeping the right investors is focusing on our to-do and personal development.

Where Is the Money?

In 2002, somewhere in East Europe I was watching TV, and a young guy was walking in a local studio for being interviewed about the future of the Internet. Our guy has been presented as an expert in the subject matter, and with all the self-confidence of his age group he has explained that the big money won't be in the public-facing Internet anymore, but in solutions for private networks.

I've felt stunned, because his reasoning has opened me a window to a different world. A couple of years ago I've felt in the same way when starting to work on a project for an ISO 9001 company - those people are living in a universe where it's natural to think in the long run.

But in 2002 the Internet penetration in East-Europe was low, and the dot-com bubble hasn't affected us. The expert guy was building his reasoning on facts like the high costs of securing virtual places, and the fundamental human need of safety.

And he was right.

During the next decade we've gotten mobile devices, cheap broadband Internet, social networks, cloud solutions, and IoT has teamed up with Big Data. After experiencing the advent of Web 2.0 - the world of interactive, rapid Internet applications - we've gotten wrapped in our personalized information bubbles shaped by Web 3.0 tools, and we've learned that security, reliability and usability are not for free.

Nowadays there is a killer competition between digital agencies serving the need for public-facing company websites. On Freelancer and similar sites it's simple to find the job offers of such agencies operating on the soho market: they are looking for students from non-industrialized countries, who accept to work for $1-$2 per hour.

On the other side of the IT&C service palette are the consulting companies specializing in complete cloud solutions: hardware & software selection, tuning, monitoring and scripting. These shops are relying on certified domestic employees, and represent a safe option for the middle market.

Tech Guy and Business Guy

They are a complementary team by design, so to speak. The tech guy spots the essence of one's painful problems and elaborates solutions for them. The business guy is doing the marketing and the feasibility analysis.

Then why these two guys so often cannot get along?

Over the years I've seen many different situations: young or even mature people suffering from lack of education and experience, or too much greed. I consider that our personalities are evolving during all our life, and everybody has the capacity to overcome his/her weaknesses, but for turning a project into a success all the team members need to be in their best psychical shape.

Some people are nice one-man business guys - even if apparently they are leading thriving small businesses, all their team members are just executing orders. Other people are bringing the sun with them and turning their competitors in team assets - these special guys sometimes make millions, but most of the time just make happy their families and friends.

About a year ago I had a written job interview, and between others I had to answer this question: "What 2 'unicorn' companies do you consider most over-inflated and subsequently most susceptible to being impacted by a bubble burst?"

My reply stated the following: "...Uber and similar dispatcher companies, picture sharing, text and voice chatting, social networks (SnapChat, Pinterest) might loose even more than 50% of their current  market values."

Of course somebody else has taken the job, because the job poster (like many many others) has underestimated the importance of the technological factors in the evolution of business entities.

Those guys bringing the sun with them are natural leaders, they are able to run companies with happy tech guys and business guys, and I'm considering a matter of elementary common sense to vote for them.

The BPO Saga

Accounting and debt collection services are classic examples of businesses answering the need for externalizing certain business processes. The first call centers have occurred in the 1960s, when phone systems became generally available consumer goods, and the first digital marketing services have occured in the 1990s, after the Internet.

Nowadays the BPO family includes members from multiple location contact centers to boutique accounting firms. Although different in geographic presence and organigrams, all of then are sharing a common set of particularities:

• operating in a highly competitive market environment demanding always better quality and lower prices
• permanently looking for new opportunities, because both customers and employees are moving targets
• skilled and experienced decision makers, because the industry is not attractive for investors and there are no funds for errors

Nowadays even a student can organize a small team for offering digital marketing services, or a home based phone answering service. He/she won't have contracts with banks or supermarket chains, but by investing much time and some money in his/her startup he/she can gain the necessary experience for being hired by a BPO company operating on the middle or high end market.

Once a tech guy enters a professional BPO company, he/she will experience the "love me or leave me" trait of this industry. While these companies must follow the newest trends in technology and economy, and they encourage their tech personnel in studying, getting certified, growing personally and professionally, high salaries and stable incomes are not typical in the domain.

BPO workers are mostly underpaid, and sometimes even overworked. This happens because of the complex business model based on numerous smaller and bigger projects handled in parallel by a number of persons working in turns. Micromanaging such processes is a nonsense - most workers have to do multitasking (handling at least 2 projects in the same time). A fixed full-time or part-time salary supplemented with bonuses is widely accepted for this kind of work.
 
Let's face it, staying 8 hours on the phone is not a dream job, and tackling Office documents for ever-changing customers is not something you are happy to do all your life. The BPO workers are looking for other jobs, and the tech guys might leave the boat for pecuniary reasons.

On the other hand most customers of BPO companies are entities running 1-2 year projects, or startups with limited funds. In time the projects are ending, and the startups are or failing, or growing and considering more appropriate solutions for their new needs.

For BPO managers hunting new customers and new personnel has to be a permanent activity. For them the breach between contractual incomes and salary expenses does mean first of all an investment fund in technology and education for keeping the boat floating.

The funny boys of the BPO family are Upwork and Freelancer. Both are defining themselves as meeting places for employers and professionals, but they are used mainly for BPO purposes and for experimental projects.

While Upwork has been struggling for two years to break into a hypotetical middle market, Freelancer is adapting itself to a global market using the breach between the prices and salaries of different countries. In my opinion who is consuming the benefits of this breach for anything else than the latest technologies and education, will probably fail in the BPO business.

Contact centers already have a tradition in moving from one country to another, virtual admin and digital marketing teams are following their paths as the Internet bandwidth becomes larger.

I'm envisioning BPO as a saga because for surviving they have to fight continuously with the project management triangle's constraints and doing their best quality work.

PowerShell as Rescue Party

During the last two years Microsoft reorganized its own certification system, and now MVA is offering several so-called Learning Paths, two of them based on PowerShell. Although it's categorized as a tool for IT professionals, I consider PowerShell a fundamental tool for developers as well.

As most end-users are working in small and medium-sized companies, most IT guys are expected to offer working solutions, not just completing isolated tasks.

Thinking about solutions determines us to analyze and define the problem we have, to shortlist possible alternatives, to consider the pros, cons, HR and financial aspects of those alternatives - in short it teaches us project management.

The nature of end-user activities and workflows indicate when and where a web app, a shell script or a desktop app works better.

PowerShell always comes in handy as a rescue party when an emergency situation arises, or concrete results are required by undecided users, or the work environment is chaotic.

This happens because PowerShell has been designed to be the IT guy's Swiss Army knife. Of course PowerShell has evolved together with the Windows OS versions, and it's neither a universal glue for 32 bit and 64 bit software, nor a scotch tape for parallel and batch processing.

When I've made my first home work with PowerShell and MS SQL Server, I've been impressed that my small script was reading csv (xml etc.) files pushed by a different system, and updating my database, and sending notifications in case of certain error conditions.

Later I've learned that SharePoint workflow automations and remote server monitoring are also using PowerShell - so it certainly worth the time and money spent.

Business models are changing in the same pace as the economic environment, consequently nowadays in an IT system the proportion of the rapidly updatable shell scripts tends to grow - that's why learning some PowerShell becomes more and more important.

Synching Calendars?

Innate multitaskers and firefighters are thriving in a chaotic environment. They don't mind to handle 2-3 phones, half a dozen of IM channels and a browser with 1-2 dozens of opened tabs.

Easygoing professionals might pick up several messaging and time management software, and one day they realize that they have a number of calendars, contact lists and message lists to sync, because the data they need is spread across more or less integrable services.

Is hiring a part-time assistant a good solution to this kind of new problems produced by the new technologies? The answer is - as always - it depends.

The primary rule is that the business model tells what kind of project management and process management tools are suitable for the company. People often put off changing software, or consider that their existing processes are too complicated for being restructured.

"We love our ...name here... software so much, that we've also purchased ...here comes a list of tools... in order to complete its missing features" could be a winning innovation model, or hard stuff with steep learning curve for new employees, or a hack causing quality degradation in time.

In case of a BPO company it's good to search for a software based on Kanban tables or Gantt charts, which offers graphs for past and future time intervals. Todoist is ok for a freelance VA, but not for a VA team, and who has dozens of processes, might consider migrating from Asana.

In case a professional needs a predictable and quiet environment for performing well, then he/she will definitely make a good complementary team with a native multitasker assistant, regardless of his/her software tools.

From Blogs to Content Management

Lately I've spent quite a bit of time with Moodle, Office 365, and a few hours with WordPress in order to check some embedding tricks.

To be honest, I've never been a WordPress fan ...between others I'm not after its architecture, and I don't want to use custom markup instead of html.

As a wannabe e-Learning course author I've been pleasantly surprised by the good integration between Moodle and Docs.com, or even a sway including a classic presentation with an embedded Youtube video - practically a teacher without IT background can attend dozens of students free of charge.

The forms and quizzes provided by Office 365 could be used as feedback surveys, but Moodle's scales, gradebooks, question banks, assignments, workshops and other specific entities are complementing excellently with a general-purpose document authoring and a multimedia authoring software package.

Nowadays a teacher can feel overwhelmed by the multitude of software tools designed to make his/her activity more efficient, and an administrative assistant might also need half a dozen of CMSs for doing his/her job.

Stock management, billing & drop-shipping, website & SEO, team management & collaboration are the minimal toolset for a company doing online commerce, and the situation is not simpler in other industries.

With the advent of management systems today we have hundreds of online tools offering highly interactive, user-friendly solutions, and hiding as much as possible the complexities of their internal logics.

In such an environment I think there is not a good idea investing time and money in CMS systems, which require mastering a multitude of static templates (a template should be visually editable and self-explanatory) or big manuals describing dozens of counterintuitive workflows instead of visual, context-sensitive guides for novice users.

PM Tools

Think about a restaurant where people can choose what they want from the menu. How would you organize 8 workers in the kitchen to prepare 27 meals in the shortest time? Project management tools are meant to support resolving this kind of problems.

A company can have 2-3 projects...or dozens of projects to work on at the same time. Each project can be taken off in processes (some of them must be done sequentially, others can be done in parallel), and each process can be taken off in activities.

Both processes and activities can be prioritized and re-prioritized as needed.

Gantt charts are classic tools used for a reduced number of slowly moving projects with well-known outcome - in construction you have the design and you can do good estimates for processes and activities.

Kanban tables are newer tools used in agile project management, and they are good for visualizing processes of projects with many unknown aspects - in service-based companies you have to redistribute workers and machines in function of the incoming commands and technical incidents; the IT&C industry is dealing with the most rapidly changing aspects like traffic on the wire/air and user requests.

There are many dozens of PM tools out here, I'm going to list three of them.

Trello for 2-3 small projects: https://trello.com/

KanbanTool for bigger projects - it has "swimlanes" (projects and processes can be kept together and handled easily), "sub-tables" (for complex projects) and in general it scales well as a company is growing: http://kanbantool.com/

Microsoft's Project - although I've never evaluated the costs for adopting Office 365 with additional goodies: https://products.office.com/en-us/project/compare-microsoft-project-management-software

Dotnet Core On Duty

Several hosting providers have added ASP.NET Core 1.0 to their offer. In other words after near four years  of client-side presence .NET Core is now on duty at server-side.

The hardware and communication technologies emerging after the first  version of the .NET Framework have made necessary a major redesign of Microsoft's managed code environment, and finally .NET Core is ready to go for early adopters.

Some people testing or evaluating ASP.NET Core's feature set are wondering why it doesn't include a mailer, an image processing library, a DataAdapter or SignalR implementation?

In my opinion this happens because it has been designed as a modern multi-platform tool with loosely coupled architecture and dockers in mind, employing with maximum efficiency the appropriate platform-specific software resources.

The server-side operating system of your choice already has native tools for mailing, charting, generating images, rich text, data sheets or handling multimedia files, and those tools will certainly work with better speed and stability than a generic library.

ASP.NET as a middleware does not need to double the role of a web server, a game server or a media streamer, those roles are normally delegated to specialized local processes - their concrete pros and cons depending on the server operating system or your third-party vendors.

From project management point of view defining clearly the objectives and domain of relevance are key aspects of a successful project, thus in my opinion ASP.NET Core is on the right track and it's a good choice for new projects with service-oriented architecture.

Multi-platform Development Now and Then

Between 2002 and 2004 I was a brave full-time enterprise employee preparing myself for a freelance career. I've spent some time playing with html, JavaScript, Java, PHP, C++ and several Linux distros.

That time developing cross-platform code has been not only a shiny perspective, but a common user requirement, and getting one's Windows applications running on Wine was a cool feature.

When I've had the time to look into the core of a free multi-platform programming language framework written in ANSI C (like PHP or Python), I've realized the dimensions of the human resource investment and dedication necessary to develop and maintain such products, which predestinates them to be an oligopoly in terms of market structure.

Between 2005 and 2008 it was still a good decision to invest in multi-platfom applications - that time the libraries based on managed code  were not mature enough for serving efficiently a considerable list of market demands, typically coming from domains where the business  processes have been changing rapidly.

In the meanwhile the spread of multicore processors and broadband Internet services have made possible the spread of new programming patterns focused on better server response times and more responsive user interfaces with rich, internationalized content - multiple challenges asking for refactoring classic libraries.

During the previous decade the hardware industry has evolved more rapidly than the software for the new technologies, that's why mobile operating systems like Symbian or now Android could achieve so large popularity - it has been necessary to put something on the new hardware to get it working and doing sellings.

Due to the continuous diversification of processors and hardware architectures an increasing number of software companies have started choosing Java or .NET for their long-term projects.

For a small or medium software company doing cross-platform coding is not a financially feasible option anymore, and the managed code is employed between others for execution speed improvements.

The development efforts invested in .NET and targeting parallel and asynchronous programming led to a solid foundation for business-critical apps doable within the limitations of a concrete triangle of budget, time and quality.

.NET is my world, with Java I'm not familiar enough to write about its recent evolution.