Why so much of fuss about these two?

SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) is a bill currently in the US Congress that would allow the US Government to add sites to a blacklist, preventing anyone in the United States from accessing them. The stated goal is to limit access to pirate (“warez”) sites, and sites that sell counterfeit physical products. Fake Rolexes, designer clothes, prescription drugs, etc.

The intent of the bill is great. However, it has far greater ramifications.

If any data which any user posts on a blog or forum is copyrighted, that includes thousands of websites which use even small copyrighted images or content in even user posts – that forum gets into the risk of Going Dark. Permanently! Period.

Each word you post on a blog or some forum or some community site which allows user comments will be reviewed and audited before they go live. Small headache for you.. BIG headache for popular forums which you use on a daily basis. If you are a developer and you are using StackOverFlow forum and users are posting content. A large forum may have some 200000 pages. Of all those pages, if someone posts an ad on any one single page for downloading an illegal software or license and before even the forum moderators find the thread and delete it,  the entire forum has the risk of getting deleted from US search engines and entire site going dark temporarily! The amount of time that it would take to correct such an unjustified blocking would cause permanent damage to any interactive site.

It will cause similar or greater problems to the individuals actively seeking and providing help. They would not be able to log in to get the help any more.

What would this lead to?

This would lead to interactive sites stopping all interactions and user comment additions. Are you thinking of Wikipedia or you are thinking of Facebook? Or Elance? Whatever. Whichever website allowed you to comment on it will make sure that each of your comments are reviewed by someone before they are posted. Result – Response time would be astronomically high. People would ask questions in one time zone.. There would be a timezone lag for approval.. Then there would be a time lag for response and timelag for approval and then this process is going to slow things like anything which would take the value-add out from online interactive media.

Would you get impacted because of this?

Oh, Of course! It does not matter which part of the world you are in. Even if you are not in the US, then also this hurts you the same.

Situation 1: You are a US company. Directly impacted with what I shared above.

Situation 2: You are a Indian software company. If your site has content which is copyrighted, you wont show up on the search results in US. Major problem. Right?

Situation 3: You are a developer. You use forums which are mostly on US server. About 85% of them. If they shutdown, your access to expert help diminishes.

Situation 4: You are outside US. You dont have anything to do with Internet. You still are impacted because a lot of the news you read in the newspapers are stories which are picked up from the Internet with live stories/content which people upload real-time. If websites which take in user stories take time to review, verify and then post. Things will not be REAL-TIME anymore!!

Now do you think you should oppose SOPA /PIPA?

Cheers,

Sam

References:

1. Warrior Forum – Why people are opposing SOPA PIPA

2. MadMikesAmerica – Stop SOPA/PIPA

3. Economic Times - PIPA and SOPA: Wikipedia, Google protest internet bills on online piracy

4. And Many more.. Google News

Small and Medium businesses in particular have clearer needs in terms of what is the software development they need done. However, at times they are not aware which technology might suit their needs best, what framework would make their application scalable and what databases would be able to take up the load of the concurrent high volume usage once their business picks up and what applications or licenses should they be using to save if not thousands but atleast hundreds of dollars. And all this should be catered to by the outsourcing firm you are speaking with.

Wrong Choice of Technology can skew Project Success Rates

If you are not able to get clearer comparisons, and you are not able to get confirmed answers of these, trust me, you can take it as an early sign of the vendor firm’s incapability in competing frameworks, hence you would be told only one option and you would be advised that it is the best option for you. Give me a break! The availability of developers’ skillsets would determine my product’s technology? It should always be the other way round – I am informed – i get to know what works best and then if you have expertise – we can talk!!

Simple classy example: Client needs to develop a prototype for something. The need is to get something done quickly so that he can get his funding companies or end-clients or his users to get a feel of the product before he actually invests significantly in the product. Here scalability is not the concern. Time to Market is. Cost is. Reason – Client can not experiment at a huge cost. Costs have to be down,  still majority features should be there in the product to generate interest and yet it has to be done quickly!

What would most firms do?

They will wait to hear about the technology requirements and then your choice of technology and then they will advise not this that.. Not that this. BS!!

Python – inherent strengths are it is a very powerful language (meaning can be used to build a wide variety of applications) and is pretty easy to learn. Thats the reason it is used to teach programming in most universities and colleges. It is around 4-5 times faster to build an application in Python than in Java.But Java is preferred when building robust ‘real’ applications. You can check Python.org for detailed comparison and all but that is not the point.

The point is reaching out to a vendor who gives you suggestions on how to reach your objectives quicker, yet not compromising with the quality. The only way such a thing can happen is when the vendor has expertise in all technologies, has worked previously with the technology and has gained experience along the way.

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There are more such critical factors which can become a bottleneck in offshore project success. To read more about the pain points, Download Mindfire Whitepaper.

Happy Reading!

Cheers,

Sam

A client is a normal human being who is running a business for profits. What he needs basically is a solution to his problems or situation. That can be a software solution, a security solution, a testing solution, a design solution or a framework consulting solution or the like. If he has multiple things he is seeking for, he would be happy to get all the answers in one place and the vendor firm which can supply this to him becomes a one stop solution for him. Advantages – less headache. Disadvantages – More headache because if the vendor fails – client would rarely know what failed!

Problems converting to Migraines

During this solutioning process, the client is looking for a partner who comes up with solutions to a problem rather than coming forward with a bunch of problems. If the offshore firm’s team keeps coming back to the client for directions regarding every small thing, it completely defeats the purpose of outsourcing itself.

Classic Examples of situation above:

1.  Client logs off sending email to the offshore team – ” Hi PadmanavaRajaGopalan, When you login in the morning, check for Ravi’s designs and upload it into the UI we have been using. Ours was functional, remember.. This one is the graphic one. ”  Off the record – Ravi is the designer from Pune who is working from India.

Developer ‘P’ comes in the morning. Checks the design which has been sent by the designer and the email from the client. Tests the design diligently and logs in defects in the defect tracker. Sends a note to the client, sends a note to the designer and calls it a day.

It is late afternoon when the designer gets the email from the developer P. He replies back with his comments and says these are not defects. These are minor things and is not acceptable as defects. He marks a copy to the client too!

Client wakes up in his morning. Hopes to find the design integrated. Opens up his mailbox and sees agitated emails flying around. No one has cared to understand the importance of implementation today. Another day wasted because developer has asked a question – with all these defects, should i implement the design on the website?? The designer has also asked a question – These are all minor defects, do you want me to fix all this? This is going to cost extra hours!!! #$%^&$%!#@!

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This is what normally happens when the outsourcing firms raise their hands whenever they could actually have taken the bottomline responsibility. Identifying a partner who owns up the tasks and sees them to completion, is one who comes up with solutions to a problem rather than coming forward with a bunch of problems. The Key lies in identifying and empowering such firms.

Interested to know more about the other critical situations which become pain points in a offshore software development arrangement? Download Whitepaper here.

I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on this.

Regards

Sam

Shield yourself from Failures. Talk to us.

Don't Outsource Blindly. Get Informed.

If you own a software product, chances are that you would have already contemplated migrating your project into SAP so that you can  atleast buzz past the first door where the customer is skeptical about your product and the massive amount of changes they need to undergo in their existing SAP backbone which is fueling their business. Inevitably, you need to change your product. Now, changes to your product might mean more customization time, more time to get the product market ready and there is every possibility that this changed product would be only suited for the client you are talking to. The client next door would have a separate need for a similar system and you keep customizing your product at the expense of more time and money and end up making smaller margins. If you are slightly less lucky, as we all feel looking at the greener grass on the other side, then by the time you are ready with the changes, the client might just say – we have had restructuring inside the org and product needs to change again!! There can be many more such situations.

What is the way out?

You would already be thinking by now – Ok then – tell me how SAP can help in such a situation.

Logic is simple. If you start looking at companies which run on SAP, instead of companies which are uniquely different from each other, the amount of customization you would need to do is limited and one time. After the initial set of customization is done and you enable your product to talk to SAP backend, it can just become a plug and play system and you would see more and more clients coming forward to know more about your product, taking up your product since it costs them nothing more to adopt it to their million dollar SAP backend. That is when they look at the innovation in your product, the creativity with which your product does what it is intended to do.  Even if your client is using a customized SAP infrastructure, the amount of changes needed to your already-SAP-enabled product will be less. But first things first – your products need to be SAP certified and compatible.

Mindfire – What is it? Can it even do what it claims?

Well, two ways to know the answer to this other than I telling you – Yes we can do it. First, take a smaller product – send it to us for a quote and get a risk free trial of a few days in place. I am sure you would be surprised at two things – at the comparative lower quotes than you would expect from IT majors in India and second, at the expertise and commitment levels of Mindfireans. The second way to know the answer to the question above would be to wait till we at Mindfire finish about 40-50 migration projects and then you can speak to our references and then think about your decision to migrate your product. Time lost can become detrimental but that’s fine. Better be safe than be sorry.

We dont claim to be the best. And we also say NO clearly when we feel that we dont have expertise to do a project. But once we commit to something, we will everything it takes to finish that by then. After all, we have a business to run.

Please do send me if you have any questions and i would be glad to take it up for you.

Cheers,

Sam

Many other companies like us say the same and try various means of achieving it. But there is a subtle difference in the way we do it. With a quick risk free trial you can gauge the depth of knowledge and experience of your software partner. But to ascertain if your software provider would be able to cope up with the speed at which you are growing, or will they be able to add value to you other than just from the cost savings perspective are something which needs to be experimented and found out.  Unfortunately, purpose of this post is not to share how to carry out this experiment but rather to understand what can be done to enhance your business outlook and to basically understand what is in store for you when a vendor comes forward to state they can add value to your business. How??

Traditionally, we at Mindfire Solutions have worked on multiple skills and with clients from over the world who have their own software products and have done business ranging from good, fair, ok to not so ok revenues and growth. What we could do for them was adding value in terms of innovation in tools used, innovation in project practices which improve transparency, innovation in measuring metrics which ensured  less cost of operations as well reducing chances of project failures. What we had not done previously was Upscaling.

That is what we have always thought of and working on it for years. Now we are ready.

Upscaling to SAP.

SAP - Empower your product

If you are the CEO of a software product company which is catering to needs of enterprises, you would surely understand that selling to large enterprises is often much tougher since they either are running on SAP or Oracle or something else and it is very difficult to get an affirmative nod from them to accept and use your product. For them to accept the product and buy it from you, the product needs to be either highly innovative, or it needs to be highly popular or it needs to run on the backend they have. Chances are that, most likely it would be SAP. The safest way to reach out to your clients would be to tell them that your product is SAP-compatible and they will not have to change their system at all to use your product. When the clients see value in what you are proposing (be it a activity management system, timesheet management system, a project management tool, a material management invoicing module or anything which an enterprise needs) and they see that their existing enterprise SAP would not need to change, they are more likely to listen. Another advantage is that when your product becomes pro-SAP and you integrate SAP in your product, you get exposed to thousands if not millions of enterprises which run on SAP. This happens when you get listed as a preferred partner on SAP website.

We started off modestly by learning the ropes. Today, we have applied for SAP ICC partnership as we speak and the work we were silently doing in the background would be known to existing and future clients gradually. If you feel you need to identify if you will gain or not, from a SAP integration of your product, send me an email. Check out our SAP Integration/ ABAP Development skills.

Cheers,

Sam

Mindfire needs no introduction now in the SMB IT industry anymore. We have come a long way when we were trying to establish ourselves as one of the most respected SMB enterprises catering to the needs of global clients worldwide. Based on our experience gathered over 1000+ projects since the last 12 years, we have tried to identify pain points which clients normally face when they are confronted with outsourcing.

These are clients who heard about outsourcing and tried it without understanding what lies in store. Half researched, half baked information made them susceptible to situations beyond their control which steered the project health towards the leaner side which finally led to project failure.

One of the keys to developing software applications with offshore teams is the synchronization of expectations. Expectations can range from communication, requirements, delivery, timeliness and can go endless to finer details of responsiveness, cultural fit and others. Mismatch in expectations in any form can lead to communication gaps, disinterested teams and a less engaged customer. By eliminating the gaps between work processes performed in IT silos, teams can rapidly deliver applications in response to shifting business requirements and expectations.

This whitepaper captures 12 most frequently confronted pain points while dealing with offshore teams and Enterprise-level and project-level best suited suggestions in defining and managing geographically distributed teams to help projects meet intended business metrics.

Since the whitepaper is for private distribution, I would not be able to provide a public link here. However, if you subscribe to this blog or just put in a comment here with your email ID or send me an email at sam@mindfiresolutions.com, I would be glad to send you a complimentary copy.

Happy Reading!

Cheers,

Sam

Microprocessors do. They are judged by the number of parallel computations which they can do at one time. How do they manage? They work on one operation while they are continuously ticking for other inputs every second. The moment user input comes in, they start working on that with priority.

Multitasking

What do we do? We do a lot of work at the same time – We look at our emails with headphone on, attending meetings, reading triage reports and someone who looks at such a person would feel he is a perfect multitasker. Actually the word itself is used so frequently in the industry where we work that project managers at times expect teams to multitask. We feel good if we are working on 2-3 things at the same time and at the end of the hour, all three things are successfully completed. However, what we are doing is actually “Time Switching” and not multitasking.

When we are in a triage meeting and listening to defect statuses or in a Joint Application Discussion (JAD) session, we think that we are multitasking when we read emails in between in the meeting. Reality – We are not even listening to what is being said in the call. So we are actually switching the idle time in the meeting to reading the emails and saving time. However, we are completely ignorant of what is going on in the call in the meanwhile. Our minds are built in such a way that we can think about only one thing at a time and when we switch quickly from one task to the other leaving one task incomplete, we tend to do a lot of ALT+TABS to only realize that we spent 25% more time in switching tasks and switching time! (Source: Linkedin HBR Article published November 3rd, 2011)

Multitasking gives an impression of work being done faster whereas the quality suffers.

When you think of people working in multiple projects at the same time in various software companies, the situation would be nearly similar. You have to switch off your mind and the code which you are writing for Client A and then move your mind and time to code for Client B.  As a developer, as a project manager, you would have to ensure that the work quality is not lowered and the client gets the perfect quality of work done. And that inevitably means longer work hours, longer work times and reduced energy levels and reduced quality. Its goes on as a cycle and can be broken with the myth on multitasking breaking down!

Lets focus on doing one job at a time, one step at a time. That is why we ensure our clients are informed about Mindfire’s Dedicated Monthly Engagement model and its advantages before they choose any form of engagement with us. If you have questions on how we ensure quality in the monthly model, please do feel free to email me – sam@mindfiresolutions.com

Do you agree that so called Multitasking actually takes up a lot of your time, creates confusion and finally ends up wasting more time? Or Do you feel that Multitasking or Switching time has actually helped you become more efficient and you can do two things at a time.. Would love to hear your views.

Cheers,

Sam