A company just created a php class that can be used to implement PHP and Google Maps. I’ve tried it out and it works great. I’ve created a little application that allows you to pinpoint multiple locations. Check it out. Be sure to read the directions.

Check out the RJ’s Phoogle Implementation. I’ve also used this little tool to find an acceptable color schemes.

NOTE: The design of this utility does not pass the design standards of iProv, LLC.

      

Leadership Is Enthusiasm

We find ourselves intrinsically attracted to passionate and excited people

Leaders often find themselves in familiar situations

Leaders are usually trend spotters. They see the trend and move toward that trend and merely ask people to “follow them”. The people would probably get there without the leader. But, in no way, is the leader worthless. Most people are followers and followers need leaders.

      

There are some really neat ways to foster action. Here are a couple that I thought you might be interested in.

Get a College Team to Develop an Application - Joel Spolsky has done a great job at FogCreek with what he calls, Project Aardvark. He recruited four Ivy League interns and instead of wasting their talents giving them the usual dull and unimportant tasks of a typical summer internship, we decided to let the interns create a complete new software product, from beginning to end, over the course of one summer. FogCreek now sells this product and has developed a documentary film based on Project Aardvark.

Get a College Team to Develop a Marketing Campaign - The project explained above can be applied to any type of project that has an end goal. This project could be a computer application, marketing campaign, building restoration, office design, etc. Be creative but have a goal with specific deliverables.

Have a One Day Hackathon - What’s a hackathon you ask? Well, all of the engineers (and even some of our “business people”!) showed up in the conference room at 9:00am with ideas for projects that could be designed, implemented, and tested in a single day. We tossed around the ideas for a little while to determine which ones would be the biggest hit with our publishers and by 9:30am everyone left with their assignment: Put everything else on hold and complete their project by the end of the day.
http://www.burningdoor.com/feedburner/archives/001299.html
http://www.burningdoor.com/feedburner/archives/001299.html

      

You run into opportunity as you run toward an opportunity. You can’t expect opportunities to run into you and you’ll never see an opportunity unless you’re moving toward something.

      

Just listened to an interesting recording by Venture Voice that interviewed Brad Feld. Feld started off as a high risk entrepreneur (software company and bootstraped) and moved into angel investing, and then started an investment company.

He pinpoints my reasons to focus on product development rather than services. As he grew to 20 people or so, he ran into scaling issues. If he grew to 40 people he’d obviously double the revenue, but his profit would probably be exactly the same.

He advises consulting companies to start small, bootstrap, and make sure that you create more demand before adding more people. Very slow, clear, profitable growth. He says, like most people, he stumbled into a consulting firm. He also talks about consulting companies wanting to become a product based companies and failing… or just talking.

He also talks about how to get funded which why, I think, most people are listening. He says a lot of good thing such as “The Business Plan Evolves… it’s never complete”, “Intellectual horsepower has to be tempered with experience”, and “I think the business plan is a really, really useful tool for an entrepreneur in terms of framing out what he or she is thinking about building.”

If you’re like me, which I think the people that read this are… I’d recommend you read this.

      

Tonight, in about 5 minutes, I installed a wiki for the office. Some of you many have heard of Wikipedia which allows ANYONE to edit the pages. This creates a “community” learning enviornment. It’s a great concept and has been extremely successful at Wikipedia. If you haven’t checked out Wikipedia, I strongly suggest you go and do some research there. If you’re too smart for an encyclopedia, I’d suggest you go there and share some of the knowledge by writing new terms and adding to existing topics.

In an office enviornment there is a lot of information John knows and should relay to Chris. An office could use a wiki to share this information.

Tonight, in about 5 minutes, I installed a wiki for iProv. You can see our wiki at www.iprovinternal.com/wiki. Now, I know its cool and I think it will be extremely useful. But, my questions is, how can we take full advantage of this?

My current ideas include:

1. Customer Relationship Mangement
2. Public To Do List
3. Business Plan Development
4. A Democratic Policies and Procedures
5. Coding Standards
6. Books to Read
7. Things to Buy

What are other ideas?

      

Our new web site is at www.iProvOnline.com!

      

I was thinking about our many projects at iProv today during church. We’ve got a pretty solid process for managing our project but there are some hand-calculations that still have to be made.

As most of you know, the majority of my job is project management and new business. I can’t really teach you how to come up with creative solutions but I can talk just a little bit about project management. This blog entry is going to focus on proposal development, project evaluation, and break even points.

At iProv, we break projects into “days”. If your business breaks things into “hours”, you will have to do a little modifying.

Proposal Development
When you look at developing a project, use this formula

1. $ per day = (Amount of Money You Want Your Organization to put in it’s Pocket Each Day) + (Price of an Employee Per Day * Number of Employees Working)
2. Total Project Price = ($ per day) * (total number of days in the project)

Sure this is simple, but many people try to make this a lot more confusing. The “$ per day” is what the organization profits each day.

Break Even Date
After the customer agrees and signs off on the project, take a look at the start date and figure out what day the break even date is. You may tell a customer that the project will be done on January 1st. But, b/c the customer puts the project on the back burner, it won’t get done until March 1st. It’s fine b/c the customer doesn’t get mad at you but you’ve got to keep paying your employees each day. The longer the project goes on, the more it cuts into your organizations profits.

1. # of work days for break even = (Total Project Price) / [ Price of an Employee Per Day * Number of Employees Working ]

Project Evaluation
After the project is done you can evaluate the project and see what your organization made after the project was complete. To do this, just reverse the Proposal Development.

1. $ per day = (Total Project Price) / (Total # of days in the project)
2. net profit per day = ($ per day) - (employee price per day * Number of Employees)

Good luck on your next project!

      

We need better work ethic. Somewhere there is someone that wants your job.

      

Parkinson’s law states that work expands to fill the time allocated for it. For instance, if you have a project due in two-weeks it will take you the entire two weeks. But, if that same project is scheduled for two-days, you could still finish it in two days. This was a theory I noticed in high school (before I knew it was published, I thought I was coming up with something original).

A lot of management articles that I’ve read speak about motivation being killed when unreasonable deadlines being committed, faulty software due to pressured deadlines, and lack of quality. Am I missing something or is this just wrong?

Personally when I’ve got too much to do, I turn out the best results. Sure, the quality may be lower but the amount of work I get done is worth the lowered quality. I get more done and ignore the small detail work. Their argument is that when deadlines are enforced, quality is lowered, the product is criticized, and it creates an unhealthy work enviornment. This causes unhappy workers and destruction within the company. My question is how do you react to an extreme amount of responsibility?