 Christopher Butler Strategy and Resourcing Hi, I'm Chris. I've been working at Newfangled since September, 2004. | Chris Butler's Blog |
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The Fine Print Will Always Get You!
March 28, 2008 at 10:30 am by ChrisI hesitated to link to the new Photoshop Express site (in beta), which offers basic online Photoshop functionality for free, mostly because after looking at it with Eric and Able, we all concluded that it really wasn't worth using at this point, since we all have Photoshop on our computers and Picnik is also free and better. But now I have an even better reason! Apparently, the terms of service are raising eyebrows aplenty (note that when you click the 'terms of service' link in the footer of the site, you get the 'Additional Terms of Service,' but to read the 'General Terms of Service,' you have to click an additional obscure link). Get a load of this:
Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.According to Wired, "John Nack, Adobe’s Senior Product Manager for Photoshop, reports that the Photoshop Express team has responded to questions about the license saying, 'we reviewed the terms in context of your comments — and we agree that it currently implies things we would never do with the content.'" Good to know. In the meantime, stick to Picnik. |
Tags: social-media design software
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The Week in Review
March 28, 2008 at 8:00 am by Chris
This post is a collection of things that caught my attention this week, most of which came to me via RSS feeds and blogs that I read myself. Now I'm passing them on to you (in the order in which I bookmarked them). Enjoy!- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Read about Google's latest patent application for a more sophisticated behavior tracking ad platform. Read how surveillance was able to detect a radioactive cat in a vehicle moving at 70mph. Read this review of 'The Future of the Internet.' Read about Google's vision for WiFi 2.0, wireless internet services using the "white space" spectrum- the unused spectrum that lies next to television channels. Read this article that wonders about whether the 'net amplifies deception. Learn about Diigo's new social features. Read about the Connecticut-sized chunk of ice that has collapsed off of Antarctica. Browse some concepts for computers you might use in 2015. Read how computers may thwart the 2010 census. Read about Dean Kamen's latest invention (he invented the Segway), a water-purification system. Read why application exploits and virtualization security are big concerns for Bret Arsenault, Microsoft's U.S. General Manager/Chief Security Advisor. Read how Google is working with other companies to push consumer privacy legislation in the U.S. Congress and will work with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to fine-tune online advertising principles. Read how scientists say further moves into solar system will require a human/robot partnership. Read about the NSA Spying back story, as told by a New York Times reporter. Watch this video, which follows around the developer of the Facebook carpoolers application. Read how the builders of the world's biggest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet. Read Google's annual report letter from founder Larry Page. Read this interview with Moxilla's founder, Asa Dotzler on Firefox, and Democracy. Read why even IT execs are feeling the hurt by ingnoring social media. Read how a group of venture capitalists are saying, 'No more social networks!' Browse this review of the evolution of 10 popular websites. |
Tags: technology strategy hardware week-in-review user-interface-design video web-development design audio social-media art privacy marketing software
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Corporate Blogging Policies
March 26, 2008 at 4:00 pm by Chris| A recent story about how Cisco has gotten in to hot water over a high
profile blog maintained by one of its intellectual property advisors
has prompted many companies to consider their policy in regard to
corporate blogging. The blog, which is now somewhat locked-down,
is called "Patent Toll Tracker," and was kept by Rick Frenkel to
chronicle issues related to patent litigation. Apparently, several
patent lawyers involved in a case against Cisco have filed a libel case
against them after Frenkel revealed his identity and affiliation with
the company. Cisco has released a statement affirming that they will be retaining Frenkel though re-thinking their corporate policy. One particular quote has been making its way across the 'net already: "If you comment on any aspect of the company's business or any policy issue the company is involved in where you have responsibility for Cisco's engagement, you must clearly identify yourself as a Cisco employee in your postings or blog site(s) and include a disclaimer that the views are your own and not those of Cisco."Seems pretty common-sense to me... After all, it's just the right thing to do. I mentioned this idea toward the end of a previous post I wrote about using blogging to build your online reputation. Corporate blogging is an opportunity to connect with potential and existing customers in a positive way, even if to address negative feedback. It is not a good method to attack competition, react against upset customers, or act subversively. That's the thing about the internet- the truth will come out, and if you've got something to hide, it won't be pretty. Update: 03/28/2008, Regarding the truth coming out on the 'net, and it not being pretty, check this out. |
Tags: strategy blogging
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Video Newsletter: How to Do SEO
March 26, 2008 at 3:45 pm by Chris| Just on the off chance that you read this blog but not the Newfangled newsletter, check out Eric's latest video newsletter, How To Do SEO, Part 2, Farming vs. Hunting. It's about 15 minutes long, but well worth the time spent to watch. |
Tags: video google newfangled search
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The Future of the Internet
March 26, 2008 at 11:00 am by ChrisJeremiah Owyang posted this morning a question, whether the reader was a "corporatist" or a "purist" in regard to the corporate impact of social media. There is a nice discussion in response to this in his comments section which you can read or participate in here. 
In my comment, I mentioned the book, The Future of the Internet, which takes a big picture view of the internet as it matures due to the impact of trends like social media, and technological developments (here's a more in-depth review of the book). Zittrain considers whether the trajectory will be shaped more by tethered appliances rather than the generative approach of its first decade. Since I tend toward pessimism when it comes to technology's role in society in general (yeah, I just said that), my sense is that we are headed toward a more lock-down oriented phase (corporatist) of the internet, though I'll be happy to be proven wrong. What do you think? |
Tags: social-media software the-future
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Artists, the Internet and Intellectual Property
March 24, 2008 at 9:00 am by Chris| There is a great discussion about this topic going on over at Nicholas Carr's blog. Nick posted a short post in response to TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington's comment, that "Recorded music is nothing but marketing material to drive awareness of an artist." You'll see by his title that Nick completely disagrees. At this point, I do too. According to Arrington's comment, if the art that an artist makes is just marketing material to drive awareness to her, I wonder what exactly is the point of driving awareness to that person? I think that most artists would feel that their work is the manifestation of who they are as an artist... |
Tags: art technology
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2007 YouTube Video Award Winners
March 21, 2008 at 2:20 pm by Chris| Browse the winners of this year's YouTube Video Awards. My favorites are probably the Original Human TETRIS Performance and the How to Solve a Rubik's Cube video (see below, too): |
Tags: video
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The Week in Review
March 21, 2008 at 8:00 am by Chris
This post is a collection of things that caught my attention this week, most of which came to me via RSS feeds and blogs that I read myself. Now I'm passing them on to you (in the order in which I bookmarked them). Enjoy!- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Dystopia Now! Read this article which wonders if Americans care about Big Brother. Read this article about the demise of Bear Stearns and what it says about the American economy. $70 oil by September? Discuss... Read this piece which answers why nobody is using your website. Read about the MIT graduate student who has designed custom LED light fixtures which are seven times brighter than the closest similar commercial models, and include colors which can't be reproduced by a normal RGB cluster. Read Dot Earth's farewell to ice. Read Jakob Nielsen's latest alertbox, which states that "Depending on how representative designers are of the target audience, a project might need more or less user testing. Still, usability concerns never go away completely." Do the Test. If you missed it, you're not alone (via Dave). Read about the death of Arthur C. Clarke. Watch his last video message to Earth, which he uploaded to YouTube earlier this year. Watch this 1995 video explaining the internet (via Eric). Find out what kind of client you have- a Bruiser, Brainiac, Champion, a Donald Trump maybe? Read how TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington wants to take down CNet. Dystopia Now! Read about companies in Britain experimenting with ISP behavioral tracking based advertisement systems. Read about hallucinating sound. Read about US Fusion Centers, fifty or so in number, where the federal, state and local cops share intelligence, sift data for clues, run down reports of suspicious packages and connect dots in an effort to detect and thwart terrorism attacks, drug smuggling and gang fighting |
Tags: technology strategy hardware week-in-review user-interface-design video web-development design audio social-media art privacy marketing software
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Timekeeping is at the Root of any Successful Resourcing System
March 19, 2008 at 4:00 pm by ChrisIn my last two posts about Resourcing, you might have noticed a recurring theme: data. Proper Resourcing just would not be possible without the availability of reliable and consistent data. In our case, we have two types of data that are necessary to make sense of where we stand at any point in time, time and pricing. 
Because we are a service company, our pricing is contingent upon the time we spend on projects. This means that our time data is central to our understanding of our utilization, and any improvements we could make to how we work. Each of our employees enters their time on a daily basis categorized by date, project type, project name, task description and time spent. We call this record a timesheet. We ensure that the categories directly relate to billing phases and terms so that when we evaluate the data it can be understood in terms of the financial picture as well as the schedule. After all, time is money, right? Once we had a large enough sample of data, we were able to look at it in order to evaluate our utilization picture. Overall, we can assess our utilization by looking at the total number of hours our employees will work in a particular time period. For example, in a company of 15 full-time employees (close to our size), the total work hours per week would be roughly 560 hours (7.5 hours x 5 days x 15 employees = 562.5 hours/week). This number of hours in a typical work year would amount to about 26,000 hours a year (562.5 hours/week X 47 weeks = 26,437.5 hours/year). If we were to bill at 100% utilization, we would capture our full hourly rate multiplied by that total number of hours and the result would be equivalent to our gross income. However, 100% utilization is not realistic. Some employees' time is going to be more billable than others, and some time spent in any given project will not be billable if initial pricing was inaccurate. A more likely goal would be 60%. With a goal like 60%, a more realistic amount of billable hours would be around 15,600. In any case, according to David Baker, if Resourcing is being done properly with good time data at its disposal, utilization could be expected to improve by 1.5% a month. In the same manner, individual projects can be evaluated in terms of meeting or exceeding budgets using our time data. We typically assemble budgets based upon the various roles taken by employees within the different phases of a project. Each role in each phase will have a budget value. While we usually don't itemize these budgets in our proposals, we keep the itemization internally so that we can match time data with it in order to track projects as they are happening or determine exactly where a budget was or was not accurate later on. Because we record detailed descriptions with every time entry, we can even get a sense for why something went wrong if it isn't immediately obvious (for example, seeing a developer log like "data import took longer than expected due to corruption and mismatches") or recognize patterns and account for them in future schedule or budget planning. Having a realistic picture of utilization allows us to be able to determine time standards for certain types of tasks, which in turn helps us to establish good pricing for projects. As we increase in efficiency, time spent in implementation should decrease (if our utilization is not great) or level out (due to lack of standardization) allowing for a reasonable profit margin. We can also plan project timelines in advance and more reliably by knowing how long comparable tasks took given comparable circumstances. This is all based upon having a large pool of data and having taken the time to measure utilization, diagnose the areas where we over-service and/or under-price, and made adjustments incrementally. As you can see, timekeeping is essential to any method of achieving optimal utilization! |
Tags: project-management resourcing
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DIY Smart Home
March 19, 2008 at 1:30 pm by Chris| Sicknasty also describes this DIY smarthome: Reconfigurable House 2.0 from haque d+r on Vimeo. |
Tags: design video computers the-future
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Crazy Alphabet Pop-Up Book
March 19, 2008 at 1:00 pm by Chris| Sicknasty... that's the only word that does this video justice (via Able): |
Tags: design art video
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Lincoln gets a Facelift
March 14, 2008 at 4:00 pm by ChrisHere's a look at the revised design of the five-dollar bill. But is it "money?" In case you're interested in comparing our slightly boring and uptight US currency design to that of other countries of the world, check out Ron Wise's Banknoteworld Geographical Directory of World Paper Money. I am somewhat partial (after having lived there for a year) to the Malaysian currency:     What currency is your favorite? Update: 04/07/2008: Apparently, these folks think that the new Five is NOT money. |
Tags: design
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The Week in Review
March 14, 2008 at 8:00 am by Chris
This post is a collection of things that caught my attention this week, most of which came to me via RSS feeds and blogs that I read myself. Now I'm passing them on to you (in the order in which I bookmarked them). Enjoy!- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Read about Microsoft's cloud ambitions. Dystopia now! Our drinking water contains lots and lots of drugs. Read about this proposed MIT solution to the drugs-in-the-water problem. Read about Jonathan Zittrain's lecture on The Future of The Internet. Should we have a new Bill of Rights for the Digital Age? This reader says yes. Dystopia Now! Read what advertising executives say is the "first broad estimate of the amount of consumer data that is transmitted to Internet companies," and why has privacy advocates sounding the alarm. Watch this SXSW interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, which has been regarded as one of the most disastrous interviews in recent memory. I didn't think it was THAT bad... Read about the AT&T whistle blower's allegations that congress wants to cover up his testimony. Read about venture capital growth in unexpected places. Read MIT's annual list of 10 Emerging Technologies for 2008. Read why classified documents show that telcos don't deserve government amnesty. Watch this video of an amazing tiny car. Browse these "Friday Freebies" from Smashing Magazine. Read as Eric wonders, "designers, will you ever realize that your client's website is not about entertainment but about their content?" Read about Xcerion's browser-based environment known as icloud that looks a whole lot like a Windows or Linux desktop. Check out Go2Web2.0.net, the complete Web 2.0 Directory. Read about MapJack's street-level maps in San Francisco and Thailand, which some say are better than Google's. Read about the House of Representatives' secret session, whose first rule is "Don't talk about the secret session." Read about what technologies Michio Kaku thinks we'll invent "tomorrow." |
Tags: technology strategy hardware week-in-review user-interface-design video web-development design audio social-media art privacy marketing software
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Why Delivering and Resourcing Cannot be Shared Responsibilities
March 13, 2008 at 12:00 pm by ChrisIt used to be the case that our Project Managers would schedule and price work for existing clients as it came in. Naturally, this resulted in frequent 'traffic' meetings during which we would have to determine as a group how to sort tasks by priority after they had already been priced and promised to our clients. Clearly we had this backward. As I mentioned in my last post, this made the Summer of 2007 a tough time for everyone- something we could have prevented by doing Resourcing properly. 
Prior to actually setting up a Resourcing procedure, all we were really doing was just trying to get good work out the door quickly and keep our clients happy. Unfortunately, the way we went about doing that was causing our utilization to be very low. We were spending a disproportionate amount of time to that which we were billing for, and resources were going on a first-come-first-serve basis, often being depended upon in excess of capability. We created a bottleneck at our development level because our programmers would be at the mercy of their task lists, and to their credit, would try valiantly to meet the deadlines no matter how unrealistic they may have been. This made for delays and reduced quality, which meant we were not succeeding at what we were trying to do- keeping our clients happy. As the Recourses seminar attendee said, "they'll never remember that you did it fast," but they will remember that you did it poorly. Why wasn't our ad hoc "resourcing" scheme not working? Ultimately, it is because there is a conflict of interest between the role of the Deliverer and the Resourcer. The Deliverer's main concern is to deliver the project in the agreed schedule, to the correct technical specification, within the approved budget, while fostering a good relationship with the client. (In our environment, we fuse project and client management into one uber mastermind position ;-) This can make for an obvious tension when it seems like the client's satisfaction can only come at the expense of over servicing or under charging, though ultimately the Deliverer's responsibility is to the company's interests. On the other hand, the Resourcer's main concern is making sure that the company is properly utilized. If Resourcing is being done well, then the Deliverer should be set up for success and not have to worry about haggling over quotes, bending time to conform to an unreasonable schedule, or committing more development resources than are available. All of the pricing, scheduling and allocation of resources should be determined based upon the big picture of our production schedule and utilization so that what we have to offer our clients is actually what we have to offer. If we can be clear and efficient in Resourcing, our Project Managers can always be one step ahead and deliver well. In my next post, I'll talk about why timekeeping is the key to successful Resourcing. |
Tags: project-management resourcing
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Some Good Tech-Related Audiocasts
March 13, 2008 at 8:30 am by Chris| Here are a few links to some interesting tech-related podcasts from this week: Slate Daily Podcast: "Have People Stopped Clicking on Google Ads?" http://www.slate.com/id/2185926/ New York Times Tech Talk: Trends in Global Internet Censorship, iPhone development. http://podcasts.nytimes.com/podcasts/2008/03/12/13techtalk.mp3 Make Weekend Projects: "Make a PDA Notebook" http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/03/weekend_project_make_a_pd.html |
Tags: privacy design google software search video audio
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Introducing Resourcing
March 11, 2008 at 2:30 pm by Chris| A Little Background 2007 was a busy year at Newfangled. So busy, in fact, that it put to the test just about every aspect of our operation. Our positioning, our process, our team's role breakdown, our scheduling, and our pricing were all examined closely (see Mark's blog on our new Project Anatomy). Needless to say, we made it through and learned quite a bit about how we can improve and be an even better company than we were before. Instrumental in this process was the consulting we received from David Baker, owner of ReCourses, Inc. David is an expert in consulting companies like ours and helping them to solidify positioning, management, and process. One of his recommendations was to introduce a new role to our team: Resourcing. I've taken on that role (in addition to Strategy, something I'll probably talk more about at some point), while Katie Jamison has done a great job already of taking over as Project Manager for my clients. 
Resourcing and Measuring UtilizationThe primary goal of Resourcing is to ensure that your company is properly utilized. Utilization, according to Max's Project Management Glossary, is the "extent to which something is turned to practical use or account." I like David Baker's definition better, which is essentially that a company's utilization is the percentage of possible billable hours actually billed as reflected in your revenue. Given that definition, many professional services companies, especially creative agencies, may quickly and rightly suspect that their utilization is low. Depending upon the number of employees that you consider primarily overhead, a reasonable utilization goal could be anywhere from 55 to 70%. Once you have measured your company's utilization, you can set a goal for improvement. It might be easy to jump to the conclusion that the way to achieve your goal is to simply raise your rates. However, David challenged us to really evaluate why our utilization was low. Was it due to under charging, or was it due to over servicing? As it turns out, it's actually a subtle combination of the two, but what was important was acknowledging that over servicing was even possible! We even determined later that, contrary to most agencies, we weren't struggling with staying within implementation budgets but were not accounting for the time spent actually managing the project. For a typical project, we've found that Strategy, Project Management, QA, and Support actually account for over 50% of the total time spent, with the remaining 50% to be divided among implementation of Prototyping, Design and Development. That means that a major amount of work, and a significant value, resides with the way things are delivered, not just the implementation. As you might imagine, getting these budget ratios wrong will significantly affect your utilization. Adjusting how you plan your production schedule is another way to improve utilization. When we were at our busiest in 2007, it was mostly due to a major traffic jam in our schedule- one we could have prevented. Since our schedule is divided between two different kinds of work - new projects and upgrades to existing client sites - it's difficult to predict when things are going to be tight. We can plan out new projects, but we never know when an existing client might call. This has historically caused us to attempt to schedule more work in a week than there are hours to work! This kind of scheduling is partly due to the fear that not being able to give immediate service is somehow a bad thing. However, we've realized that doing a subpar job quickly is far worse than doing a great job slowly. As one participant in a recent ReCourses seminar rightly put it, "they'll never remember that you did it fast." She is completely right. What they will remember are all the mistakes made trying to rush a project through. The fact is that we are in demand- so much so that we now are scheduled out months in advance- and we're not willing to rush projects at the expense of quality. Sure, some projects have to wait to get started, but we believe they are worth waiting for. The Nitty Gritty A lot of things need to be in place in order to evaluate and maintain proper utilization. First, there needs to be as much data on hand as possible to ensure that Resourcing is not a wasted effort. We get this data from our timekeeping system being integrated with our project management, scheduling and billing tools. With this data on hand, Resourcing can evaluate profitability for completed projects and determine pricing for future projects, recommend realistic workloads for the development staff, monitor quality, anticipate over and under-utilization due to various factors, maintain timesheet and project management systems, etc. Yes, there is much to do! This is why Resourcing needed to be a new role for us, not just something else that existing delivering staff does in addition to everything else they already do. In my next post, I'll talk more about why Delivering (account management, or as we call it, project management) and Resourcing cannot be shared by the same team members. |
Tags: project-management resourcing
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The Week in Review
March 7, 2008 at 8:00 am by Chris
This post is a collection of things that caught my attention this week, most of which came to me via RSS feeds and blogs that I read myself. Now I'm passing them on to you (in the order in which I bookmarked them). Enjoy!- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Read how Jakob Nielsen recommends that "typically, you should deemphasize your company's name in links, but a new guideline recommends frontloading the name for search engine links under certain conditions." Read this thorough comparison of the OLPC, Classmate and Eee notebooks. Read how online marketers say there are little to no signs of a recession underway. Read how PayPal is urging its users to ditch Safari and instead use alternative browsers such as Internet Explorer 7, IE 8, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, or even Opera. Browse this list of 6 free Photoshop alternatives. Dystopia now! Read Cnet's opinion of Google Street View. Read this interview with Matt Cutts on SEO and the Future of Search. Read how the fight in Congress and the big push for expanded wiretapping powers has nothing to do with intercepting foreign-to-foreign phone calls inside the United States without a court order- it's all about the emails. Browse Smashing Magazine's list of 25 Brilliant Animated Short Movies. Read this review of several virtual on-demand operating systems. Watch Craig Venter's talk from TED 2008, in which he claims that we're on the verge of creating synthetic life. Monkey Boy is back! Web Developers! Web Developers! Web Developers! Read about Ausra, the solar company that has released a paper claiming that solar thermal electric technology can provide 90% of US grid electricity, with enough left over to power a fleet of plug-in hybrids. Read about building a new public library in the age of Google. Browse New York Magazine's Best of the Best competition. Read about student Chris Avenir, who is fighting charges of academic misconduct for helping run an online chemistry study group via Facebook. And lastly, Able wants you to push it to the LIMIT! |
Tags: technology strategy hardware week-in-review user-interface-design video web-development design audio social-media art privacy marketing software
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Ray Kurzweil on "How Technology's Accelerating Power Will Transform Us"
March 7, 2008 at 7:30 am by ChrisTags: video technology the-future
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The Sound of Type
March 6, 2008 at 8:30 am by Chris| Pretty neat, huh? You can learn more about Meek FM here. |
Tags: design art video technology
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