BOT – Do YOU Know How?

Today’s global economy is bridging the international gap and making many organizations who harness this change, very profitable. These organisations align themselves with the right providers at a macroeconomic level.

When companies grow, they look for ways to expand their existing operations to allow for increased throughput. The result is a careful balancing act between risk and reward.

There are numerous risks associated with expansion. An example of which, to expand through the conventional model, organizations must dedicate a portion (if not 100%) of existing skilled employee(s) to hiring and training all new recruits. This is a massive undertaking and does not factor in the likelihood of reduced output while this activity is in motion.

To reduce cost and risk, organizations turn to an offshore model where there is an abundance of human capital at reduced operational expenditures (OpEx). This is not straight forward as companies will then have to go through the lengthy, error-prone, and costly process of understanding how to find the right people, establish legal entities, and then operate under a different set of laws and customs.

The solution to this problem is a Build – Operate – Transfer model, or “BOT” for short.

Organizations leverage the BOT provider’s wealth of local knowledge to:

• Understand local laws, business environment and labor market;
• Attract, recruit, induct new skilled staff;
• Establish infrastructure; and
• Increase success percentage by utilizing the provider’s proven offshore methodology and practices.

Commercially, it makes sense by:

• Eliminating up-front Capital Expenditures (CapEx) involved with setting up a new office;
• Reducing time taken to become productive; and
• Reducing risk by providing an exit strategy to cancel the entire operation at short notice, reduce liquidating costs.

Now organizations have to find the right provider. It is absolutely critical to find the right provider that has the right expertise in delivering on BOT initiatives. I have personally witnessed many BOTs (some good, some bad) for almost a full decade now. Since 2005, I’ve been involved with internal BOT projects for a sizable company of 12,000 employees and $8.5B in annual revenues. Instead of a BOT with an offshore entity, we were building additional departments onshore which were later transitioned back into the business. In 2008, I lead the organization’s Transformation team which dedicated itself to building, operating and transferring functions back into the business. The year 2011 was a milestone year in terms of BOT velocity – we built a complete team of 55 employees in less than 6 months for an operator 13 time zones away!

All BOTs have their own unique traits but there are some commonalities. In an agreed time period, we BUILD up the platforms and solutions, OPERATE these for an agreed length of time – usually one or two years – to make sure all works seamlessly. Once the ters completes, all people, tools and processes are TRANSFERRED to the operator. This “expertise in a box” ensures operators can build up future-proof operations quickly and benefit from a pool of qualified resources who are trained and compliant in their existing mode of operation.

The fast pace environment of a BOT is very exciting and requires enormous dedication from the provider. The provider also has to be located in the correct geographic region to support the build. It is for these reasons that I truly believe Vinasource are uniquely positioned to be leaders in the BOT space.

Contact me today if you have any questions on BOTs and how they can help your organization.

Please check out my blog page at www.TimNguyen.ca to find out more information about myself.

Making That First Day Special

A few years back we recognized that a lot of our retention problems happened in the first week of work. After asking around, I found out that it’s a relatively common problem in Vietnam as candidates are still looking at options up through their first couple of weeks. This posed a serious risk to our project schedules and sales pipeline. For the longest time I just accepted it as a fact of life and basically threw my hands up in the air, until I started reading some articles about creative onboarding.

Sadly I don’t remember where i read it, but a quote that stuck in my head was “when it’s all said and done, a team member will only remember their first and last day”. With this in mind I sat down with my team and started putting a new process into place that we call the 5 days of fun.

The key to the 5 days of fun is the team member’s mentor. Each day they meet for coffee, discuss the previous day, and get feedback both directions. The mentor isn’t involved in the team member’s review process so they serve as a senior member who can really drive in our core value “Build open and honest relationships through communication”.  Some of the ideas we embrace during the first week are:

• Fun – Every day there is something fun. From foosball to ping pong to drinking games. We make the new team member feel like they want to go back to the office
• Lunch Roulette – Our guys love to gamble, so we make lunch into a game! Right before lunch we gather the company to the middle of the office. The new team member then draws 3 names out of a hat. Along with the mentor, the 5 team member share an intimate lunch.
• Real work – We make sure they are doing multiple tasks that are real and valuable to our business
• Recognition – From day 1 to day 5, team members are encouraged to interact with the new member. We hang a big sign on their desk and formally remove it on graduation day
• Learning – Everyday there is some learning activity taught by a trainer who specializes. We want to make sure the team member is schooled in everything from company history to process.
• Photo Journal – All through the first week we take pictures of the new team member. The following week those pics are put into a video and played up on the lunch room tv.

Got a cool onboarding technique you’d like to share?

 

Here’s why we flattened our company

I have been blessed to have spent a majority of my working career as an entrepreneur surrounded by great people.  I’ve spent much of this career reading business books, blogs, and magazines. While there are many different opinions on how to run a business, no matter who you talk to in the entrepreneur or managerial world, they will tell you this: “It’s critical to surround yourself by great people”.  That being the case, as leaders, the next step is to make sure you have done everything in your power to set those great people free to grow the business.

The evolution of Vinasource started as a couple of guys, sick of Microsoft process, who wanted to operate freely and build great, affordable applications for our clients. We were fortunate to find a dynamic, enthusiastic group of developers in Vietnam and we were off to the races. We ran the company loosely, with very few rules, and loosely based process. Once you get into dealing with cultural differences, time zones, communication challenges, and English as a second language you realize process is the key to success.

But having a good SDLC and having a structured hierarchy of team members are very different things. When I was at Microsoft, they went through a realization that most developers are not cut out to be managers, and, in fact hate the routine duties managers are faced with.  So they stopped pressuring devs to move “up” the ladder and instead created an individual contributor track. Even though I was there through this evolution, I found myself making the same mistake again at Vinasource.

Cut to 2011. As we worked to really define our processes in a way that worked for our team and our clients, we started slowly “promoting” developers to managerial positions. By 2012 we had a beautiful hierarchy structure that resulted in us taking 50% of the time away from our top devs who were now managing people instead of pursuing their passion – writing code. As a services business, our three key metrics are utilization, partner satisfaction and team happiness.  We weren’t doing particularly well in any of the three.

My aha moment came when I was reading an article in Inc Magazine titled “It’s Time to Ditch Your Org Chart“. The study on Valve in particular and their Handbook for New Employees really resonated with me and made me think “wow, that’s an awesome place to work”. As soon as I started contemplating the idea for Vinasource I knew it was exactly what we needed to do for the following reasons:

1. Our core team unit was based around a client project, not a technology
2. Most devs don’t like to manage
3. Utilization is a key metric
4. Project team members are better suited to review a team member than a manger
5. “We own our work” is the #1 value in our company.
6. We needed to empower people with the ability to choose their work (project), train specifically for that work, be evaluated fairly on their work
7. We needed people who loved initiatives driving them: The “Champion” was born

So in 2014 we flattened the company. We appointed a managing director to focus on company initiatives. We are in the process of hiring a training coordinator to help people find the right resources they need to get better at their role. We do a quarterly “request process” that allows people to move projects. We focus more on roles and responsibilities within a project team (which fits nicely with the family values found in our culture). We introduced 360 reviews in which each reviewer’s opinion carries equal weight in the final score.

In our company now nobody reports to anybody. A project team has a unified goal each iteration and they work together towards it.  Piece by piece they work to build amazing software for our partners.  We are helping team members understand that they own their career growth and have the companies full support in climbing which ever mountain they choose. While it’s still a work in progress, the initial team satisfaction level, which we measure using a tool called Tiny Pulse, has been climbing each month. I’m excited to come back and post more concrete results once we’ve hit the 12 month mark.

While flattening your company may not be the way to go for you, one thing we can agree on is you need to find good people, then find a way to set them free.

Wipe out the org chart

Is Your Startup Lean and Mean?

Reflecting back through all the learnings I’ve had in my involvement with the hundreds of projects we’ve completed at Vinasource, the most useful one is in appreciating and understanding the value of Lean Startup methodology and MVP products.

“Lean startup” is a method for developing businesses and product, originally proposed by Eric Ries in his appropriately named book, “The Lean startup“, The premise behind the methodology is that companies/startups spend too much time and money on product development before validating their core business and product models. Instead businesses should iteratively develop their product, continuously gathering customer feedback and validation, before further investing into deeper product features.

We’ve seen continuous validation in our own projects of the value of Lean Startup. The truth is, you just don’t KNOW, what the end user of your product really wants. Until you actually get actual customer validation, everything that you believe and are betting your company on is just a guess. Perhaps an educated guess, but truly still a guess. As such, developing a product is similar to the scientific method. Start with a hypothesis, perform an experiment to verify the hypotheses, and then analyze and perhaps refine your hypotheses based on data and learning.

Minimum Viable Product, or MVP, defines this process. The standard definition of MVP is a product that has “just the core features that allow the product to be deployed, and no more.” I actually prefer Ries’ deeper explanation that truly gets to the core purpose of MVP – “a version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.”

All of our projects at Vinasource start with an MVP, whether it ends up getting launched to the public or just shown to our customer for review and feedback. We help our clients whittle down their initial visions and requirements into an MVP, often cutting down months of development time and cost, with a goal of getting a working, usable, live initial version of the product up and running as soon as possible. The completion of the MVP doesn’t mean we’re necessarily “done” with the project, but it does mean that we have a working implementation that can be iterated upon. From there, depending on client preferences, the working product can be shown to early adopters, launched as a beta, or launched as an actual live V1 product itself. The feedback and usage data received from users at this point is often transformational. Features that were originally thought to be core to the product may turn out to be unused and ignored. Similarly, however, other features that perhaps barely even made it into the MVP are determined to be the most well-received features within the product and warrants further development and refinement.

A perfect example of this was in our own product, Anomo, an “anonymous social discovery” mobile application. Our check-in feature and “places” feature, which we spent the majority of our initial requirement/spec definition phase defining and perfecting, turned out to be a bit of a dud, due to the chicken-and-egg problem inherent in new social networks that haven’t yet achieved critical mass. On the other hand, our icebreakers feature turned out to be a massive hit, with over 500,000 questions answered per week. While this didn’t change our overall vision for the product, it did result in a pretty significant change in our philosophy, marketing, and advertising efforts for achieving critical mass.

The other key advantage that we found of the MVP model, particularly in being a services business, is that it allowed us to get an early checkpoint with our clients to ensure that we’ve all properly understood requirements and expectations. Inevitably, intent gets lost in communication. While the client may be describing a Volkswagon, we may have understood that they wanted a Ferrari (or vice versa). Nothing is more clear than working software. With the MVP, we can get initial client feedback, course correct if necessary, and ensure everybody is on the same page, before it’s too late.

Sometimes, MVP may actually mean not building a product at all! The famous example is of Nick Sinmurn, founder of Zappos. Instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to build the perfect, beautiful, scalable, performant website, he first approached local shoe stores, took pictures of their inventory, posted pictures online, bought the shoes from stores at full price, and sold the shoes directly to customers from his rudimentary website at a loss. From that, he was able to establish demand and market fit, significantly reducing risk prior to further development and investment.

The natural tendency for entrepreneurs, particular those with high achieving academic and corporate backgrounds, is to seek perfection in their initial launch. Everything in their lives up to that point has validated their desire for perfection. But in a startup world of limited budget, limited time, and massive competition, building what you need, and ONLY what you need, is vital for survival. While it goes against every grain of your soul, Reid Hoffman’s (LinkedIn) famous quote – “if you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late” (http://startupquote.com/post/855482768) is one at least worth considering.

What Does Transparency and Social Media Have To do With Creating a Strong Business Mindset Across Your Team?

Recently I was interviewed by Entrepreneur Magazine columnist Chris Hann.  The question they were trying to answer was “Do you accept friend requests from your employees on Facebook”. The short answer for me is yes.  The long answer is a bit more involved. I’ve been really excited about a recent move in our company to provide full transparency to our team while teaching everyone what it means to take ownership in our business. At Vinasource, one of our core values is “Build open and honest relationships through communication”.  What this means as company leaders is that no information is kept secret from the team. While some people feel big about privacy, I’m not one of them. In the modern era of social media, it’s a bit of a pipe dream to think you can really keep many too many things a secret. So, why not embrace it! At Vinasource we use social media to expose different parts of our company culture to the world.  This is valuable both for internal participation in company functions and external recruiting. A core competency we measure each month is “Business Mindset”.  Combining this with the value we place on communication, we have embarked on a mission to help our team members fully understand our business.  The first step to this was opening up our financials both at a high level, and at a project level. Currently, we are working with our team members to truly understand what it means to run a business, starting at their project level.  Every project has the core elements of running a small business:

• Team Building
• Client Satisfaction
• Budgeting
• Profit and Loss

By flattening our organization and getting rid of the hierarchical management structure, each team member has more significant roles within their project.  The most important being monthly peer reviews. While we are just starting down this path, I’ve already seen a noticeable bump in enthusiasm.  Using Tiny Pulse we measure our teams happiness and the week after we revealed our first set of financials we saw an immediate spike. Sure, there is probably a place and an industry where it makes sense to have a hierarchical structure and keep separation between your personal and professional lives. In tech though, I think it’s going to be harder and harder to recruit in a closed organization when you are going against forward thinking companies such as Valve, Zappos and Google.