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.

Sobering Mobile App Statistics

One of my favorite blogs to read is that of Andrew Chen (http://andrewchen.co).  He focuses particularly on the mobile app environment, as well as concepts for achieving virality and growth hacking.

Recently he published two guest posts, by Aaron Schildkrout, founder of HowAboutWe, and the other by Mark Flavelle, founder of Tapstream (which is a REALLY cool product that solves the difficult problem of mobile app deeplinking).  The two articles, with links below, portray a sobering view of the mobile app landscape.

http://andrewchen.co/2014/09/24/mobile-retention-benchmarks-for-2014-vs-2013-show-a-50-drop-in-d1-retention-guest-post/

http://andrewchen.co/2014/10/13/iacs-howaboutwe-co-founder-how-to-avoid-delusional-thinking-in-start-up-growth-strategy-guest-post/

The two articles, in summary, basically says that one-day retention in 2014 dropped over 50% to an unprecedented 14%, and that finding successful growth/acquisition strategy is tremendously hard with no guarantees.

The reality is that the app world has become a very very noisy place.  One could compare it to the Klondike Gold Rush at its peak.  With apps like Instagram selling for $1B, and WhatsApp for a cool $19B, everyone and their mother is looking to cash in on their winning lottery ticket.  However, with over 1.3M apps in the Android store and 1.2M apps in the Apple Store (as of July 2014), its nearly impossible for an independently released app to get any notice.  Releasing a great new disruptive app to the store has become just the first step in a long journey of solving the soduku puzzle of attracting and retaining users.

So what’s the solution then?  If I knew exactly, I wouldn’t be here writing this article.  But what it does mean is that the margin of error is smaller than ever.  My top 5 pieces of advice:

1. Your app must be damn good.  The bar is so high now that crashes, bugs, and poor/confusing user experiences are not accepted.  Users are quick to judge and quick to delete your app off their phone if they find it to be technically unsound.

2. Partner or find an advisor who has done it before.  The mobile ecosystem is a world of its own and takes time to learn and navigate.  Valuable time and resources can be wasted pursuing the wrong goals and attempting to achieve the wrong objectives at the wrong times.

3. Measure everything.  You can’t win if you don’t know how to keep score.  Track all of your vital app statistics via analytics tools such as Flurry, Google, NewRelic, as well as your own custom dashboards.  Carefully analyze and compare your numbers week over week and ensure that you’re trending in the right direction.  Use the numbers and statistics to guide your future decisions.

4. Give yourself enough of a runway.  The race is no longer a sprint or mad dash – but instead, very much a marathon.  Make sure you have enough of a war chest to go through multiple rounds of iterations and perhaps even a pivot.  The odds are you won’t get it right the first time – be prepared for the long haul.

5. Be optimistic.  Jane Park, CEO of Julep, said at a recent alumni gathering that tests showed she was 1000x more optimistic than the average person.  Realize that the odds are stacked against you and have been since the beginning.  If you want a sure thing, go work for Microsoft.  Otherwise, be prepared to fight and do whatever it takes, no matter how many nonbelievers tell you that you’ll fail and you can’t do it.

Add iOS 8 Sharing Extensions to Your App

If you run an iOS app, it’s time for you to implement an important new feature in iOS 8 – sharing extensions.

If your app contains any type of share-able content, whether user generated or published by your company, you’ll likely want to set this up in your app as it will quickly become a standard feature people come to rely on.

There are two sides to this feature – sharing content out of your app to other apps, and being able to handle receiving content shared to your app from other apps.

To easily see this in action, open safari on your iOS 8 device, go to a page with some photos, and tap the share icon in the safari toolbar. If you have other apps such as Pinterest or tumblr installed, you’ll see those icons appear as sharing destinations. This is because the Pinterest and tumblr apps have implemented sharing extensions. Similarly, the safari browser has registered activity types for certain media, such as images, so that iOS knows certain media from this app can be shared out.

For more detail, look over this article that breaks it down in detail and gives more examples.

What is Agile Acceptance Criteria?

In Agile, one of the goals is to keep you user stories clear and concise. To this end, it can be useful to separate out the user story from deeper detail needed by development and testing. As with all things, it’s a balance:

• Too much detail in the user story and you’ve lost valuable conciseness
• Too little detail in the user story and others won’t be able to understand the story

There’s also a balance in how you divide up user stories into bite-size, incremental, releasable pieces, but let’s save that for another discussion.

For now, let’s assume you’re starting with an appropriately-sized user story. How do you know what detail to put into the story itself, and what to put “on the back” of the card in Acceptance Criteria?

Acceptance Criteria is a list of statements that can be tested and must be true for a story to be considered done. This site has a good concise run-down of how to choose and phrase ACs. Each user story or AC can optionally have attachments such as a spreadsheet, list, mock-up, algorithm description, reference link, or other asset, for the team to refer to.

For example, if the user story is “As the site owner/manager I want my shopping site to show suggested products to consumers so that they are inspired to make additional purchases”, then you might have an AC explaining what logic is used for the product suggestion, and an attached link to an article about a recommended product suggestion algorithm.

Or in another case, if the user story is “As the app owner/manager I want the app to only accept signups for users with addresses in a specific geographic area so that I can build momentum in a small market first” then you might have an AC stating that users can sign up if their zip code is in an accepted list, and all other users are presented with a “thank you for your interest” page, and an attached spreadsheet that lists out all the zip codes that are included in the market area.

If you find yourself creating a large number of ACs for one story, you might take this as a warning that your story is too large, and you should take the opportunity to break it down into several individual stories. As mentioned earlier, it’s all a balance, and Agile is all about finding a method or process that works for you and your specific team.

CMS Quick Review

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Over the years, we’ve researched, analyzed, and built dozens of CMS systems for clients ranging from small business and startup websites to Microsoft and Group Health.

In almost all cases, we choose to build on top of an existing CMS platform, customizing to meet the exact user requirements. After all, why rebuild what already exists and has been proven? Our value add is adding additional features to meet our client’s exact needs.

In the CMS Platform world, there’s no one size fits all solution. Considerations include scale (expected monthly page views), open source vs proprietary systems, technology stack, publishing workflow, support and maintenance, and other systems that the CMS may be integrating with.

Our favorites include WordPress, Expression Engine, Umbraco, Telerik Sitefinity, Kentico, Drupal, Joomla and on the enterprise side, Sitecore and Microsoft Sharepoint 2013.

I’ll do a more comprehensive review of these CMS systems in a future post, but for…

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