There’s no better way to discuss technology than to get 6 CTO’s together on a windy New York City Monday night with some pizza and a few imports. Last night’s Morpho Mind Bar event was a triple-double-click above par.

The CTO of an online food delivery service arrived first, which I believe is part of their on-time delivery strategy. The others started blowing in soon after, greeted by a refreshing beverage and the Morpho Team. Side discussions began naturally between our attendees; platforms & frameworks, PHP & .NET, Ruby on Rails & Drupal, iPhone & Android, lack of females in the tech world & the Super Bowl. It was pure face-to-face interaction, human contact… and not one computer was in the room (except for the Smartphones, and oh yeah, the big-screen LCD shooting out sounds from Pandora). The conversations grew organically, the attendees were comfortable yet fully engaged – it was beautiful. How often can you find a group of tech heads enjoying themselves without a ratio of 2.45 monitors to every person in the room?

Our next event will be another invitational with a different small group of technology professionals. We will only invite a max of 10 people so we can continue keeping our event small and intimate. It allows for everyone to talk to one another, get involved in conversation about a topic that each attendee has in common, and satisfy their stomachs after a long day of work. We’re definitely looking forward to the next one.

Great thanks to our attendants for making this a successful event. Here’s some feedback from our attendees:

“I thought it was a great forum for technologists that as more and more people jump on can only get better. Kind of nice having it not driven by any one agenda as folks were free to talk about real challenges rather than what Information Week would like us to be talking about.”

“I learned…
That I have overestimated the mindshare/penetration of Rails
That I have underestimated the mindshare/penetration of mobile apps
That I should probably go to more events like this one.”

“I learned about a few useful services I didn’t know existed before – not just the businesses represented, but about a few third parties that could help our business. Also got some interesting insight into the sorts of challenges that other companies are having and how they overcome them.”

PingWire is a real-time feed of twitter pictures that has been covered on New York Times, BoingBoing, CNet, BBC News, Wired Magazine, and more. The creator of PingWire teamed up with Morpho to enhance performance and develop new features such as a Widget called PingWire-in-a-box that was just released. You can customize and embed this Widget on your own website.  Morpho also developed an iPhone app for PingWire that is soon to be released.  PingWire calls itself “perhaps the most amazing website ever created.” We think that’s funny, and perhaps its true!

Maximize Quality-to-Cost ratio through agile + nearshore outsourced web development

Having developed software for many years in New York City, we have struggled with contradicting objectives – to reduce our costs and to increase the quality of our work. In other words, we have been striving to maximize our Quality-to-Cost ratio.

Like many other development teams, we’ve been successful in using Agile development (particularly the Scrum methodology) to produce high-quality software that is effective in accomplishing business objectives. The reasons for this are widely discussed. A really good (and free) tool we use to manage our sprints is Pivotal Tracker – free lightweight agile project management and team collaboration.

We have also found that the most effective way to save money without incurring a lot of hassle is by utilizing great talent in South America – often called nearshore outsourcing. Learn more about “Culture, Conflict and Where Value Fits In” at Nearshore Americas – smart sourcing for the competitive enterprise.

Morpho offers the possibility to combine both of these powerful components resulting in tremendous maximization of your Quality-to-Cost ratio. Our office in Quito, Ecuador is in the same time-zone as eastern United States, which makes daily Scrum meetings possible. In addition, Morpho account managers are experts in team-building, and our developers are good communicators – sharing a relatively similar culture to their counterparts in the US. This helps make daily Scrum meetings not only possible, but easy. Learn more about how Central and South American culture fits well with US companies from this video interview with human capital expert Lori Blackman.

Morpho’s .NET development team are big advocates of Agile development practices, and their methodology of choice is the Microsoft Solutions Framework (or MSF). MSF is a proven framework for completing projects on time and on budget, regardless of scale.

Originally developed in 1994, MSF is the culmination of best practices derived from Microsoft’s internal product development efforts and external consulting projects. It is added to and improved upon by a project team at Microsoft that is continually evaluating its effectiveness in the face of technological change.

The problem isn’t the technology

MSF holds that while technology projects have some inherent complexity, more often than not breakdowns and problems in developing and deploying applications is a result of people and processes, not the technology itself. These problems can be many and varied, but generally fall into a couple categories:

• Lack of sufficient input from key stakeholders leading to an incomplete understanding of the project.
• Lack of clearly defined roles on the project team.
• Poorly developed specs that leave out critical pieces, elements that are unnecessary, or elements that are vague or misunderstood by project team members.
• Mix-ups and delays when transitioning from the development to deployment, when handing off to the people who will be using the software solution.

The 8 foundational principles of MSF

Underlying the models, tools and recommendations of MSF are 8 core principles that inform and guide decision making and processes. We’ll expand on these in later posts, but for now a brief explanation of each will suffice:

• Foster open communications – keep team members working in an informed and effective manner.
• Work toward a shared vision – make sure everyone is clear about the goals of the project, what defines a successful outcome, etc.
• Empower team members – a team of peers with the empowerment (and responsibilities) that implies.
• Establish clear accountability and shared responsibility – each member knows their role and is accountable for the quality of that role in the project.
• Focus on delivering business value – team decisions are based firmly in the world of the customer or ultimate user of the solution, with product management or user experience roles to speak on the stakeholder’s behalf.
• Stay agile, expect change – know that things will change as you progress through a project, and anticipate it. Iterative development cycles with regular feedback aids in this process.
• Invest in quality – testing is built into the project from the beginning, with each role accountable for quality and a dedicated resource ensuring overall project quality through each state of the project.
• Learn from all experiences – organizational learning is valued during projects, and key learnings are extracted for use in future projects. A project is not just work to be completed, but an opportunity to improve as a team.

The MSF Team Model

MSF breaks projects into teams of people (or roles), each of which brings a specific skillset to the table to ensure a complete and quality final product. Although a project can have any combination of these teams (or individuals overlapping multiple roles) depending on available resources, successful projects include each of these roles to make sure all of the important quality goals are being met. For example, even if the developers also have to be the testers, it’s important to emphasize and hold them accountable for both aspects of the project as both are vital to a successful outcome.

The MSF framework includes the following roles:

• Program Management to ensure the project is completed on time and within the allotted budget.
• Development to produce the code according to the stated specifications.
• Testing to monitor and catch any issues during each stage in the project.
• Release Management to ensure the project is deployed and handed off smoothly.
• User Experience to ensure the project is enjoyable and easy to use by stakeholders.
• Product Management to ensure the project is meeting the stated needs and business requirements of the stakeholders.

The MSF Process Model

MSF combines the common “waterfall” and “spiral” process methodologies into a single model, leveraging the strengths of each. A project simultaneously has iterative development and a larger set of milestones to indicate progress.

The iterative aspect of the Process Model is characterized by “phases“, a period of time with focused activity on one aspect of the project followed by feedback and the ability to make any necessary adjustments. Phases are undertaken to progress towards stated “milestones“, giving the team specific, concrete goals to accomplish. There can be any number of phases en route to the completion of a milestone, and the character and nature of activities within a phase will be different depending on the milestone you are working toward.

Similar to the 37Signals axiom to “build half a product, not a half-assed product”, the Process Model often focuses on highest priority features to get a solution deployed, then improving upon it and adding less important features during subsequent iterations. Knowing that the project will likely need modifications once you have real people interacting with it (echoing principle #6 to expect change) the Process Model builds flexibility and an anticipation for continuous improvement into the process.

The MSF Disciplines

In order to effectively execute on the People and Process Models, MSF focuses on the development and cultivation of three disciplines. These disciplines are each required in order for your team to operate at a high level. We will expand upon each of these disciplines in future posts, but for now a brief explanation is sufficient:

• Project Management – Many of the standard Project Management tools are used by the Program Management role in the Team Model. However, MSF is unique in that it emphasizes a collaborative process, recognizing that project management is best accomplished when all team members take collective responsibility for a project’s success.
• Risk Management – MSF recognizes and anticipates risk in projects, and uses risk-based decision making to manage risks inherent in projects. At the most basic level, MSF calls for an assessment of project risks, a ranking of the most critical or most likely risks, the creation of action plans to deal with those risks, and regular monitoring of those action plans and the risks identified throughout the project.
• Readiness Management – MSF focuses on the readiness of project teams, and the knowledge and skills necessary to successfully execute on projects. In short, it makes sure that all members of the team are able to effectively fulfill the roles they’re being called upon to commit to. Since empowerment and accountability are central to the MSF framework, it makes sense that team members need to have the knowledge necessary to accomplish the tasks within their role. Towards that end, Readiness Management includes regular and open communication, and emphasis on quality, and strong investments in education and training.

Flexible and proven

The foundational principles, models and disciplines of MSF ensure that projects have the necessary people, processes and areas of focus to complete projects in a reliable, cost-effective manner. By identifying the major roadblocks in most technology projects and developing solutions to address, MSF gives development teams a flexible, proven methodology for completing successful projects.

Great presentation by Leah Buley from Adaptive Path on UX design:

blip.tv presents at NY Tech Meetup

“New York City has produced about $35 billion in tech assets over the past decade. That makes it second only to the Bay Area.” – CNET

Allan (a friend of ours) at blip.tv (New York-based startup) presented their new dashboard at NY Tech Meetup this week. The dashboard is a single place where video creators can do almost everything they need to distribute their video across many sources and generate ad revenue.  For starters, it allows creators to upload multiple versions of their videos in various formats and distribute them in a single step across 80% of all Internet-video providers, including YouTube, Vimeo, TiVo, Verizon FiOS On-Demand, a WNBC digital TV channel called New York Non-Stop, and more. They also built several new analytic tools into the dashboard, including the ability to see a timeline graph of your video that shows when people stopped watching or when they rewound and watched again.

The audience at NY Tech Meetup was impressed and so was I. The other demos were great and it was nice to see once again how packed the auditorium was (over 400 people on a Tuesday evening in August). It reflects well on the New York tech community as NY Tech Meetup has been growing rapidly in popularity, now reaching over 10,000 members. There are also many other great events setup in New York City for the tech community – particularly for Internet start-ups.

• Bootup puts startups in front of engineers to create a forum for analysis and the technical pitch.  It is the startup-focused counterpart to NYPHP’s monthly corporate meetings at IBM (operated by the New York PHP User Group Community, the world’s largest PHP user community).
• Ultra Light Startups (recently referred to as Self-Help for Startups, by Businessweek), held in Chelsea, Manhattan.
• StartUpAlhpa, an entrepreneurship network in the greater New York area that hosts various events.
  
• The Hatchery, where audiences watch while technology companies pitch their ideas to a panel, after which they receive priceless guidance and feedback from successful entrepreneurs.
• Other events include the NextWeb | NY Web 2.0 Meetup, the SEMPO New York, and Web2NewYork (New York Web Entrepreneurs).

Kevin from Adobe presenting Flash Builder 4 with the Zend Framework

Arranged by the New York PHP group, Kevin Hoyt from Adobe spoke at IBM’s New York City office yesterday about the new Adobe Flash Builder 4 (formerly Flex Builder) coming out later this year.  He showed the new features specifically for PHP developers, and how Flex can integrate easily with the Zend framework for building rich Internet applications quickly.

Because Adobe and Zend Technologies formed a strategic partnership, Flash Builder 4 has a whole bunch of new features especially suitable for enterprise and data-centric PHP development.  This includes the newly made support for Adobe Action Message Format (AMF) through the Zend_Amf module now in the Zend Framework, which enables high-speed data transfer between the client and server.  We also learned about a great tool called ServiceCapture that monitors AMF activity among other things, helping Rich Internet Application developers debug, analyze, and test their applications.

In addition, we looked at some other significant improvements to Flex 4 – most notably the separation of function from design, just like with CSS.  With this new “Spark architecture”, a developer can now build an application just once, and then a designer can create multiple skins for various devices and/or contexts for that application without having to touch or modify the underlying code related to the functionality.  This is progress.  You can learn more about this in detail here.

At an IxDA event in the Bloomberg building (which has a koi pond inside), two guys from IDEO did a presentation about interaction and business design. They considered “how interaction and business designers approach problems, how the relationship between the two disciplines has changed, and how collaboration can lead to rich user experiences and business solutions.”

This was intriguing. On IDEO’s website, they explain that their “business design specialists take a user-centered approach to understanding our customers’ business.  We consider the capabilities of our clients and the needs of their customers to prototype new business scenarios.  As we iterate towards a solution, we assess the implications of our design. Our goal is to deliver appropriate and actionable strategies… ”

What does this mean?  It means that IDEO has expanded into business strategy consulting, usually provided by the likes of McKinsey, because there is a demand for something more than just traditional design or traditional business strategy – companies want a hybrid. Having been involved in the development and launch of so many new products and services from a design perspective, IDEO saw an opportunity to also consult on the business implications of the design, branding, and user-experience decisions. With everything changing rapidly as industries converge and social media transforms how you manage PR and your brand, companies need help figuring out the repercussions of potential actions to help guide their business to success, not just making things look aesthetically pleasing. An example of this is IDEO’s work with the Adobe Creative Suite, where they worked on “creating sustainable packaging for a design-savvy clientele.” Essentially, they helped Adobe make business decisions in combination with packaging design decisions. Learn more here.

Morpho’s approach to web development outsourcing is similar. Just writing code isn’t enough. Included in the cost of our developers, we provide a US-based account manager and South American-based supervisors, who are web developers / business consultants that continuously monitor progress and seek out opportunities for improvement. They are proactive – anticipating and addressing issues before they become actual problems, and they fill in the gaps that they identify in clients’ existing processes with our best practices.

We guide web development not just to completion by writing code, but to success by helping our clients maximize their outsourcing operations, which results in saving money, increasing productivity, and ultimately increasing the quality of their web-based products and services.