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Conflicts Help Optimize Business Processes

Sandro Groganz 2 Comments

While reading Lean Solutions (thanks Judith!), I came across this paragraph:

And the one thing we can conclude for certain, based on our years of observing faulty processes, is that if you drop good people into a bad process you quickly end up with a lot of “bad” people assigning blame to each other.

I have experienced this phenomena of teams gone bad myself several times while being employed or working on the spot with customers and observing their corporate culture.

Here are some symptoms:

  • Political games or bullying kill creativity and the ability to concentrate
  • Others think about others that they are incompetent
  • … and truly incompetent people do not get fired
  • No one speaks the truth and real conflicts are being avoided
  • Emotions are being classified as unprofessional

It all comes down to a company not capable or interested in optimizing its processes, which is effectively the same as not respecting each employee’s motivation for doing a great job. This is where a lot of frustration erodes the company’s business potentials.

Japanese car producers have shown that tightly structured work processes are not the domain of Germans only :). Optimized processes are key to success. Monopolists can afford to be chaotic – but there will come the day where a competitor with much better processes will seriously attack the monopolist.

Breaking the spell of an inefficient work environment is actually simple, yet it starts with the behavior of each individual person in the company. Hence, it requires courage:

  • Speak for yourself, practice radical honesty, say how you feel
  • Don’t hold back just because others might not like what you are saying

Being good to yourself does not mean that you disrespect others or that you are a trouble maker. Quite the opposite, this is actually the best way how to show respect, because by being honest and straight forward, everyone else has the chance to react upon what you are saying (even if it means that you might realize you are wrong and act like an idiot – we are all human…).

Well, of course, if you realize that the company is still not good to you, then you’ll have to leave.

Once, each employee feels taken serious and is able to express himself, business issues instead of personal fights will regain attention. Only by clearly addressing conflicts, there’s a chance that business processes can be optimized. Conflict resolution is key to business process optimization and to support teams in striving for a common goal.

Adding Creative Commons Music to a Screencast with GarageBand on Mac for YouTube

Sandro Groganz 1 Comment

The Mindquarry screencast I wrote about before, got spiced up with the song Revolve by His Boy Elroy, which is available under a Creative Commons license.

Here’s what I did technically:

First I hit File > Export in iMovie and clicked on “GarageBand” to transfer the video to the GarageBand application included on my Mac. In GarageBand, I added the song to the audio track. It was necessary to adjust the music to the video, e.g. to highlight a switch of the topic with the music. After some trial and error, I learned how to cut, paste, move parts of the music and also that you could simply extend a part at its beginning and end (cool!).

When the audio work was done, I wanted to add the music credits at the end of the video. I added the missing clip in iMovie and wondered how I can get the extended video into GarageBand. The trick is actually, that GarageBand will automatically load the new video because it is linked to iMovie.

It was more hassle to find a way how to get the audio track imported to iMovie. I think I only found a workaround yet: 1) Export from GarageBand to high quality video (640×480), 2) Import in new iMovie project, 3) extract audio track in iMovie. I’d be glad to hear if someone knows a better way?

From iMovie, I exported the video in a format optimized for YouTube. The video settings have been described in my previous post Screencast for YouTube with iShowU and iMovie on Mac. I configured the audio settings as follows:

  • Format: AAC
  • Sample rate: 22.050KHz
  • Channels: Stereo
  • Bit rate: 24kbps

Screencast for YouTube with iShowU and iMovie on Mac

Sandro Groganz 1 Comment

Today, I uploaded a short screencast about Mindquarry to YouTube which will be included on our Web site.

I created it with iShowU and iMovie on my Mac and uploaded it to YouTube. It took some research on the Web as well as trial-and-error to achieve a good resolution in YouTube’s 320×240 video size. Here’s a short how-to:Download and install iShowU (I used 1.41), pay the $20. iMovie should already be installed on your Mac.These are my settings in iShowU:

  • Audio: Turned off, because we later add music to the screencast within iMovie.
  • Video:
    • Framerate: 15
    • Size: 100%
    • Quality: Max
    • Compression: Apple MPEG4 Compressor
    • Mouse: Record in each frame
    • Recording area: I used different ratios to show an overview or details. They all scale down well to the 320x240px size of YouTube videos:
      • 320×240
      • 427×320
      • 640×480
      • 854×640

Now start recording with iShowU.

Start a new iMovie project in MPEG-4 format (automatically sets the ratio to 640×320). Import the screencast files (File > Import), insert them, move them around, cut them, add images, audio, effects, etc.

When done go to File > Export in iMovie, choose QuickTime and from the drop-down that you want to define your own settings, click “Share”. Before saving the file, change the screen size by clicking on “Options”, there on “Size” and choose “320 x 240 QVGA”. For all other options, use the default settings (e.g. frame rate at 24).

The text effects in-between the screencast clips have been created in Keynote, which is part of iWorks. It’s a great presentation software with nice text animations. Keynote allows you to export to QuickTime movies which again can be imported to iMovie. The descriptive subtitles at the bottom of the screencast clips have been added within iMovie, just make sure you disable “Black background”.

Now I just need to find a good CC-licensed music for the screencast …

Useful resources:

Open Source and SaaS – Business in the Fast Lane

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

It’s been an exciting two weeks with all the preparations for the Mindquarry GO launch and respective public relations.

I can now clearly sense how the combination of Open Source and Software as a Service (SaaS) dramatically accelerates our business.

We already get plenty of feedback from users who download our software and install it on their own – that’s the Open Source engine that keeps us optimizing our product. SaaS is the other turbo engine: registrations for free Mindquarry GO beta accounts are adding up and the first beta users will go live Monday. Once we have all 333 users online by September 9th, they will provide even more feedback and help us to rapidly improve our software.

As we try to consequently apply the mantra “release early, release often” to both our Open Source and SaaS offer, we multiply the effect of early user feedback leading towards a constantly enhanced product and hosted service.

Mindquarry GO Launched – Get 3 Beta Tester Accounts

Sandro Groganz 2 Comments

Go for Mindquarry GO 🙂 It’s the new online hosted collaboration service offered by Mindquarry, powered by our Open Source Web collaboration software.

You can now (continue to read below before you click) sign up for 333 free Mindquarry GO Beta accounts to work with a fully functional version of the Mindquarry GO offer for 3 months. It includes 100GB disc space for file sharing, unlimited teams, user, Wiki pages, tasks, etc. – no need to download, install, configure or troubleshoot.

I have 3 reserved accounts for the readers of my blog. Leave a comment and make sure you enter your email address. I’ll pick those who are in desperate need of a good collaboration tool 😉

With Mindquarry GO, we are joining the ranks of Open Source companies offering their products as Software as a Service (SaaS).

The Day Your Community Comes to Life

Sandro Groganz 3 Comments

A few days ago, it happened for the first time that someone outside of the Mindquarry team answered a question in the Mindquarry forum – that’s when a community starts to blossom.

Especially for an Open Source project, this is a magic moment, because community building is so crucial to its success.

Even though I have seen it before in other projects and companies, I am always astonished when I read in a forum about developers who give a new product a try with a lot of engagement and patience. It’s so great to have virtual strangers all around the globe seriously checking out and working with our product.

Thanks to all our forum participants, we deeply appreciate all your feedback!

PS: The best tool to start a community is still a forum or mailinglist.

The Long Tail of Open Source Marketing

Sandro Groganz 4 Comments

Almost done with reading Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail. Although the book mainly focuses on the CD, DVD, books market, the principles can be applied to Open Source marketing, i.e. marketing an Open Source product. (Read the book anyway, because you’ll learn about fundamental changes in today’s economics!)

Most notably, I like the distinction between traditional media as pre-filters and social media as post-filters:

As such, in Long Tail markets, the role of filter then shifts from gatekeeper to advisor. Rather than predicting taste, post-filters such as Google measure it. […] In general, blogs are shaping up to be a powerful source of influential recommendations.

What we do at Mindquarry, is a mix of both, traditional (pre-filter) and social (post-filter) marketing. Something like a beta release of our software will be pushed via blogs, while a PR about a stable release will be send out to traditional media.

The interesting thing about social media is that a e.g. a blog entry need not come out latest 1 day after the beta release. Because blogs are a lot about the blogger’s individual authority, it’s still worth writing about a beta release even 2 weeks after it has been released.

Post-filters have a longer span of attention compared to pre-filters. This allows you to plan the PR for a stable release in a way that you first finish the work for traditional media (e.g. writing the respective press release) and after the release announcement you have 1 or 2 days to prepare the bloggers pitch or review guide.

There is one important exception to this rule: If you plan to “leak” exclusive information to a blogger or traditional media, you of course provide that info to them in advance of all others.

Principles of Marketing

Sandro Groganz 2 Comments

Besides all the marketing theories, there are basic principles to keep in mind:

  1. Your product should create value – otherwise you won’t make money with it.
  2. Marketing is the internal spokesman of your (potential) customers.

These are the implications:

Make sure your software is useful since day one. Focus on usability and stability. Implement functionality that solves daily needs and fight bugs fiercely. Make sure you have at least these processes of product development institutionalized: defining a roadmap for adding or changing features, specifying those features in more detail, implemention, feature freeze, testing + feedback from beta users, bug fixing, roll out.

As a marketing person, think like a customer and be clear and honest to your colleagues. Remember: Though you get paid by the company you do marketing for, your customers don’t. At best, customers tell you what they would like to see optimized in your software. In the worst case, they simply won’t care about your product. Hence, marketing needs to anticipate customer opinions and ensure a product’s usefulness.