Doug's Blog Archives – Page 29 of 58

20 Oct 2010

Make Decisions for Your Customers

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:50:44-06:00October 20th, 2010|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Software Development|

Three things stuck out in my mind today from reading the two books by 37signals a while back:

Scratch your own itch,
Decide what you won't do,
Make decisions for your users.

Scratch your own itch – Essentially, if you solve a problem you have you will know something about it and you will have passion about the solution.

Decide what you won't do – There is tendency to watch competitors and listen to customers to chase the feature list. 80% of non-core features rarely get used and they just make the tool more complex for everyone esle. Stick to your core and decide what […]

19 Oct 2010

Butting Heads In Rutting Season

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:50:49-06:00October 19th, 2010|Categories: Current Events, Doug's Blog, Mindset and Motivation|

Recently we went out into our yard to discover a bunch of our trees and shrubs had been hacked and slashed to bits and the bark shredded off. There were branchs strewn all over the ground and several fairly large trunks were snapped off at the base.

We had just planted them in the last year and it was a lot of work; so this was very disappointing

Upon looking closer, we determined the culprits were deer. We were thinking venison might be an option.

Apparently, male deer get their antlers in the fall and fueled by testosterone, they attack small trees and […]

13 Oct 2010

High Touch, High Value or Commodity?

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:50:54-06:00October 13th, 2010|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog|

Business is ultimately about making more money than you spend; that is a given. I would never suggest otherwise.

If you are running a commodity business, you focus on volume and keeping costs low; that is where the margins are made. Customers can go pretty much anywhere and get a similar experience. Wendy's or McDonald's? Best Western or Holiday Inn? Does it really matter which one you pick?

In sales people talk about the lifetime value of the customer; how much money is the typical customer likely to spend on your products and services over the lifetime of the relationship? How do […]

8 Oct 2010

Calgary Businesses Giving Back – Zumba Party in Pink

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:50:58-06:00October 8th, 2010|Categories: Business Strategy, Current Events, Doug's Blog|

A friend of mine owns a dance studio geared towards getting adults to go from watching dancers on "Dancing with the Stars" and "So You Think You Can Dance" to actually taking the plunge and taking lessons. Yes, if I can learn to do Step Dancing at my age and abilities… there is a course for you and you can learn to dance too.

Paula Callihoo is the owner and director of Calgary's one and only "Dance Through Life" dance studio. She is into her second year of keeping everything running and teaching lots of classes to boot.

You read a […]

5 Oct 2010

Doesn’t Anyone Else Hear It?

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:51:02-06:00October 5th, 2010|Categories: Doug's Blog, Leadership|

I was at the local Tim Horton's to pick up my lunch today. They have those bread toasters with the conveyor belts. Over the last 2 months, the toaster has started screeching, progressively getting louder and louder every time I visit.

I can only take about 5 minutes in that place. I can't imagine meeting someone for coffee and trying to listen to the person attentively.

A while back, I asked an employee there if the noise bothered him. He told me you get used to it after a while. Kind of like that frog in hot water experiment I guess. (Come to […]

22 Sep 2010

The Journey to Happiness Is About The Journey

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:51:10-06:00September 22nd, 2010|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Mindset and Motivation|

I have been reading "Delivering Happiness" by Tony Hsieh. He is the guy who started LinkExchange and sold it for 200 million and then grew Zappos and sold it for 1 billion. Not a bad track record.

What is interesting is not the making lots of money part (well that is interesting too).

It is that he realized early on that it is not about the money (especially when you have a reasonable amount already I suppose). It is about the experiences you create and the relationships you build.

If fact, on professional networking… build depth in the friendships first and […]

20 Sep 2010

Doug the Plumber

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:51:18-06:00September 20th, 2010|Categories: Current Events, Doug's Blog, Software Development|

There are surprising similarities between the process of plumbing and building and supporting software. I didn't realize that until the other day.

Recently the pump that runs hot water through out in-floor heating stopped working. This was fairly easy to determine as:

The floor was getting colder,
The pump was not making it's normal humming noise, and
It was overheating (the last time this happened I burned my fingers learning this).

The last time the pumped seized up I called in a plumber. I had to wait a week for them to show. Then they put in a new pump. The total cost was over […]

14 Sep 2010

Do Optimists Make Better Entrepreneurs?

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:51:25-06:00September 14th, 2010|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Mindset and Motivation|

First Thing – Realists are Not Optimists

Most people don't want to be labeled as a pessimist, even if it is true.

It has been my experience that some people focus and dwell on the negative things as a habit or by nature.

When you are talking to them and feel the conversation is going into negative or blaming territory, you may be tempted to call them out; "why are you being so negative?" or "be patient things will get better", etc.

Someone who is an optimist by nature (temporary deviation) will pause, admit they are being overly negative, and then immediately brighten up […]

9 Sep 2010

Software Post-it Notes

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:51:33-06:00September 9th, 2010|Categories: Doug's Blog, Software Development, Technology|

Keeping things simple we would have just used post-it notes and a whiteboard or wall. We have lots of concurrent projects and could have used up lots of walls.

But we also have remote clients, developers and testers.

So we decided on a software solution. This is what the OnTime Planning Board looks like with client names removed.

Of course it is all drag and drop.

Note that we are currently using 1 week sprints with two major releases for these types of projects. I have found that longer sprints make it hard […]

8 Sep 2010

Pushing Out of the Comfort Zone

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:51:41-06:00September 8th, 2010|Categories: Doug's Blog, Mindset and Motivation, Software Development|

Recently we had a project where we received a rather complicated mail merge Word document that needed to be generated from a web site. If we could handle the Word documents directly, we would have a very flexible method of building similar applications for our clients in the future.

We looked at third party tools and several looked promising initially.

However, they seemed to fail on handling the nested if statements properly. The output in Word or PDF format was rendered incorrectly.

So we looked at using the docx (XML) format and the Microsoft docx SDK. The Word docx format saves the content […]

Doug’s Blog

First Thing – Realists are Not Optimists