David Anderson rose (as he often does) an interesting topic about management inputs and outcomes. I completely agree with David that problem of managers who perform but not on company values is dilemma of short-term vs. long-term success. Delivering on numbers while sacrificing values can and probably will have distant consequences.

In my view numbers should come because of values not in spite of them. And in order to ensure that proper system of measurement should be developed. You want to know early when success is achieved at the expense of values, before it starts to affect your long-term performance.

Doing some experiments with Google Blog Search I suddenly realized that press-releases are dead. Dead in a sense that they can no longer serve as a means of attracting new customers. In modern world of blogs and social networks press-releases are just old-fashioned ridiculous way of informing about things happening that just does not work for technology people.

The interest to technology starts with two things: information about the mere fact of existence of technology or product and positive opinion about it. Press-releases can inform you, but they can not form opinions. At least it would be too thoughtless of you. Instead you would like to know what other people think about it. And blogs are just perfect for that. To me one human-made blog post about product means more than hundred of similar press-releases in news agencies feeds.

Now we've got past those times when vendors had to say that their product is great to sell it. Today they have to offer good products to sell them.

Do an experiment, check what people say about your company and its services with Google Blog Search. If they do not say much, probably, you want to change your PR approach.

Sun is going to release NetBeans, a popular Java IDE, under GPL. I'm not sure if this is good or bad and who will loose or benefit from this. And I do not see how making NetBeans "more Linux friendly" as stated in "Why GPL v2 FAQ" will make its users happier and the product itself more successful.

PS I'm not against open source. I'm against spending effort on activities that do not produce any value.

David Anderson in his recent post about Jeff Sutherland's speech mentioned Jeff's mentioning (looks like I began to spread rumors) 2x productivity improvement after deployment of Scrum in a CMMI Level 5 organization. Very impressive achievement especially for the company that has been focusing on continuous improvement for at least some time. This together with "official" data on CMMI performance, which suggest over 62% productivity improvement over non-CMMI processes, gives this company enormous advantage over an average competitor.

What would be interesting to see is what was so wrong with the original process that deployment of Scrum allowed to squeeze 200% of productivity out of the same resources. In my opinion greatest improvements come from eliminating waste. But I just do not see how waste can be sucking 50% of capacity of a CMMI Level 5 organization to give 2x productivity improvement when eliminated. Would be be very interesting to know details on how such a great achievement was possible.

Speaking about Niklas experience with outsourcing I wrote before. I could not help commenting his general description of his job. Don't get me wrong, but believe that outsourcing to 4 countries with 12 hours maximum time-zone difference that make you work 24/7 is not The Right Thing™. On the high-level I divide outsourcing into 2 types: outsourcing to save (i.e. Bad Outsourcing) and outsourcing to focus (i.e. Good Outsourcing).

When you outsource to save costs you send wrong signal to your vendor: whatever it is, it should be cheap. And when vendor receives this signal, he starts sacrificing things to save costs. The first thing he sacrifices is quality. Quality of office, quality of equipment, quality of workforce, quality of deliverables. This ends up as a nightmare for your managers and engineers.

On the contrary, I never repair my car myself. I outsource this activity to focus on my core competencies. And do not seek for cheap service providers. I seek for those whom I can trust, for those who save my time. Such outsourcing partners can boost your business by enabling you to deliver more value to your customers.

Niklas from Stockholm shares his experience with outsourcing to Ukraine. Everything he says is correct except for there are software companies in Ukraine whose developers are not all students. He goes

The entire company sat in two small rooms with computers everywhere, and the programmers was all young men from the Kiev university. But they where all very enthusiastic and with a lot of energy for the new tasks.

While energy and enthusiasm are important even more important for outsourcing kind of work are engineering experience and robust management approaches.

For this case I suggest a simple test. Ask yourself if you would hire students in your country if you could. If the answer is No, then why would you hire them in another country? For most cases you will want your outsourcing partner to have mature processes and management discipline that will save your time in coordinating with the remote team.

I did. Well, almost. And I love it. If you try to see not only immediate cause - consequence relations, but chains of events that make an impact - this is a book for you. You'll find true soul mates in Stevens.

And, guys, Freakonomics has blog!

Recently I found myself greeting my colleagues with "How are you getting on?". In fact, in Russian it reads somewhat different. Literally "How is your progress?". And you know what? The most important thing about progress is the mere fact that there is progress!

I started asking this unconsciously, but now I do this intentionally. This way I show people that I do not question their success and only want to share it with me. This is just a quick status meeting with positive coloration.

One day I started reading "Are you part of the Post-Agile Movement?" post by David Anderson. Which lead me to "Agility is not the point". And then to "Agile Software Development vs. Agile Project Management". Which in turn offers a whole bunch of other quite interesting links. You see, with blogs hypertext works just great. Once started you are almost certain to enjoy a never ending journey through the Web.

Speaking of Agile, have you seen this interview with David Anderson? Must see!

When you download a trial version of a product you do not have any obligation to use or even install the product. The only your investment so far is time and traffic to download. If you do not have time to test drive the product today or tomorrow, no problem - you can download it again. If you installed it and do not like it, not a big deal - uninstall and go search for an alternative. Like it? Enter activation code and there you go!

Now you've bought a product with money back guarantee. You think "I need to try it. The more time I test it the more chance I'll catch the problem and get my money back." You do not have a single day to postpone this, you've already invested money into it. The positive case is simple - you simply continue using the product.

The negative case is way more difficult. One day you decide "This piece of software isn't worth the money I spent. Lets get them back." You start looking for the instructions how to apply for money back. You know what? No one even bothered with providing you such instructions! Developers did not want to think or probably even did not know about such feature of their product. You end up writing to sales with a claim for money back. I would imagine they reply with something like "We can offer you new updated version of our product. We are sure that if you try it you will reconsider!".

I bet you will not reconsider, they just ask for additional investment of time from you. And the money back begins! But technically and legally that is not an easy process. And I mean it. The situation is even more tricky if you bought the product from reseller, not the original vendor which offers the money back guarantee. But you go through it and get your money back.

Now you get an e-mail "It is unfortunate that our product failed to meet you expectations. Blah-blah-blah. Please help us improve by telling what was wrong." Are they serious!? They've just wasted your time and probably money (shipping is not refunded) and made you go to competitor and now ask you to invest more time in helping them become better! Well, they ask for to much.

You see, this whole money back guarantee thing is not at all about you. It is all about the vendor.

Want to attract customers and make sure their bad stories do not get even worse? Offer trial versions to let users test drive your product with as less effort from their side as possible.