How to get your Team out of the Office
Lately we’ve been talking about why it’s important to get your team out of the office. There’s an old piece of advice that people give to someone contemplating getting married—they say take a trip with that person. If you go and you spend seven days on a road trip with them and you come back […]
The Importance of Communication Tools (video)
Is your lousy office communication tool slowing down your team’s progress? Here’s advice on how to choose a tool that’s right for you. Video Transcript: Any tools are a large part of communication when you’re talking, especially, about a team that’s distributed or remote. So it comes down to really three aspects when looking at tools […]
Team Communication: the Water Cooler (video)
Do you love water cooler talk, or hate it? Here’s a short video on why it’s actually very important (especially for distributed teams). Video Transcript: It’s so easy to get into the habit of when you’re communicating with your team, to just start talking about deliverables. Start talking about things that you need ASAP. Things […]
We Got Blood!
Every summer when Indian people take their vacations, a crisis arises. As you might know, India faces a terrible blood shortage—but this shortage worsens in the summer time. Regular blood donors take their vacation right when children come for surgeries in large numbers, creating a supply/demand gap which can cause lives to be lost. To […]
5 Tips For Finding Software Talent
Long-term business success isn’t easy in today’s software developer shortage, but what’s a company to do when it can’t find the right talent fit? Teams continue to suffer from the shortage, especially in mobile where agility and speediness are required to get ahead of competitors. The temptation to make a bad hire persists, but companies should still look for more […]
How your CFO can Contribute to Successful Outsourcing
Because technology is so integral to business, IT outsourcing is no longer the CIO’s challenge alone. When asked the right questions, in the right context and with the proper long-term vision, the CFO plays an amazingly valid and important role in policy and direction. However, if the recommendations or decisions are based on assumptions and […]
Can Offshore Work for a Startup?
If you had asked Chris Samuelson six months ago if he wanted to consider outsourcing some of his software development workload, he would have said no. But as it was, tech startup Varsity News Network had a developer in India on hand, and Chris was assigned to manage him. So how did six months of […]
3 Obstacles of Agile Methodology and How to Overcome Them
Over the past couple years, non-tech industries have gradually adopted a project methodology held dear by software developers everywhere: Agile Methodology (click the link for an excellent agile definition, brought to you by the world’s greatest website, Wikipedia). Our own company does agile marketing—specifically Agile Scrum—which we found to be an appropriate move, given that […]
the Gypsy Village Meets ECHO (EC Group Health Outreach)
If you’ve been keeping up with our outreach news, you’ve seen that we’ve been doing a lot of activities with the Gypsy village not far outside of the city of Chennai. Our last visit was for our Christmas party celebration. We visited again last week, this time as part of the annual EC Group medical […]
Re-Defining IT Staff Augmentation and Managed Services
Managed services vs IT staff augmentation. The internet is littered with articles discussing the pros and cons of each. These two models are the typical go-to’s. But it seems regardless of which direction you go, you’re probably not going to be satisfied with either. Why? Because if you’re facing a talent shortage in your office, […]
