John Linton
Well, the financial press was even gloomier to read today than yesterday with every bleak detail of how the Australian ASX has been reduced by 11% so far in 2008 and how that's pretty much the case on share markets around the world. Those stories/analyses were matched by the predictions for ongoing bank interest rises and the start of more 'regualtion' of 'Australian Industry' by the new 'government'.
Not what you want to read on a Saturday morning when you have other things on your mind. While I don't doubt that some recession in the USA will affect Australia and as I am basically numerate I can see that slashing the value of Australian companies by 11% in 13 working days is a fair indication that the future is far from rosy I'm mindful that there were over 1 million cars sold in 2007 and there were record retail sales in the Christmas period - up by a substantial amount on any previous Christmas period.
Another, far more important, issue to me is that Exetel has already had the best two week orders received period of its 4 years over the first two weeks of January and even more amazing has had its best ever MONTH (in two weeks) in terms of business DSL/Ethernet service orders received in a period during which many business decision makers are on annual leave. Perhaps I'll take the word of these experts overthe overwhelming economic data:
http://thebigchair.com.au/news/executive/on-the-radar?s_cid=226
However the highlight of the week for me, despite the great pleasure I got from seeing the record order streams maintained each day was the delivery of the alpha version of GURUS on time and being everything I'd hoped it would be at this early stage. I'm always impresssed when software projects (especially 'green fields' ones) are on time but I was even more impressed at what I can now do at this early stage of development.
The alpha version was mainly aimed at monitoring sales progress across the current 10 services that Exetel delivers and it does this extremely well reducing the 10 - 15 minutes I normally spend at the start of each day to a glance at one number on a screen and then two mouse clicks to be presented with the snap shot of what I must pay attention to together with the base information I need to start to address any sales issue.
Very impressive.
Of course, sales issues are always the easiest to address (which is why we started with them) but, nevertheless, a ten minute time saving on monitoring one of the ten aspects of Exetel's operations is a very significant efficiency gain. I had a 'play' with the alpha version and, of course, immediately found problems and omissions but nothing that was not immediately rectified and that in itself gave me great confidence in the way the coding had been done.
I will annoy the developers over the next few days to get this, small, aspect of GURUS working to the point that it will replace part of my daily routine and then we will move on to an alpa version of the customer service aspects of Exetel's business followed by the other 8 areas we want this system to control.
If the rest of this, very long, development process goes as well as it has over the past two months I believe we will have better methods and processes of operarting a commercial enterprise than exist anywhere else on the planet and we can also transform the speed at which new managers learn to manage as well as reducing the time taken to manage any aspect of a commercial organisation.
I remain very excited about this project and what it will deliver to every person invoved with Exetel (employees, customers and suppliers) and it certainly is a bright shining light among the doom and gloom of what is shaping up as a very tough time for all Australians.
If it works out anything the way I think/am hoping it will then we will make the code available as open source to anyone who wants to use it.
That's a way off yet.