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One of our clients is looking for someone with 3-5 years of Microsoft .NET development experience (VB and/or C#).  Experience with any or all of: WPF, LINQ, relational database programming, CSLA Business Objects, Web-Services and XML/XSLs is highly desired.

You need to be made of awesomeness, as our project manager puts it, and be both extremely reliable and easy to work with. Don’t bother if you know you’re kinda flaky—it won’t be fun for anyone, and you will be let go. If you are reliable and easy to work with, great! Extra-special brownie points go to Seattle folk, as the client is based there.

E-mail your resume and cover letter to dotnetjob2010@causeit.org. Please do not call—we are not screening developers for this client, just forwarding on your information.

When does it make sense to bring a project manager into your small business?

People have different roles for project managers within their business. In my business, I have about eight hours of meetings with project managers per month. In those meetings, I process the tasks in my inbox and triage them into Remember the Milk, have conversations with the project manager about the feasibility of the commitments I have taken on/will be taking on/would like to take on, and start to get in communication with anyone I need to repromise to, revoke promises to or reschedule with. I also have higher-level conversations about processes for efficiency, total workload capacity and balance between different types of work.

For some small business people, the project manager also does a bit of cat-herding—checking in on tasklists and duedates, especially those which are past due. When they spot something which is lagging behind or flat-out has not been done—especially if there is a recurring theme of delay on that type of task—they have a conversation with the team member to see what they need to be effective. Sometimes that conversation looks like coaching to uncover any emotional or contextual roadblocks, and sometimes it is a process conversation to see what would make it easier to complete that task consistently.

Project managers also are likely to assist in the scoping/estimating process of bids to make sure that time conflicts, logjams and cost overruns are prevented wherever possible. For example, Causeit worked with one of our project managers in the process of constructing a bid for a large flat-priced graphic design project to ensure we met a minimum hourly pay rate and, thus, profitability.

In a smaller business, the project management accountability often falls on the business owner, general manager or an account manager. First steps for additional project management support, with a generally effective team who sometimes get overwhelmed (rather than a team with systemic problems around accountability, self-discipline and communication) are to implement some simple, low-cost solutions centering around reminding people of the promises they made. Technology solutions like Remember the Milk automate some of this process, and work particularly well when paired with a meeting with an outsider or other strictly-accountable team member who gently causes the conversation to come up on a regular basis (once or twice a week is best) and to stay on track.

In short, project managers serve to make sure the actions of your games get moved forward by ensuring actionable promises are made, recorded and managed. Contact us to have us facilitate an introduction to some of our favorite project managers, like Jodi Sweetman and Amye Scavarda!

Gmail—everyone seems to know what it is, and a huge number of people use it. Hands-down, it’s recognized as the best ‘deal’ in the free webmail scene. But why?

A screenshot of Gmail's conversation view

In short, it comes down to Google’s core values. Among them are “Focus on the user and all else will follow,” and, parphrased, “don’t be evil.” Running with this direction, Google’s team (and a huge user community) turned on email on its side by acknowledging two core things: 1) people have conversations, not messages,   2) humans don’t always think linearly and 3) keep powerful features easy.

Staying in the conversation

Gmail offers something few other email clients have been able to touch: effective threaded conversations. What is a thread? Imagine passing a note back and forth in class—writing a reply on the same page that you received a message on. Gmail pieces together the messages going in and out of your address to provide a cohesive view of a conversation—even if the messages are weeks apart—so that the context of messages is clearer. This way, instead of wading through pages of ‘quoted’ messages, which are often hard to read, a user can collapse and expand messages which came before and after whatever message they are reading. Often, this makes each message shorter, too, as introductions and conclusions are less necessary.

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Remember the Milk (or RTM for short) is a powerful, flexible and simple tool for managing tasks. Small business owners (and busy folk everywhere) know that having a mere to-do list is insufficient. Remember the Milk works by helping you quickly enter and triage your tasks so that you can get back to doing whatever it is that you do best without worrying about, well, how to remember to get the milk. And, like so many great web apps these days, it’s a free service.

Remember the Milk works as a great tool for implementing productivity guru David Allen’s excellent methodologies, as articulated in Getting Things Done. The core of his practice involves sorting tasks into a couple of cross-referenced criteria, such as project (e.g. ‘creating a new website’), context (e.g. tools or locations such as ‘phone,’  ‘grocery store,’ or ‘office’) or duration (five minutes, 30 minutes, etc.). In a traditional paper to-do list or a mish-mash of different task management tools, it can be difficult to sort your the work at hand, or, say, find out what five-minutes tasks you can do between clients. Remember the Milk makes implementing a cross-referenced set of lists easy.

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“We can bring our spiritual practice

into the streets, into our communities,

when we see each realm as a temple,

as a place to discover that which is sacred.”

—Jack Kornfield

Just saw a great article on the importance of online reviews for products. According to the author, there are a couple of interesting bits of info for those new to the process:

• After about 20 comments, search engine rankings and click-throughs increase.
• Retailers needn’t be afraid of a few bad reviews if they are confident in their product: “…a handful of bad reviews, it seems, are worth having. ‘No one trusts all positive reviews,’ [Google's retail industry director John McAteer] says. So a small proportion of negative comments—’just enough to acknowledge that the product couldn’t be perfect’—can actually make an item more attractive to prospective buyers.”
• For products with a large volume of reviews, a ranking system for the helpfulness of reviews increases trust and allows for a blend of ‘most recent’ and ‘most relevant’ reviews to be aggregated into a glanceable area.

Read the full article in The Economist’s 5 Mar 09 print edition “Fair Comment” column, or here.

In my work with clients, I often remind them how important it is to carefully review documents before signing them—especially as it relates to inserting yet more provisions.

For a while now, Causeit has been searching for a new office space. After a round or two of false starts, including one we were almost ready to sign on, we found the perfect spot. What has the new place work so well is that we carefully crafted a list of wants (negotiable) and needs (non-negotiable) before we ever saw an office. We even came up with a one-sheet of what it might look like and a list of our needs and wants:

Our mini-floorplan and wishlist

This meant that when we looked through the lease (a generic and exhaustive document covering almost every industry and largely, of course, favoring the landlord,) we were able to quickly identify potential sticking points. Some of the changes we made:

• Negotiating a less-restrictive clause about bringing material in and out of the building (we have a lot of loading and unloading to do)
• Clarifying use of the office to include our deskshare concept for business incubation and network-building, so that no confusion would happen in the future regarding whether or not deskshares qualified as sublets
• Finding out exactly what we were permitted to do with the space regarding subletting and assignment (the process of handing off responsibility in the lease to another party) so that we know exactly what will happen when we go to expand

How many times have you wanted to work on a simple document with a friend or colleague, only to be stopped by problems constantly sending files back and forth? Or needed to share a spreadsheet with a client, only to find their copy of Excel won’t open your file? As part of our series on web applications for small business, we’ll take a look at Google Docs as a way to save you money.

Google Docs is a free service which allows you to work on basic documents (word processing, spreadsheets and presentations) in your browser. At a basic level, it provides the most commonly used functions of programs likes Microsoft Office for free. Your files are stored online, instead of on your computer—which means that crashes and viruses don’t affect them, but your ability to access the web does (for example, if your cable modem goes out, you can’t access your documents until you find another internet connection). This sort of online file storage is referred to as ‘the cloud’ in Web 2.0 parlance.

Google Docs also allows for the wonderful experience of jointly authoring or editing a document. Say, for example, that you are working on a notice from the board of your neighborhood association. You could try to get everyone together in the same room to edit at the same time, or attempt to pass around a document (while tracking revisions of it) or delegate the task to just one person.

Instead, Google Docs allows you to create or import a document and then share it with other users (either in an editing or read-only capacity) to make it easy for everyone to contribute (or just comment). No downloads, installations or virus-scanning is required. This is also a great way to work on joint budgets or other technical and rapidly-changing information. During one busy period, my partner and I used the spreadsheet function to track apartments we were looking at and the status of each rental application. It saved us a lot of ‘missed leads’ or duplicate communication. Google Docs can even send notifications to other users when a file is modified, taking out the step of emailing ‘look at this change.’

While there are a few bugs in its implementation (formatting isn’t as fluid, as, say, Apple’s iWork program, or even Microsoft Word), the convenience of shared documents and the ease of use make Google Docs a great tool for just about any user looking to either save money on Office or bring friends and co-workers into the editing process.

If you’ve ever checked your free e-mail account from a friend’s computer without paying a dime, you’ve experienced of glimpse of web apps. Most small business owners don’t know that everything from accounting to conference calls can be achieved online for low or no cost, so we’ve chosen to write a series on small business savings via web apps. We’ll evaluate the benefits, utility and cost of a number of applications. Since Causeit, Inc. is in the process of converting many of our desktop documents into web-capable systems, many of these trials will be supported by our own experience or those of our clients. Here are some of the potential topics [please suggest more!]:

• Mind-Mapping and Outlining Tools to Organize Your Thoughts
• Bookkeeping in a Browser: Online Bookkeeping & Invoicing
• Using Google Documents to Share For Free
• Teleportation: Remote Access and Meetings Via the Web
• Save on Saving: Online Backup Tools
• Can Facebook Actually Get You Clients?
• Using LinkedIn for Networking Knowhow and Reference-Checking
• Online Phone Systems: Press 1 For Cheap Voicemail & Calls
• Google Calendar: Scheduling Your Success/Workgroup Calendars for $0 a User
• Remember the Milk: Free, Powerful Online Task Management
• E-Mail Marketing: What’s the Best Deal?
• Online Project Management: Does it Really Save Time?