Building an information radiator: Part I – Introduction

Our company culture is based on transparency. As a consequence, visibility and measurement tools are essential to us. In the past, we built several dashboards for Confluence, JIRA, Sonar, Jenkins, Nagios, etc., because dashboards are excellent at making things visible for everyone. The problem with them however has been that they would usually display information for only one target audience at a time.

We then built Walle, an information radiator, to give insight into all the work disciplines combined (development, test, support and systems management). The main objectives behind the build were: to gather all the relevant project information in one central place; to enable anyone to react instantly when needed, to make everyone involved feel responsible for the entire project.

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Techdays: January 2012 – Mendix

This is the first in a series of summaries of our monthly “Techday” events. We organize them because we like to stay sharp and have fun. Check out our previous blog post about why we do techdays.

The first techday of 2012 was about Mendix. Mendix is both a company and a Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool. FraternIT demonstrated how simple it is to create a new application in Mendix. After a short introduction, we got to try it out for ourselves.

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A new job

When new employees come in for their first day, make sure:

  • all the paperwork is in order
  • somebody is assigned to guide them for the introduction
  • you have a mutual understanding of the expectations
  • it is clear what the arrangements are
  • everything is taken care of, computer, phone, internet connection, etc…

When employees leave your company, make sure:

  • all the paperwork is in order
  • somebody is assigned to guide them for their departure
  • you have a mutual understanding of the expectations
  • it is clear what the arrangements are
  • everything is taken care of, computer, phone, internet connection, etc…

I think you get the point by now. People come and people go. Both are important moments in their careers and lifes. Make sure you get it right.

Software projects don’t end at launch

Unfortunately some things don’t change fast enough in software development. Still today, the scope of a software project (for everyone involved) is too often limited to delivering requirements before a certain deadline, within budget and then transferring the whole thing to whoever will be responsible for the hosting and/or maintenance. There’s a big launch party, everyone celebrates and then goes home happy..

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“Hiring in the DARC ages”

The title of this post is quoted from the book ‘Inbound Marketing’ by Brian Halligan & Dharmesh Shah. This great book discusses marketing in the internet age and offers lots of practical tips. One of the chapters focuses on hiring new marketeers for your company based on what the authors refer to as the DARC framework.

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