PICnet Blog

Starting in February, the PICnet headquarters in Washington DC will begin a grand makeover, bringing in new offices, stand-up presentation area, new lounge, and a cozy new work environment.

These great changes come with the joy of construction, which has been delayed a little over the past few weeks. We’ve got our construction helmets from our NTC appearance last year, which should come in handy during the months of February and March (and maybe April…and May). Luckily we won’t be using any of the sledge hammers ourselves, but I’m sure that at the end of some days our team might be more than happy to lend a hand.

During the construction, we’ll likely be cutting back on in-house visits to the PICnet HQ. Not to fret, however, because once this project is complete you can expect a big open house bash with your PICnet friends.

Before and after photos to be used in the reality TV building makeover show of your choice will be available soon in our Flickr stream.

Last year was our building year at PICnet. That’s putting it lightly actually. Growing nearly three times in size, with two new offices in New York and San Francisco, the company has morphed into a true bi-costal enterprise (I enjoy using words like “enterprise” liberally in business).

It’s important to my business management methodology to follow my mantra of MBWA: managing by walking around. I want to be in each of our offices at least a few days each month, making sure PICnetters have face time with me while also spending time doing partner and business development meetings in our three cities.

I think it’s great that other technology companies can have their entire teams working virtually. That’s not the way we work at PICnet though, as I’m a true believer that water-cooler time is the place where new ideas are sparked, and that team building needs to happen both online and offline, daily.
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Growth provides an amazing incentive to work smarter. At 12 employees today, PICnet’s growth spurt has reached the point where working longer hours isn’t going to cut it. While I get few hours of sleep each night, PICnetters know that I don’t want to see the company follow down my path. It’s the “do as I say, not as I do” approach to sleep.

One of the most critical pieces to working more efficiently is better forecasting, and we’re taking a stab at a powerful tool called FogBugz to help us better track tasks as well as to more accurately predict completion dates. FogBugz 6.0 includes an amazing feature called Evidence-Based Scheduling (EBS), which our project management department is drooling over. Here’s the scenario to help understand why PICnetters are excited about EBS:

Imagine a reality where project managers and developers can agree on the release schedule of a project based on past performance data, predictive complexity data, and corporate calendars. Imagine a meeting where project managers can leave a scheduling meeting saying, “I know with X% probability that this project will launch on time”, and developers can leave saying, “man, it feels great to not have to make guesstimates that are force fit into PM’s schedules”.

As the FogBugz site says:

You can find out how realistic that official date is, so you can tell your boss with a straight face: “Yes, we can ship on time. With 4% probability.”

From what we’ve seen so far, FogBugz’s EBS functionalities has a good chance of making easy forecasting a reality. We’ll do our best to keep you posted on our experiment with FogBugz, and track our overall response to the effectiveness of EBS in project management.

MoveOn.org set precedence towards virtually mobilizing left-leaning activists around the nation. Friendster to MySpace to Facebook created the social networking phenomenon that allows users to find people that share similar interests, friends and institutions with a multimedia, personalized flair. There is something that finally combines the two: MyQuire.

Working virtually is a reality for many these days. PICnet, for instance, at any given time, has employees in four different locations. My volunteer work for the Emerging Leaders Council of Americans for the Arts (AFTA), for whom we serve hundreds of young professionals, is completely virtual save two meetings per year. And now I’m finding myself in San Francisco, helping a friend in Oregon organize a fundraising event in our Southern California hometown for her younger sister who has been diagnosed with brain cancer. Being able to coordinate communications, documents and tasks in a central location is key to any project whose members are remote.

The tools that we use at PICnet, while adequate for project management on a small enterprise scale, would not hold water in the non-techy environment of AFTA or among my friends where networking is at the root of collaboration. (I actually heard of MyQuire through the annals of AFTA as I have been pushing them to become more transparent and innovative with their Council and constituent organizing.) I decided to give MyQuire a test run with my fundraising event to see how easy it would be to replicate for AFTA’s purposes.

Before I begin my review, I should state that MyQuire is in Beta right now, so I am hoping that some of these issues will be fixed by the formal launch in late Fall.

Overall
MyQuire’s interface is great. The design is clean and intuitive and you can’t beat the price. It’s free for a user with five projects or less, and it only costs $9.99 per month if you need to coordinate more projects. The founder of the company is a person with a vision to remedy a need by nonprofits, and they are even awarding grants to their nonprofit users. The application cannot be wrapped under the guise of a nonprofits’ website look and feel, but I hear they have plans to do this in the future. And that is wonderful because in the long run, does an organization want to look like it’s coordinating through MyQuire, or through its own technical prowess?

Communications

Stokes:
I created our project, “Lauren’s Fundraiser,” added Jason and Lisa, my co-coordinators, and we track all our communications through the website. We each have created our own profiles much like the current popular social networking sites, so you can see our interests, our other projects, any photos we upload, and who we know.

We are even given a specific email with the project name: laurensfundraiser@projects.myquire.com, that acts as a group email list. Another great feature is that I am able to chat live with my co-coordinators if they are online. If you are feeling like dropping a w00t! or some kudos, post a comment to my wall

Bummers:
What I’d really like to show you- RIGHT NOW- is a link that goes directly to my project. Much like how you can see MySpace pages from the Web. I’d like to have a one pager that has a picture, the event details and who is coordinating the event so I could pass it around to all my friends. Even better, a way to RSVP for the event! How cool would that be?

MyQuire: Think guerilla marketing! Your domain would be in all the links.

Documents

Stokes:
They have enabled a system much like Google Docs or any wiki that provides for online collaboration. I can create a meeting agenda, and Lisa and Jason can add whatever items they need to without re-uploading a new document. I have uploaded Word docs to share, however I haven’t tried any Excel, Power Point or Visio files. I’d be interested to know if those fly.

There is also an area called “My Hard Drive” that looks promising with a Window Explorer feel. It breaks down all your items- photos, projects, files, etc- into directories.

Bummers:
Lisa is Mac user and Safari doesn’t support much of the mentioned functionalities. I also had trouble navigating back to the “Files” directory once I opened a document. There is no close or cancel button, and the back arrow on my Firefox browser landed me back to my profile. Lastly, I only see the html document I created in MyQuire in the Hard Drive section. Where are the Word docs?

Tasks

Stokes:
I assign tasks with due dates to Jason and Lisa and mark milestones on the project calendar. I can subscribe to my project’s calendar via Outlook, iCal, or Mozilla Sunbird and superimpose it on my Google calendar to help organize my hectic lifestyle.

Bummers:
I can’t track time spent on a task nor have a Gantt chart view of the project. Resource allocation and tracking would be a nice addition. Finally, the link to subscribe to the calendar didn’t work.

All in all, MyQuire has been a good resource to coordinate my fundraising event remotely. I think that after their launch, MyQuire should have the solid foundation which will make it recommendable to AFTA.

I came across an announcement for an (un)conference dedicated to the cultivation and support of women in technology called, She’s Geeky (October 22-23 in Mountain View), and thought it apropos to stake my claim on the PICnet blog– being the first female in the company as well.

I can’t say that I am more sensitive to the gender difference/inequities in technology inasmuch as the gender difference/inquities in general. I’ve been a minority within many all-male settings whether it be sports, friendships, or educational and professional settings. One of the first things I would do in my Computer Science classes in UCSB was to survey the ratio of women to men, and then white women to women of color. Rounding, I came up with the following ratios: 11% for the former, 20% for the latter.

I have chosen to accept a lot of the social morays associated with this community, while staying true to my nature: creative, outgoing, loud, and cute. (Yes, cute. Believe me, it brings it’s own set of issues to male-dominated professions.) Maybe some activists would say I have become complacent or socialized. I wouldn’t necessarily disagree, however I am who I am because of that very community I have adopted.

Having just moved to the Bay Area, it’s nice to know there is a foundation of similar support at the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. Perhaps I will be able to reflect on my formed attitudes by being exposed to a gender balanced technology community for once. And just maybe… I’ll let go of those morays that I think are so essential to my success in this profession.

And for the record, the PICnet guys are incredibly supportive. I really enjoy working here.

Our PICnetters have been working hard in 2007 to turn out some of the best projects for our community, so it’s a nice reward for hard work when people in our community send us props.

Today, Colin Delany, the writer of e.politics, reported on the results of his search for the most recommended Drupal and Joomla development shops in the non-profit and campaign sectors. He sent his list of the best over the Progressive Exchange mailing list, where this writer noticed something interesting: PICnet was listed at the top of the list!

Looks like we owe more than a few lunches and drinks to our anonymous friends. We’re proud of our clients, and we’re glad their proud of us.

I’m quite the frequent flier, and jetBlue gets the lion’s share of my mileage.  Ok, pretty much all of it.  I take the last flight out of Washington Dulles at around 9pm ET, and then take the red-eye out of Oakland on the flight to DC.

All was fine until jetBlue recent changed their schedule, pushing me back to a flight that leaves OAK at midnight (3am ET)!  Now, I get the joy of arriving at 8:05am ET, just minutes before a Washington Flyer bus leaves for West Falls Church making me wait 40 minutes for the next bus.

Why, oh why jetBlue, must you steal my sleep?  The Hollywood stars get to take a more decent 9:45pm flight to Dulles, but we Nor Cal folks get stuck with this crazy new schedule?

PICnet DC can expect a cranky Ryan on arrivals from the West coast.

I just had a great online discussion with PICnetter Tim, who rightfully thinks I’m crazy for the hours I put into my work. Luckily, Tim and I were able to see eye-to-eye on a leadership development method called servant leadership. During the conversation, I thought about my CEO title, and how it seemed to connote and over-emphasize a top-down hierarchical structure at PICnet.

While I enjoy the title and the perks, like the CEO parking space (my bike in the office) and the CEO airline upgrades (every seat on jetBlue is first class), I believe a better term to associate with my position is “custodian” or possibly “steward”.

I mean, look at this photo here. That’s me, Ryan the Builder, with PICnet’s good friend Susan Finkelpearl of Free Range Studios. What word comes to mind there, “CEO” or “custodian”?

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There’s one thing that trumps nearly everything we do here at PICnet: family. When the holidays come around, our office has a mandatory “spend time with your family” policy, that ensures our PICnetters soak up all the eggnog with distant relatives that they can handle.

It seems that our generation of business leaders are realizing that time with family is more important than time at work, and we PICnetters believe it. An interesting USA Today article entitled, “The family first generation,” points out the generational differences that seem to strike a chord with us.

This year, PICnet will be running a minimized office from December 26, 2006 through January 2, 2007. While most of our clients have already been informed of this schedule change, we hope this notice, and emails from your PICnet account manager will provide a good reminder.

Meanwhile, in case of emergency, you’ll still be able to email or call your account manager, and make sure that emergencies are still addressed immediately.

We wish you and yours a happy, family-first, holiday season.