Growing a Company: A look inside Q4 Web Systems
Last year was a great year for all of us here at Q4. We officially launched Q4 PRESS and also launched a major version of Q4 WEB that included RSS feeds, Google Maps, photo galleries and a host of other improvements.
Anyone who has worked for company experiencing explosive growth can appreciate the difficulties that come with it and the the importance of maintaining focus with respect to corporate objectives. Chris Jones posted back in July with respect to our adoption of the Rockefeller Habits as well as our re-adoption of Scrum as a way to maintain alignment across the company.
Since Q2 2008, we have been living our values. The single most important value we realize at Q4 is a dedication to constant improvement.
Lately I’ve been blogging a great deal about Reg FD and social media so I thought I’d switch gears to ring in the new year and post about our corporate culture.
I remember our first initial sessions trying to implement the Rockefeller Habits and there were many long nights, weekends and, ahem, ’spirited discussions’, however, we progressed and improved upon those sessions each quarter.
Our re-adoption of Scrum actually helped the corporate alignment process as we now have company-wide retrospectives to learn about is and isn’t working. In each retrospective we end up with a set of tangible improvements to make in the next quarter and during subsequent retrospectives we ’scrub’ which of these we were able to implement. These improvements don’t need to be earth shattering, as a series of small improvements add up over time.
‘Agile’ seems to be the latest buzzword in software development and many companies are adopting Agile principles to how they develop software – meaning they are leveraging the 4 main values from the Agile Manifesto:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
I won’t go into great detail about these statements, but in general terms they mean that we agree there is value in the items on the right, but we value the items on the left more. A simple example would be ‘would you rather have a piece of software you can provide real feedback on quickly, or a 200 page spec document that is outdated the second it’s finished and then stuffed in a filing cabinet only to never be looked at again?’
We’ve extended Agile principles to other aspects of our business and each business unit starts the day with their own daily stand-up - essentially a 15 minute meeting status update – and all department heads meet up once a week for a “Scrum of Scrums” to ensure we are setting weekly goals to track toward our quarterly priority.
Working in short iterations from a business perspective and the frequent quick and time boxed meetings does wonders for productivity. Our goals and priorities are clear and enforced by creating weekly priorities based on the bigger quarterly and yearly goals.
The key message in how we operate is that we work as a team, we adapt to change quickly and we learn frequently through retrospectives. This commitment to constant improvement is a recipe for success and I’m looking forward to another great year at Q4.
Related posts:
- A Year Later: Living with the Rockefeller Habits
- Q4 is Looking for Senior Agile .NET Developers
- Rockefeller Habits meet SCRUM
- Sheryl Joyce, Investor Relations pro joins Q4 Web Systems
- Q4 looking for a project manager
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