Q4 Blog » Culture

Q4 Named one of PROFIT Magazine’s HOT 50

Sheryl Joyce — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:56:58 +0000

Q4 was recently named as one of Canada’s Emerging Growth Companies by PROFIT Magazine, as part of the 10th annual PROFIT HOT 50 ranking and awards program.

Canada’s Emerging Growth Companies are a tiny elite. Most of the tens of thousands of businesses launched each year in this country fail within a few years. Even among the survivors, only a precious few expand at anything close to the blistering pace of the PROFIT HOT 50, whose revenue growth averaged 1,007% over the past two years.

In spite of sectoral downturns, qualified worker shortages, prospects’ reluctance to buy from a young firm, and currency fluctuations, every HOT 50 firm at least doubled its revenue from 2006 through 2008, and 13 grew by at least 1,000%. The extraordinary performance of the PROFIT HOT 50 goes beyond the top line. Fully 70% were already in the black in 2008.

Click here for a short interview “Climb the mountain from the top down” with Darrell Heaps about how Q4 got started.

source: Canadian Business Online

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Sheryl Joyce, Investor Relations pro joins Q4 Web Systems

Darrell Heaps — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:48:41 +0000

We’ve been so busy the last couple of weeks we haven’t been able to announce a new addition to Q4.

Sheryl Joyce, joined us on April 14, as Director of Marketing Communications and is responsible for all marketing and communications initiatives such as blogging, webinars, events and best practices. Sheryl has twelve years experience in the capital markets industry, nine of those specializing in investor relations. Sheryl brings years of experience in investor relations and corporate communications and maintains well-established relationships with sell-side analysts, institutional investors, investment bankers and transfer agents.

Sheryl has hit the ground running with a number of blog posts (see below) and managed our popular webinar on IR website best practices. Sheryl is also behind our new corporate twitter profile @q4websystems and is active in LinkedIn and our Q4 fan page on Facebook. Be sure to say hi next time you see her online!

Here are some of Sheryl’s recent posts:

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Webinar Replay – The Current State of Social Media and Investor Relations On February 14, Darrell Heaps, our co-founder and CEO, and...
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A Year Later: Living with the Rockefeller Habits

Jason Little — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 17:06:30 +0000

Ok, it’s been almost a year but nonetheless, this is officially the 2nd year into implementing the Rockefeller Habits at Q4.Â We kicked off our annual and Q1 2009 priorities yesterday with the whole company and now that we’ve gone through the process a few times we seem to be much more efficient at it.

I think what I enjoy most about the process for implementing the Rockefeller Habits is that it’s actually very similar to using Agile processes for developing software:

Focus on the highest value items first
Make progress on those items
Have a retrospective
Find new (and usually more difficult) problems
Repeat 1 – 4 often

For us, seeing a problem as an opportunity for improvement is the key. At the end of each quarter we get together and brainstorm what problems popped up during the quarter and then we widdle them down to which ones we can address the next quarter.

This exercise is usually the most emotionally draining but the mood improves very quickly when those problems are turned into solutions. This is the 4th consecutive quarter we’ve gone through this exercise and it was interesting to see how the complexity of the priorities increased as the quarters went by.

The very nature of Scrum is to constantly improve by having retrospectives at the end of each sprint.Â The Team talks about what went well, what didn’t go well and what they want to try during the next sprint. We’ve proven it’s been effective in our development teams so we decided our #1 priority this quarter is to extend the use of Scrum principles to the rest of the departments within the company.

After living with the Rockefeller Habits for a year, I can say without a doubt that the process works.Â Everyone rallies around the priorities and collaborates on solutions that help remove waste and increase efficiency across all departments.Â I would be interested to hear your thoughts about how you’ve used similar processes in your company or if you have questions about some tactics we use to keep this process running smoothly.

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Growing a Company: A look inside Q4 Web Systems

Jason Little — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:19:21 +0000

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.

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Q4 is Looking for Senior Agile .NET Developers

Jason Little — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 18:15:51 +0000

Q4 Web Systems is looking for senior .Net developers with Agile/TDD or XP experience to develop software for our suite of web based disclosure products. The primary responsibility will be to maintain the core product code for our Q4 WEB and Q4 PRESS products. This includes application architecture design and development accounting for new releases, rollouts, upgrades and ensuring scalability.

Q4 Web Systems is an Agile organization ( using Scrum) and to be considered, the candidates must be able to demonstrate the qualities associated with working in an Agile environment. You must be able to think on your feet, adapt to change and be involved with defining and implementing solutions to business issues and value.

You may view the full description here or contact us to apply.

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Rockefeller Habits meet SCRUM

Darrell Heaps — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:29:09 +0000

As Jason mentioned in his previous post, we are getting ready to kick off a busy summer quarter. With this, we have a new set of priorities and goals that we want to achieve. This is going to be our second quarter implementing the Rockefeller habits, we learned a lot the first time around and will be aiming to improve the way we track and score our progress.

One of the biggest changes we are making this time around is in the area of product development, implementations and support. Historically we have divided our development efforts into 2 distinct teams, a Product team that focused on building new features for our products and an implementation team that worked on implementing our products for clients and supporting those installations. As part of our recent re-adoption of Scrum project management, the entire group of developers were given the task of deciding on what kind of team structure we should work under. To make a long story short, the team decided on one group after much discussion, but the really great thing I’d like to point out is that we were given the option to chose for ourselves, this shows an amazing level of trust that is often times hard to find in the corporate world.

Photo credit: roy_mac_an_iarla

Another big change is that new team will be sitting together in one room, we feel this will not only help us as a group work together, but also to foster creative thinking and continually improve our products and processes. This also allows us to learn and feed off each other on a day to day basis. Learning is a never ending job for software developers and being surrounded by other smart people makes learning easy and fun!

We are all really excited about the coming months, and excited to be working on more great features for our clients.

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Wanted: Senior .NET Developer

Jason Little — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:18:12 +0000

Q4 Web Systems is looking for a kick-ass senior .NET developer. If you are a technology junkie and your idea of fun is spending a Saturday night reading about Team Foundation Server 2008 or playing with Silverlight 2.0 just because it’s cool, we want you!

You will become assimilated into our product development team where you will be responsible for the product advancement of our 2 application suites. You will participate in design and architecture reviews, code reviews and write code with automated testing in mind.

Q4 offers a great environment as well as competitive salary and benefits.

Job Requirements:

7+ years enterprise application development experience with 2+ years in architecting software platforms
4+ years experienced with .NET/C#, ASP .NET, distributed services
Strong interest in Design Patterns, Refactoring, TDD
Solid understanding of object oriented vs. component design
.NET Application deployment methodologies with N-Tiered systems, redundant/failover Windows technologies
Excellent Understanding of FSDL including best development practices, documentation, QA processes and deployment strategies
Windows 2003, SQL server 2005 and IIS 6.0 as it relates to application development and scalability
A willingness to promote and ensure a common understanding of user stories
Prominent participation in the planning, design, and implementation phases of high level concepts as well as user stories
Ability to work well within a team of developers
BS in Computer Science
Secure application development
Application stress testing

How to apply: Send your resume to careers@q4websystems.com Only suitable candidates will be contacted for an interview.

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Stop. Think. React.

Jason Little — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 19:47:19 +0000

I was reading an interesting blog post the other day about how to live in the present when you feel overwhelmed and how that can affect your personal and professional life.

The article talks about the 3 states a person generally lives in at any given time; past, future and present. I’m sure just about everyone uses their cell phone while driving, or has the news on TV while eating dinner and while checking email on their blackberry. All of this multi-tasking leads to a drop in focus, drop in productivity as well as an increase in stress.

What I admire about my friends here at Q4 is that we have always taken the approach of living “in the now”. There is always temptation to immediately react to any problem and I have personally been guilty of leaping before looking, but here are a few ways we handle “living in the now”

On our white board in our work area we have a motto for all to see. Stop. Think. React.
In our group chat when anyone feels we are going down a rabbit hole, someone posts “Stop. Think. React”
We reiterate this message in meetings

I have personally found this approach very useful, even in my personal life, but the greatest benefit is the gain in productivity and enjoyment at work since we are all on-board with ‘looking before leaping’

Something so simple makes a big difference in both our productivity and how we interact with each other at work. Stop. Think. React.

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