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Interview with Joe Gorup, CEO of Catavo, Inc.
Some background…
Starting as an independent consultant in 1994 and with no outside
funding, Joe Gorup built Catavo (www.catavo.com) into a multi-million
dollar consulting firm that has survived both the ups and the downs
of the economy. Mr. Gorup's background includes extensive experience
in large-scale application development projects.
GROWINGCO: What was your biggest technology mistake?
GORUP: For our customers, we have a always delivered what we said
we would, so externally there are no "big mistakes." Internally,
we’re like every other company. Clients always come first.
Clients don’t want to see pain and we don’t show it
to them. Internally, we have our own challenges and we have made
many mistakes. One mistake was a tactical mistake – an internal
technology project that went wrong. It was a case of not taking
our own advice and resulted in 2 months of delay and frustrated
users.
GROWINGCO: Tell us more about not taking your own advice?
GORUP: This mistake centered on our attempts to rollout an internal
project management & time tracking application. We had done
this dozens of times for clients. We understood that time and project
management is a critical business function (it drives our invoicing
process) and changing it carries some risk. For clients, we would
diagram the business processes and identify the critical path for
the implementation.
GROWINGCO: What do you mean when you say “critical path.”
GORUP: The critical path is the individual tasks that directly
impact the overall timeline for accomplishing an entire project.
Collectively, these "tasks" make up the "critical
path". When we know the critical path, we have a clear picture
of what needed to be done, how it would get done and we would have
buy-in from all the business process owners. For example, at the
start of a housing project - the action of "Pouring the foundation"
would initially be on the critical path and the "purchase door
frames" would NOT be on the critical path. Once the foundation
was poured and the house framed the "purchase door frames"
tasks would be on the critical path. The entire house project would
be on hold (e.g. could not drywall, etc.) if the door frames were
not purchased, hence the "critical path".
Sadly, our mistake was not taking our own advice and finding the
critical path. Our mistake was attempting to implement all features
of the new software before proving how the critical path items would
fit into our business. We became enamored with all of the new features
(e.g. web-based real-time data warehouse reporting), and in the
process of playing with all of the possible bells and whistles,
put the software into such a state that it required us to completely
start over and rebuild. Aside from the time wasted and inefficiencies,
we missed our year-end go live date, and confused/frustrated staff
that were helping out in our initial "beta" rollout because
they had to “re-enter" their time...again.
The problem is that people have a hard time finding the critical
path and focus on what is fun, interesting, or "easy".
In complex systems/projects, it can be challenging to determine
precisely what these tasks are. Making things more challenging is
the fact that as the project progresses, the task that is on the
critical path changes.
Data warehouse reporting was clearly not critical to implementing
the project but it was "neat". Venturing into this land
de-railed the entire project.
GROWINGCO: How did you fix it and what did you learn from it?
GORUP: We applied our own consulting advice to ourselves. Specifically,
we went back and identified the critical path elements of the software;
specifically, what is minimally needed to collect, report, and invoice
for our time. Once we had identified these key features, we also
confirmed a backup and recovery strategy so that we can restore
the application if we ever have a major issue again. It reinforced
the reason why we give the advise we do and that even the brightest
technologists need a plan and a process to be successful.
GROWINGCO: What is your advice for people designing business processes?
Do not buy, install, or set expectations based on the features
of a given technology. One should focus on the business process(es)
first, then apply the software to specifically meet/enhance these
processes. Technology can almost do anything, the question is NOT
what it COULD do; the question is what SHOULD it do.
GROWINGCO: In hindsight, how would you have done it differently?
GORUP: We thought we were above the law. We use the phrase the
"physics of application development" to point out that
there are absolutes and real science and process to technology implementations
(it is not just "art") and to project management in general.
Oftentimes budgets or time constraints make us think the short cuts
are better. We tried to "break the laws of technology physics"
- we tried to turn an ice cube (new software) into steam (finished
product), skipping the "water phase" – it does not
work.
CONTACT
Ben Bradley
Managing Director
GrowingCo, Inc.
ben @ growingco.com
Direct: 630-221-9844
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