June 1, 2007
Aplicor Organizational Framework
I had a welcome day today and want to share its enjoyment and relevance with our customers. A few months ago a business colleague nominated Aplicor for the annual Good to Great awards. This award is of course based on the best selling business book by Jim Collins. I’ve been a fan of Jim Collins for about six years and have modeled several of the Good to Great principals into the Aplicor framework. As I’m always interested in how my customers, vendors and business partners frame their business models, I’ll use this post to share how Aplicor does the same by incorporating several of the Good to Great principals.
The first principal is leadership, or more specifically level 5 leadership. As CEO of this company, I have two very unusual and powerful leadership benefits. First, I’ve had the privilege of acting as CEO for three prior successful software technology companies and this prior experience seems to provide dividends in dealing with the leadership issues that arise daily. More importantly, I’ve been able to surround myself with an executive team of three level 5 leaders. Seldom do companies achieve even one level 5 leader, and I have the luxury of dealing with Mark Wakelin, Pete Koltis and David Anbari – all of whom demonstrate the level 5 leadership characteristics of personal humility and an uncompromising will to succeed on a daily basis. What does this mean to our clients and partners? In part it means that the Aplicor executive team will do whatever it takes to achieve our goals. We don’t approach our goals and client commitments with a lackadaisical or half-hearted demeanor. We approach them with 100% confidence that they will get done and we persevere until they do.
The second Good to Great principal we endorse is getting the right people on the bus – and getting the wrong people off the bus. This of course is easier said than done. Our customers have come to learn they we work some long hours and some crazy hours when confronted with problems or facing deadlines – a schedule which doesn’t work with many. Through a program of rigid recruiting and retention programs, and a whole lot of luck, we’ve been fortunate thus far to have a disproportionately high number of A players on the team. Nowhere is this more evident than with our DEV staff. For most software development companies, software developers pose the greatest HR and work force challenges. For us, they are the role models for the rest of the company in terms of making tireless and endless contributions without expectations of glory.
The third and final principal I’ll share in this post is our hedgehog focus. For whatever reason, I normally call this our trifecta focal point. Doing what we are good at will only make us a good company (maybe acceptable to some). Focusing solely on something we do better than any other organization can make us a great company. We’ve pinned our futures on allocating all resources to an arena where we can potentially be the best – and that is the delivery of enterprise-wide SaaS business systems for midmarket and enterprise organizations. Again, what does this mean to our customers? If means you can expect us to apply 100% of our continued efforts to our flagship product suite – and you can similarly assume that we will not be investing time or money into non-related ventures. No creation of a proprietary development platform, no complex combinations of product suite combinations and no partnership to resell Google adwords. About two months ago, a Good to Great evaluation committee spent time with us at our Boca Raton office. We really enjoyed it as their pointed questions forced us to rethink some of our positions. Well I guess the meeting went well as on May 1st, we were named a Finalist in the Good to Great awards. To really cap it off, we were named the Winner today at a fancy smancy event at The Biltmore in front of about 1000 business folks. Two other winners in other categories were Carnival Cruise Lines and Royal Caribbean. I didn’t expect to win so I had no acceptance speech in mind. Looking back I’m sure I rambled on the stage. Oh well. My point in this post is not to boast but to help our customers and partners understand a few of our steadfast guiding principles so that they can better recognize the provider behind their application software system. Like to share your organizational framework? I’d like to hear it.
Technorati: crm, customer relationship management
Del.icio.us: crm
View CC license
Posted by Chuck Schaeffer on June 1, 2007 in Organizational Framework
Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Congrats to you on your award, however, I've read the Good to Great book and although I think it is a great book I don't see how it aides a software manufacturing company in producing quality software.
Posted by Tom Foristell on July 11, 2007
Aplicor and CMMI Software Manufacturing Framework
Aplicor uses the Good to Great framework as an organizational framework - effectively to ground and guide our leadership team, vision, strategy, go to market (GTM) objectives, hedgehog concept, economic engine and disciplined culture.
The process of consistently producing high quality software requires a more technical discipline and we actually rely on two technical frameworks - the Microsoft Development Framework and version 1.2 of the Capability Maturity Model (CMMI). We of course utilize the MS Framework as we develop in .NET (C#) and take extreme advantage of the SQL stack. From a broader SDLC (software development life cycle) perspective we leverage the CMMI process model as it is designed to plan, measure and continuously improve software engineering and related disciplines. If you're familiar with CMMI, we actually subscribe to SW-CMM (Capability Maturity Model for Software), SE-CMM (Systems Engineering Capability Maturity Model) and IPD-CMM (Integrated Product Development Capability Maturity Model). Our macro level CMMI process model is visually illustrated below.
As you can imagine, these development frameworks can get pretty deep. I hesitate to go into too much detail in a blog post, however, I am happy to respond (via blog or email) to any particular questions.
To complete the discussion of company methodologies, we also heavily leverage Six Sigma for our QA process (unit testing, regression testing, defect tracking, etc. ) as well as ISO 27001 and NIST C&A for data center operations, information security and disaster recovery/business continuity. We're audited and certified annually for both the ISO and NIST standards. I'm of course happy to expand on any of these topics on request. Hope that helps put the Good to Great utilization in perspective.
Posted by Chuck Schaeffer on July 12, 2007
Trackback
Trackback URL for this entry: http://www.aplicor.com/blog/070601.htm
Comments
Comments are moderated and will not appear on this weblog until approved.
|
