I’ve been doing software developing for 8 years now, and the reason I want to be in this industry is as simple as I love it. So, I enjoy my every single working day, and amazingly I never miss any deadlines for all my 31 projects throughout the 8 years. Early this year, I was promoted to the role of CTO, and then I have to do a lot of management work. To be honest, I really miss the days when I only need to concentrate on coding.

Bizroof platform is the first project I am in charge of after my promotion. We’ve got 8 people working on it full time, including 3 PHP developers, 2 javascript developers, 1 graphic designer, 1content writer and myself (project manager). Initially, I did write a project plan which states deadlines for each phase with time tolerance. Also, we’ve got daily and weekly meetings to help us understand our positions. There is no doubt that all those project management stuff helps to maintain a decent delivery speed. However, it makes most team members focusing on delivery with less creative ideas, and people get bored quite easily. So, I recently stopped using the initial plan and told my team members that they ONLY need to deliver stuff when they are comfortable with it. Also, we measure their performance based on quality rather than quantity.

Project management is all about managing exceptions. In another word, the project manager’s job is to try the best to help others solve their problems and to make your team members enjoy their work, and then your members will build their confidence and ready to contribute.

Events, from the software perspective, are business activities associated with the contacts in your network. It ranges widely from lunch meetings with your clients to your coleauges’ birthday parties. However, the nature of events is simple as they always consist of a summary (What), time and duration (When), location (Where), and a guest list (Who). This simplicity just forms the basis of the event management solutions, such as Google Calendar, Highrise and Bizroof.

But, simplicity is not enough in this modern world. We need it to be functional as well. If you grab a cell phone and click through its menu, you most likely to see features like digital camara, alarm, web browser etc. Some people blame the manufactures putting too much functions they never use onto a simply phone. In fact, I am one of them. But, when they pop into a shop to buy a new phone, they always ask questions the quality of its digital camara… Ridiculous? Nope, that is just a common sense of the value of money. If we buy somthing, we try to get as many as they can, and we tell ourselves that we may need them
in the future.

Both simple and functional are equally important. Therefore, the information flow within the application need to be well designed with an objective to provide best user experience. As known to all application developers, AJAX can not only help to simulate desktop-like look-n-feel but reduce the page loading time dramatically by refreshing only updated sections as well. It is a perfect solution for filerting events options, inline editing events and live search. The paragraph below descripbs a simple test and results of AJAX.

Both my coleauge and I are given a same list of tasks (e.g. create new contacts, add new events etc) to do on bizroof. My browser has javascript disabled (i.e. AJAX disabled) while his not. He finished all the tasks in 14 mins while spent 6 mins extra.

Take data sharing into consideration, softwares should be able to talk to each other, not necessarily need to synchronize. We use RSS, RTF, microformats (vcard, hcalendar, etc) to allow data easily shared with MS Outlook, google calendar, iCalendar, Address Book etc.

Our team started developing bizroof platform 20 days ago, and currently working on the dashboard and address book modules. The dashboard is a place where you can see what is happening in your business and what’s your colleagues working on. Also – we provide the RSS feed facility, which allow you to easily keep up with the latest activities. The address book module is MAC address book style and compatible with all major contact management softwares, including MS outlook, Gmail contacts and more. With this module, you can create notes and related events (tasks, meetings, projects, etc) on a per contact basis and linked the contacts either by company names or tags.

We aim to deliver a simply and functional web-based business management tool which helps you to build your customer-centric and cost-effective business strategy.

I will keep updating our development news. (The estimated beta launch date is 31st July 2008)

Screenshots available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/bizroof/