I sent out a survey that is devoted to improving my service to you!
Based on respondents’ input, I’ll able to address your REAL needs, and together we can create projects, that you can be proud of and your customer grateful for.
If you would like to be one of the respondents and throw your voice into the project management arena, you can access the survey here
Not only can you make your voice count, you’ll also be able to attend a project management training built on the survey findings and offered free to the respondents. Let’s create valuable training together.
About project management, leadership, and Point Man System. Insights into a way of getting things done on time, within budget, scope, and…with a confidence and a peace of mind.
by CK Lin, Director of CoGi (Convergence of Global Innovators) and Tony Wong, founder of Digital Onion
Thursday the 9th of April. This is a day to remember.
For the first time in as long as I can remember, I put enjoyment, satisfaction, happiness ahead of money and business. A business partner and I had a significant amount of money on the table from a new client and we chose not to take it!
Given the circumstances (one of the senior managers of this new client warned us to “cover your ass in your contract” and “this is going to be very difficult for you.”), we turned down the project. Whew! In the midst of running on the ‘hamster wheel,’ my partner and I had just the briefest of window of clarity. And in that tiny, tiny space of clarity, we woke up and said “wait! Is this really what we want?”
That’s all it took for us to take a step back and say to ourselves, this is a really bad situation and it’s not going to be good for neither our new client nor us. We thought, “wow, what did we just almost do to ourselves? That was close! We almost threw ourselves into a situation where we would sacrifice our own personal well being along with our client’s.” That like a lifeguard jumping into the water to save a panicked swimmer that’s going to drown them both!
All of a sudden, I feel much better. I feel alive again. I feel like I actually can influence the direction of my life instead of just having the past repeat itself.
Anyway, just wanted to share with those that might read this.
It’s Tuesday the 7th of April. I realized that I enjoy work when I’m doing the work that I enjoy.
I know a big duh but I’m a human being and humans often do not see what’s right in front of them. The work I enjoy is teaching, writing and moving the discipline of Software Development Leadership forward. And a lot of the time- ok, most of the time, I’m not doing that. I’m doing the things that make me money.
Today was shaping out to be one of those days… you know, one of those days where you think to yourself, ‘What the hell I am I doing with my life? Why am I in this business? This sucks…’ But then I had a great conversation with an Information Marketer who’s going to help get my Info Biz off the ground. I went into that meeting beaten down and discouraged from interacting with… well, challenging situations.
But during this meeting with the Information Marketer, I came alive and thought to myself WOW, I actually am happy and feel alive when… I’M DOING THE THINGS THAT I LIKE TO DO!! (duh).
For me at least, these realizations are BIG. Not necessarily big in terms of me knowing that I’m happy when I’m doing the things that make me happy but me actually experiencing it.
And not only experiencing it but actually causing it to happen. I understood that I actually dragged myself into a meeting that I could have easily canceled or re-scheduled because ‘I wasn’t feeling well’ or made some other excuse. But I didn’t.
“I” (you know that other “I” that’s in you… well, that’s another conversation) knew that I had to go do something that was going to make me happy. And the “me” inside me reluctantly went along.
And look what happened! I’m back writing and feeling good. Such a duh.
Digital Onion is looking for tenants to share our exclusive beachfront office property in the popular Marina Del Rey/Venice Beach area. We have up to 5 desks for rent in a shared space.
For only $850 a month, you get a desk, all utilities paid, cleaning staff, full kitchen, bathroom, conference room for meeting with clients and access to 10 great restaurants and bars surrounding us.
And a clear view of the pacific ocean every day! Street parking is available plus there’s a large public parking lot for just a few dollars per day.
This space RARELY comes up for lease! So don’t wait or someone will beat you to it! Email us at tony.wong@digitalonioninc.com for further details.
I’ve been in professional services for… a long time. It’s been 15 years. And for much of that time, I’d say for the first 12 years or so, “services” wasn’t inspiring. In fact, it was just the opposite. It was deadening.
Speaking for myself and those that I’ve had direct contact with in the professional services industry, “deadening” is a typical experience of the professional services industry. Many of us go home on a Monday evening, almost too tired to do anything else. Then by Friday evening, we’re for sure too tired to do anything but sit on a couch or go to sleep. And so to say that work for us wasn’t inspiring is an understatement.
It wasn’t because of the work itself was boring, simple or just not exciting. I’ve worked on the best of the best. I’ve worked for the best consultancies in town on the most high-profile and coveted projects. The teams I’ve worked with were the best in the industry. The clients themselves were also top notch. So it wasn’t the work. It wasn’t the people. But it was the inherent point of view of services that kills. And that point of view is “get it done on time,” “get it done under budget,” “do more,” “make the client happy,” “just get it done” and most importantly, “make it more profitable!” How inspiring is that? Well for some it may be inspiring but for most is wasn’t. What it felt like is… running on a hamster wheel. Faster, faster, faster. More, more, more.
Now here’s the ironic thing. The industry is called Professional Services. And so we’re supposed to be professionals in providing service. But the point of view I just described produced everything BUT true service or Being of Service.
What I’ve written here is not news to anyone within the industry. But this may be- if you actually be of service, it can be inspiring. Let me give you an example.
This past week, I offered our services to a trusted and valued client (that could no longer afford to pay for our services) for free. Actually, within the past 2 weeks, I’ve done this 3 times. You may be asking “why?” Or in the words of one of the clients that got this offer, “Thanks for the offer – out of curiosity, what’s the rationale?” Well, like I told this client, it was because I still see the opportunity to still be of help (service) and I wasn’t going to let the fact that they didn’t have money to pay us stand in the way. It’s funny. This economic downturn has created an opening, an opportunity to truly be of service. It awakened me to what’s really inspiring about this industry- which is being of help to others. And I’m grateful that the economic downturn reminded me of this. And I’m grateful that our services have been so beneficial to our clients- so much so that I’m willing to continue working for those clients that have been so good to us during the good times whether or not they can pay for us in the bad times.
This model of free services isn’t scalable or sustainable but I’ll do it as long as we can and as long as it continues to inspire us.
I attended a CEOFlow/Nitro.la CEO gathering last Friday at Fina Ventures in Santa Monica, CA. During our conversation, several CEO’s expressed interest in my personal life mission and how I created my company around that mission. So I just emailed them several docs which included My Personal Life Mission. Since they were interested in reading it, I thought others might be interested too. So here it is:
Like everyone I want my life to count. I want my life to be useful. I want my life to have purpose.
Somewhere through my career working on large, high-profile, Fortune 100 software projects, I realized that my work wasn’t contributing to other people’s lives. It wasn’t useful and it definitely didn’t provide me a sense of purpose in life. And so like everyone else, I began my search for “what I wanted to do with my life.”
Luckily, I soon found an answer. Not just any answer but an answer that had longevity; an answer that I was sure was the answer. Through years of asking the question, “What do I want to do with my life?” and getting the same answer back, I made a life commitment. I took a stand for what I was going to do with my life. I made a commitment to Create a World
that Works.
From there, I set out to structure all aspects of my life around this mission. For American men, one of the most critical aspects of our lives is our work (because we typically connect our identity and even our value as a human to our work). So I made sure my job reflected this. And for me, the best way to do this was to create my own company around my mission. My company mission reads, “Lead the industry with project management systems that produce extraordinary teams that produce extraordinary results.” It’s from here that my company
was created.
For us, it’s about transforming how people and teams work together. By transforming the way they do business and how they interact with each other, we see that we can ultimately change how we interact with each other in all areas of our lives. We see the possibility of a world that works. A world where people simply keep their agreements, take responsibility for their own actions and are accountable to each other. Can you imagine a world like that? It may not be world peace, but it’d be damn close. It’d be… wow, just extraordinary.
We can see that this can all work. We can achieve great things if we all work together and believe it can be done. We can do this effortlessly without the back stabbing, politics, second-guessing, domination, manipulation. It can be joyful, effortless and ultimately fulfilling in knowing that you are creating a new reality – a reality where the world fulfills its potential to be fully functioning, people working together to achieve extraordinary things. A World that Works- the way we always knew it could.
And so this is worth it to me. This is worth dedicating my life doing.
A client of ours put it best when she said,
“The principles and philosophies Digital Onion imbues are unique. They definitely like to remember that life is to be enjoyed. They want to make project management better to make
I write this piece as I think about the similarities between the Green Environmental movement and what’s happening in the US and Global economies. I don’t believe in coincidences so I though there must be a connection and I found that there is.
The following is what I see happening not only in our physical environment but also in our economic environment. In fact, it’s happening all around us because the cause of these things comes from the same place – our individual and collective thoughts.
We must recognize that who we have been, especially as Americans, has created the world around us.
Is it a coincidence that our environment is suffering to the extent that it is – with the air, land and sea in the state that it is AND simultaneously, we are all suffering through the greatest economic tragedy since The Great Depression? NO.
I don’t believe in coincidences of this magnitude. Why? Because I see the same modalities; the same mindsets that led us to do the things that we did – dump trash and toxic waste into our oceans, spew dirt, chemicals and smoke into our atmosphere so recklessly that it created a hole in the ozone as large as the Asian continent are the same ones that led us to overspend, overextend our finances and to create the oppressive, dominating, greed producing business organizations that eventually led us to our current financial demise.
What we have now is an individual, societal and business disaster! This disaster is at all levels and all facets of who we are as humans on this planet called earth. And we’ve created it for ourselves. There’s no one to blame except us humans.
Our greed, our unnatural, forced ways of being. Our modalities of excess where nothing is ever enough. Our ego, our desires, our attachments to material goods all led us to where we are today. In Zen Buddhism, we refer to this as the Hungry Ghost- an emaciated creature with an extended belly that is packed full of desires, attachments, power, greed etc.
Now the ironic part of all this, is that many of us are finding that we sought after those materialistic, ego-centric things in the pursuit of achieving the what we really wanted – camaraderie, community, friendship, space, clarity, peace, happiness, satisfaction, fulfillment, love, joy, aliveness.
We somehow misguidedly thought that those things – the hamster wheel running and buying, buying, buying and getting more status, a better job, a bigger title etc.- would somehow get us the things that we really want. But in reality, doing those things have nothing to do with camaraderie, community, friendship, space, clarity, peace, happiness, satisfaction, fulfillment, love, joy, aliveness.
I often use this analogy in consulting with my clients. It’s as if you’re trying to stop the water from filling up a leaky boat by plugging all the leaks while ignoring the fact that you have a crazy shipmate with a pickaxe punching more holes in the bottom of the boat that you can never plug up. The point to my clients is that stopping leaks is… stopping leaks.
Leaks are often just the symptoms of a disease. You gotta get to the root cause aka disease if you’re gonna really find a solution.
With our thoughts, we create our world. – the Buddha
These famous and impactful words came from Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 during the country’s biggest financial crisis in history. Today, his words have even more meaning than ever before.
Skip ahead 76 years and our nation is feeling that same fear all over again. We’re fearful for our jobs, our well-being, the unknown.
Fear is also a common theme in business. Have you ever felt blocked on your projects? Unable to move forward in your job? For most people, what’s standing in their way is FEAR. Fear of failure. Fear of looking bad. Fear of looking like they don’t know what they’re doing.
AND, the more people focus on this fear, the more it paralyzes them. While it is important to be aware of the realities around us, we can’t let them be the driving factors of our actions. You must focus on where you want to go, not what could go wrong along the way.
This is is where true leadership comes into play. You’ve got to do what others are unwilling to do. Not unable, but unwilling to do. And you will need courage for this, because it may not just be a scary place, it’s a place you’ve never been.
Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of ‘you can’t’ once and for all.” - Vincent Van Gogh, October 1884
Go forward this day, this week and this month with courage in your heart, and be willing to take on the impossible. Remember, ‘you can’.
Last night’s Bootstrapping an Agile Team event was a great success with huge community turnout and engaging presentations by Christophe Louvion (Gorilla Nation), Scott Downey (MySpace) and George Shiltz (Big Visible). Event brainchild Amanda Ablelove described moderator Tony Wong as “a rockstar…he kept everyone in check and the audience involved, with a fine hand on reality.”
The presentations all shared a common thread and exposed the hard cold truth of projects: sometimes Scrum Fails.
AND, it can be HUGELY successful. Each presenter went on to give his opinion on how successful projects are won. Christophe placed emphasis on tracking metrics. Scott’s belief lay in the importance of goal setting. And George reminded us not to discount the amount of effort that needs to be exerted on change management.
Digital Onion recently published a real world one-pager on just this topic. Our answer to producing successful projects? LEADERSHIP. Read more over at our Case Studies or download the one-pager.
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We’ll leave you with this promo video from the event last night – Scrum Club’s first ever scrum-produced video. Enjoy!
