Best Financial Advisory Firm:
Independent advisory firm Koos Wealth Management, Inc. of Dublin topped global giant Morgan Stanley Smith Barney for his year’s Best of Business ranking.

K Studio Dance. Wordpress integrated website.

The website itself is a basic Word Press integration. We also added Face Book Like buttons on each page so her clients could easily give some “shout outs” from Face Book. On the first day the buttons were available, the site got 73 likes, increasing traffic from about 10 hits per day to over 100+ hits for the day the Like button functionality was launched. We are now working on some SEO loose ends to get the website more noticeable on search engines like Google and Youtube.

Fork Dorks

The site has also played a neat role as a test location for some new techniques. We used Word Press with a super basic template and rolled the site out over a weekend. Since then, we implemented some basic integration points with Flickr and Facebook. Anyway, I hope everyone enjoys the fruits of our labor.

This post used to link to an article in the Lantern, but they took the article down for some reason. Bummer, folks.

Tailgating, Ohio State Football

The brainchild website of the business, OSU Home Base underwent a new look. OSU Home Base is a website dedicated to our alumni group and Ohio State Football. The purpose is to serve as a general forum for old friends to stay connected and to meet new friends with common interests. I created this site as an undergrad student and during one of its many transformations, I got a lot of attention and a few job offers. I got enough offers, in fact, that I decided to go a little bigger and start my own business… and Home Base Web Solutions was born.

Title: How to juggle stakeholders, vendors, and integration for a housing system deployment.

Participants will: listen to the pros and cons of moving to a third party housing application from a home grown system.

Participants will: learn about some of the complex integration challenges between a third party application and internal systems such as other home grown mainframe applications, PeopleSoft, and BlackBoard.

Participants will: learn how to balance the difficult juggling act of managing stakeholder expectations with vendor and technical constraints.

This program will be an overview of Ohio State’s journey from using a home grown mainframe application to managing housing assignments with a third party system. We will briefly cover where we came from and what we are capable of doing today. Ohio State offers a unique perspective on some of the pros and cons of both a home grown application that has been customized over the past 30 years and also using a powerful third party application. The presentation will include hurdles we have overcome and challenges we continue to face including vendor management, stakeholder expectations, and some complex integration points with various university systems. We will also touch on the massive undertaking of migrating over 10,000 bed spaces from one system to another and how business processes and personnel have adjusted to a new way of doing things.

Presentation Outline: This presentation will be a standard Power Point delivery, with some comic relief to keep the audience engaged. Time permitting, we will have a brief question and answer session at the end.

• Overview of existing mainframe application
• Vendor selection method
• Benefits of and decision to move to StarRez
• Hurdles we overcame moving to StarRez
• Challenges we continue to face
• Vendor management
• Data integration management
  • PeopleSoft
  • BlackBoard
  • Mainframe Applications
• Meeting stakeholder’s expectations, including students

The old site can be seen here:

Old Site... in all her glory

The new site can be seen here:

Beautiful

Not much changed as far as text and content.  We did rearrange some of the linking structure to better categorize everything.  Home Base provided design services and also hosts the web and email for Amherst Vision Center.  We installed a Word Press driven site to provide some content management capabilities.

Baron Landscaping

Some of the toughest clients are family.  A major part of effective project management is defining your client’s expectations early in the project.  The problem with working for family is that there are always implied expectations that don’t always get put on paper.   You also usually work for a discount, if not for free, so motivation to work extra hours to get things done is pretty low.  Fortunately, my brother isn’t a computer geek like me.  The fact that he has a website at all gives him an edge on his competition so customer satisfaction was pretty easy to achieve.  I also know that those discounts and implied expectations are a two way street… so now I have the coolest landscaping on the block.

Check out Baron Landscaping and if you’re in North East Ohio and your yard needs help, call up ole’ Danny Boy and tell him Mike sent you.  I’m pretty sure you won’t get a discount, but you will make both of us happy.

MCF Solutions

To kick off the new website, Home Base would like to showcase one of our current projects.  We are working with Urban Fox Design on a complete web redesign for a dental equipment sales company.  One of our strategic initiatives this year is to incorporate industry standard project management methodologies and a formal software development life cyle into small web development projects.

I will be quick since this is our first post and I obviously have a lot more work to do on the website.  The idea behind the project management methodology is to take the Project Management framework used on Ohio State’s Student Life enterprise level projects and scale it to an appropriate level of management on smaller web app projects.  I just got my PMP in December 2008 so all of the knowledge areas and process groups are fresh on my mind.  When you’re a small company and you’re dealing with projects that require less than 50 man hours and maybe four resources, you don’t want to over-manage.  I think this is the dilemma many process oriented managers face in a small business environment.  With MCF, and with all of our current projects, we focus on the following:

• Set, Manage, and Meet client expectations
• Frequently communicate status and progress
• Keep metrics to improve future projects and processes

All three focus areas above are applied to the project management triple constraints, which I think are worth another set of bullets:

• Cost
• Scope
• Schedule

Clearly communicating how much a project is going to cost, when it is going to get done, and exactly what a client can expect their new website to do up front is a huge part of our process.   It is very difficult to define scope and come up with accurate estimates early in projects, especially when you’re working with a client who doesn’t really know what they want, but the more time you spend early on defining and documenting scope, the better.  It is much better to frustrate a client by telling them something can’t be done up front than it is to tell them it can be done, have them spend a bunch of money on you, and then fail to deliver.  It also just straight up sucks when you have vague requirements and then you can’t justify charging more for scope creep.  Before I really embraced implementing project management methodologies, that happened to me more often than I’d like to admit.

This ties into our SDLC.  Home Base follows sort of a modified RUP/Agile Software Development Life Cycle.  We go through several iterations similar to Agile, but each iteration follows RUP-like process. I think I will save the specifics for a dedicated post, but we try to break each project into smaller parts, and then have clear phases with phase gate meetings within each mini-cycle.   For example, the MCF project has a bunch of static content and several dynamically driven components.  The project is broken into the following cycles:

1. Graphic Design – Site Template and Static Content
2. Admin Framework
3. Slide Show, events, contact us (dynamic content)
4. Case Studies

Each cycle essentially passes through requirements elicitation, design, development, quality assurance, and release to production.  I have fancy names for these phases, but I’ll save them for the longer post with plenty of pictures and diagrams.    In any case, we spend a lot of time on requirements and once Mark at MCF approves them, each cycle will enter development phase.   Progress can be monitored at http://dev.mcf-solutions.com.  The caveat is that there are no promises that anything in development will actually work. It’s my playground, and I can do what I want in there, damn it!

When I think I’m done with development for a cycle, I copy everything to QA at http://qa.mcf-solutions.com.  At Home Base, the lovely Brittany Baron will hopefully agree to be  our Quality Analyst.   Once she finds all of my major bugs (and I fix them), we ask the client to review and approve that the QA version of the site matches what they asked for in their requirements.  THIS IS IMPORTANT!! At this point, I often have clients say things like, “well I kind of thought the site should do this and not that.”  That’s great, and we can accomodate, but if we had good requirements and we can basically check off that the site meets them, these new requests equal change requests that we can charge for.  Not that I’m looking for new and improved ways to make money.  The later you make changes in a project, the bigger the impact.  I also don’t enjoy working for free.  Communicating this part of the puzzle up front usually causes clients to think a littly harder when coming up with their requirements.  Then I come closer to getting what they want the first time around, so they get their site done sooner and cheaper and everybody is happy!  If they really want to implement those changes, we can start the cycle over or decide to postpone changes for later.

If the client approves of what is in QA, we simply copy straight to production.

And that’s it!  Somehow I just wrapped up the process I’ve been thinking about for years in a nutshell! With MCF, the design cycle is currently moving from dev to QA.  While Brittany, Mark from MCF, and George from Urban Fox nit pick all of my minor design flaws, I am going to start work on filling in some of the admin framework in dev.  Hopefully this article gives some insight into our process.  I look forward to updating here as much as I can.