Emerge Inc. Blog

Companies are always looking for the best way to deliver an excellent product while using less time and money to produce that product.  In order to save time and money while producing great results, companies that provide internet solutions and software are looking for the most efficient ways to develop these products.  On Thursday, Mike and I went to “The Path to Agility” conference which covered methodologies, structural changes, and tools that can be used to increase efficiency in that development process.

One of the focuses of the conference was a framework called Scrum.   Scrum was introduced in the 1990’s but hasn’t been widely implemented until recently. It is a framework designed to increase the speed, efficiency, and quality of project development while minimizing the cost and risk. This framework is vastly different than the traditional development frameworks. Scrum realizes that the development process is complicated and unpredictable and its focus is on flexibility and productivity over linear development. The project is broken down into smaller iterations known as sprints, where the team plans, builds, tests, reviews, then deploys after each sprint.  When a sprint is finished, the project is reviewed to see what adjustments need to be made which gives the project added flexibility.

Other than Scrum, the conference also covered topics such as agile testing, transferring the company to use agile, and ways to attract and hire agile developers.  I learned why some companies have not dedicated themselves to switching to the agile way, and what challenges exist in this transition. This conference also exposed me to a number of different practices and ideas being used throughout other companies.  When a company changes to agile, many areas of the company from management methods down to the production environment are altered in order to have a truly agile development process.  When viewing the results of companies that have made this change, it is apparent that the rewards far outweigh the risk.

On May 20th I had a chance to discuss ways to utilize the Internet in a more effective manner with the Women’s Business Owners Network. The environment was informal but that provided us an opportunity to discuss the topics that each member might have found interesting in more depth. We covered a variety of subjects including the use of Social Media such as Facebook and Twitter, Seach Engine Optimization, 10 ideas to think about when it comes to your website, and more.

The most impressive part was after the meeting and getting a chance to discuss some of the ideas of the group members more fully. One woman in particular had never thought of the idea of using a blog for her business, but saw some potential opportunity there. We discussed some different ideas to get started and how to try it out to see if it makes sense for her and her business.

I want to thank Karen Cheshire and the members of the WBON for inviting me out to speak with them.

We are excited to welcome 5 interns to the Emerge team for the summer. Ranging from a recent high school graduate to a recent college graduate, the new team members bring additional youth, energy and new perspectives on emerging technology.

During the summer, the interns will work in teams and focus on 10 summer projects. Each project has a written vision, scope, measurable goals and a definition of why the project is important both internally for Emerge and externally for the customers, constituents and stakeholders that will be involved.

We’ll share the details of each project over the next couple of months. In general, we’ve organized the internship the way I think it would be like to work in a lab. Each project is it’s own experiment, we think we know what will work and what won’t, but until we start testing, we won’t know for sure.