Monsoon is looking for a project manager with the chops to join our team.  We need someone with the talent, hustle, and experience to manage projects ranging in budget from 50 thousand to over a million dollars.  Many of these two month to two year projects often require the management of a distributed team of designers and developers.

(more…)

After years of using red carpet metaphors, we finally made it to the red carpet. Well sort of. Monsoon partnered with Motion Picture Television Fund and Variety Magazine to create the official touch-trivia application for the Oscars. We are totally psyched about launching this at the Oscars this weekend!

The application lets you spin a virtual orb and answer Oscar worthy trivia questions. HP will be giving away trivia participants some amazing prizes including TV’s, laptops, cameras and free Oscar morning kits.

And while the blue Pandorians may end up mourning their loss to The Hurt Locker, we’ll be celebrating…..because at the end of the day, it’s not really about who took the Oscar home, it’s about which consulting firm made it to the red carpet!

Special thanks to Kevin and John for helping with the install and sharing this video!

At Monsoon, we may never be able to rap like the pantless knights but, we still like to think of ourselves as hardcore apple fanboys. We own 3 generations of every Apple product, camp overnight for new product launches and celebrate popcorn-hour each time Steve Jobs gives his keynote.

With every piece of digital loveliness made by Apple, being a part of this brand and culture fits right into our techno-chic lifestyle and gives us endless gratification. But the ultimate high for us is to see our work on Apple products. We’ve been developing applications for the iPhone for quite some time but we recently had the opportunity to work on an app with another one of our favorite partners, South By Southwest. SXSW brings together some of the world’s most creative artists, speakers and entrepreneurs and my business partner Sandeep has previously had the opportunity to captivate audiences with interactive panels on Outsourcing.

There is no other conference that fosters creative growth and networking opportunities the way South by does. Which is why we’re so excited to announce SXSW® Play, the official media discovery app for the SXSW 2010 Music, Film, and Interactive conferences. The app features a wealth of rich media from musicians, films, and interactive panels that will be featured at the festival in Austin, TX from March 12-21. With this app at your fingertips, you’ll never be bored in line again!

Features of the application:

You can download the free application from the Appstore and find out if you’re an Apple fanboy here.

“Experts say this global warming is serious, and they are predicting now that by the year 2050, we will be out of party ice.” –David Letterman

Jokes about climate change may not always garner lasting belly aches, but let’s face it, they tend to be more captivating then scatter diagrams and pie charts. So when the UN decided to collaborate with Monsoon for COP, we wanted to build an application that would be fun and interactive; something even Al Gore would appreciate.

We wanted to leverage the power of touch technology to ensure negotiators and leaders participating in Copenhagen heard voices of those affected by the impacts of global warming. We worked with the UN to create the Climate Wall, an experience that allowed conference attendees to spin a virtual globe and watch real-life stories about climate change.

Sights and sounds from around the globe bear witness to how the changing climate is changing lives. One of these stories takes us on a virtual journey to the Prey Koki forest, located in a quiet corner of eastern Cambodia. The forest has lost most of its cover to desertification and while planting trees, Buddhist monk So Kon shares the impacts of climate change . “Here in Cambodia our climate is changing. It’s getting hotter and the rainfall is irregular. But we believe that these trees can bring rain and help the farmers with their crops and daily life,” says Kon.

In an era where buzzwords like Corporate Social Responsibility and CO2 emissions make climate change feel like a distant paradigm, Monsoon’s virtual globe application brings stories from real people like Kon to your fingertips.

The concept was a success and featured on the home of Seal the deal and the UN. We simply feel blessed that we had the opportunity to make a small contribution in raising awareness about climate change.

See more pictures here.

You could listen to Gary Vaynerchuk:

Too many people don’t want to swallow the pill of working every day, every chance they get.

I hate to disappoint here, but if you’re looking for an easier time here, you’re barking up the wrong tree. There might be a little flexibility to your day should you be at liberty to devote yourself full-time to building your personal brand, but otherwise, assuming you’re doing this right, you’ll be bleeding out of your eyeballs at your computer.

- Gary Vaynerchuk “Crush It”

Or you could listen to Tim Ferriss:

Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.  The options are almost limitless for creating “busyness”.

Believe it or not, it is not only possible to accomplish more by doing less, it is mandatory.  Enter the world of elimination.

- Tim Ferriss, “The Four Hour Work Week”

Both books are inspiring in their own way, and I suspect the answer is somewhere in between.

Happy Friday.

I’ve been realizing lately that it might be time to button up our company, if only just a bit.

Like many of our small devteam peers, Monsoon’s philosophy has long been influenced by ultra-agile companies like 37Signals and their Getting Real approach to design and development (these dudes are the closest things I have to heros in our business). Our clients usually find this approach deeply refreshing, especially when they have been served a steady diet of bullshit deliverables and even-more-bullshit invoices from large consulting companies.

However, I’ve been noticing lately that our scrappy, informal approach to design and development requires a level of trust and diligent communication that, while totally doable, is often just not as practical as a slightly more formal approach.

Let me be clear.  Agile development and Getting Real are a way of life at Monsoon.  They are ingrained in our daily processes and general approach to strategic consulting; and we have no intention of changing that core approach.

However, I am beginning to appreciate the value of deliverables such as well-executed Omnigraffle flows, simple information architecture diagrams, and even comprehensive application wireframes (300 page scope documents are purposely left out of this list).  We know how to build this stuff – most of us have bigco backgrounds, after all.  And, we have always built these when required (usually by larger clients), but now I’m beginning to realize, that in some cases, the effort required to produce these deliverables may simply be more efficient.

This is part of a larger acceptance that we are, regardless of our attitude & size, a consulting firm.  The Getting Real approach works best with 2 – 3 guys in the same room, on the same payroll, and with the same general mindset & understanding of technology.

In our case, we have a global team and an external client – this requires nuances to the process that have not yet been documented or championed, as far as I know.

So, we are gong to slowly bring a few of the [ironic drumroll please] Pillars of the Consulting Process back into our work.   This is not an admission that the Getting Real approach or agile development is flawed; rather, it is part of our learning process.  We are better integrating these models into consulting work, which seems to require that these approaches be tweaked, if only slightly.

Don’t worry – we’re not going Infosys on you, I promise.

At some point during a challenging project, you inevitably find out if your project manager actually cares – could be during a looming deadline, a malware attack, or just an intense phase of development.

If you’re working with an offshore team, the distance doesn’t make your team leader’s concern (or lack thereof) easier to fake.  You’ll know if she cares – it’s unmistakeable.

Leaders who don’t care hide behind contracts, jump too quickly to “that’s impossible”, or question (inappropriately) business need.

You can increase your chances of success immeasurably by finding out how much your project manager cares before you hit that first fire drill.

One way to figure this out: create an intense deadline early, before the project is anywhere near its critical phase.  In most cases, you’ll learn something about the character of your team.

I’ll be speaking on a panel held by Stanford professors Richard Dasher for his course “Technology Strategies in Asia Business” on October 1st.

The panel is titled “Managing outsourced R&D in India”, and I’m excited to be joined by Avinash Agrawal (Sun/Stanford) and Bill Ihrie (Intuit).

The class is open to the public – here’s what I know so far:

October 1, 4:15 – 5pm

I’ll update the exact location as soon as I have it.

I’m thinking about rocking my Jahvid Best jersey to the panel. Go Bears.

This is the first post in a series about the advantages of global collaboration (beyond the obvious cost advantage):

A few years ago, I coined the following statement to encapsulate one of the many things I love about virtual work:

You work. They sleep. Reverse. Repeat.

When global teams work efficiently, they can move with a speed that is impossible for a single-office team to match, no matter how much Blue Bottle coffee is involved.   After cost, it is the single biggest advantage of global work.

Yet, for the past decade, most literature on global collaboration has focused on the negative aspects of 24-hour work cycles.  The party line has been that time zones are a handicap we must overcome, and global teams will always struggle to manage communication, iterate quickly, handle disconnects, and clarify scope.

This is with good reason.  Few global firms have reached a level of efficiency where they reap the advantages of 24-hour work cycles.  Inevitably, the baton is  fumbled, dropped, and stabbed into the hearts of unwitting customers.

Passing the baton is a discipline and an art form.  It is what separates talented teams from stellar performers.  It is a ninja-level skill, and after 10 years, many teams are beginning to show us what is possible when the baton is passed smoothly, day ‘n’ nite.

Because of how important the baton-passing process is, my statement actually needs to be revised:

You work. They sleep.  Everyone talks.  Reverse. Repeat.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be demonstrating how Monsoon handles baton-passing for design and development.  

(more…)

In a few weeks, four of our best developers will be leaving their offices in India and traveling to a client’s headquarters to do some development work.  It’s a simple thing that happens every day, everywhere.

It’s called consulting.

Which is why it hit me like a ton of bricks when I was reminded, by a well-intentioned friend, what this is called when an Indian company does it.

“Oh right, body shopping.”

It doesn’t matter whether your team has worked on high-profile projects and gained valuable, specialized experience in their niche.  If they come from a third-world country, you’re just shopping bodies.

A few decades ago, Y2K fears lead to the employment of hundreds of Indian programmers at Western companies.  It’s easy to understand how our terminology for global work evolved during this time.  Indian salaries were a low fraction of Western pay; and Indian companies lacked the wherewithal to challenge Western thought on their fledgling industry.

But why have these terms stuck?

These words were never fair definitions.  Yet even if you assume they were justified, our industry has evolved far beyond the days of searching for 2-digit date fields.  Indian companies handle critical business processes and lead R&D efforts for the Fortune 100 set.  So why do we allow the persistence of outdated terminology that cheapens our profession?

Are we waiting for Thomas Friedman to write another book?