October 09, 2008

When The Going Gets Tough...

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As a kid when I learned how to play basketball, my coach would also have us do 'suicide' drills at the end of practice. Those typically were windsprints up and down the basketball court where you touch the free throw line, go back to the out-of-bounds line, touch center court line, then run back to the out-of-bounds line, touch the other free throw line, go back, and touch the opposite foul line, then go back, then the full court and back. Sometimes he would throw in sprints up and down our high school stairwells.

Needless to say, we were quite exhausted at the end of it. Before he'd send us to the lockers, he'd have us practice free throws. One would ask why would he take a technique-heavy part of the game and leave it to the end of practice when we were completely spent?

Looking back, I realize that what the coach was trying to do was get us to emulate gameday conditions. When you're running up and down court -- particularly against a tough team that may be ahead -- you've got lactic acid buildup, your adrenaline may be causing your heart to race and your concentration levels tend to be less than ideal. As it turns out, the extra foul shots made -- 'free throws' -- may be those few points that make the difference between a win and a loss that day.

Concurrently to my passion for basketball, I also had the opportunity to study classical piano at Mannes School of Music (preparatory division). Other than football or boxing, there probably is not a worse sport to play for a pianist than basketball, where jammed fingers are commonplace. However, like many kids, I figured I could do it all.

When one wishes to play piano, having a musical 'ear' is not quite enough. There are hours of technique work that must be accomplished over many years -- decades, in fact -- to be able to play virtuosically. Scales of all sorts, Hanon exercises transposed to all keys, Chopin Etudes, and many more such tasks. At the end of it all, technique and preparation must only serve the inspired pianist on performance day. Like basketball, or other sports, there are many distractions on the day of a performance that the pianist must overcome. Technique is the foundation that the accomplished musican can rest upon to show greatness on the stage.

In sports as in the Arts (music, theatre, fine Arts, etc), the 'performer' knows that technique and discipline are the foundations of their craft from which they build using their talent and creativity.

Having had the opportunity to play music and sports in my life, I determined years ago to apply the approach to my professional career in technology. When I founded DPCI in 1999, I observed at the time how many technology companies were starting up with flimsy business plans, no fiscal disciplines, no operational protocols, and seemingly endless supplies of money coming from heaven knows where. I chose to sidestep that approach entirely.

While I had learned some valuable techniques in project management and had ideas about multichannel content solutions, I had never had any formal training in running a business. During the first few years of DPCI I found myself preoccupied with building airtight, repeatable operational protocols that staff would use to collaborate for the benefit of our customers. For instance, my core team and I built a timesheet database that was integrated with Microsoft Project, which we then integrated that with our expense management, our project logging, QA, and so forth.

We also documented an operational guidebook for all aspects of the business. This included 'fulfillment' or project work we performed for our customers, as well as HR, finance, IT, and so forth. Those protocol 'fieldbooks' are living and breathing, being constantly enhanced and amended based on our continued experiences as a group running a company that serves the content technology needs of our customers.

I wasn't ever thinking that the company was going to be some huge, multinational concern, but the excesses of the day that I saw back in 1999 with other companies drove me harder toward focusing on operational excellence. In essence, what I was concerned with at the get-go was that any staffer that joined our company would have the tools and documentation needed that described DPCI's technique for implementing content management solutions. We then set out to hire top-educated, well-certified developers to join the team. We've gotten great results with this approach, so I stand by it nine and a half years later as one of the greater achievements of my career.

The reason I'm writing about this today is that -- like most people -- I have had an emotional response to what is going on in the marketplace. I see the undisciplined excesses of businesses, of government, and of individuals, and it saddens me that this is the way people and institutions tend to conduct themselves. I've always felt that self-discipline, constant attention to technique, and continual development of the rules of engagement for teams to work together, would help me and my colleagues get the best results in life.

While we watch the maelstrom about us, DPCI is operating as efficiently as ever -- moreso in some ways since we made some additional hires in the last few months with Sam Wilson, our new Director of Operations, as well as Vanna Sann, a talented and capable Project Coordinator. We also brought on a young fellow named Adam Kriesberg, a recent graduate from Brown University (my alma mater), to help Tracy Gardner, our VP of client services, run our program management office. And I also brought on Yael Maxwell as a young and highly detail-oriented office administrator to help continue to tighten our protocols and chase out any variance and root out wasteful processes and expenditures.

Our workload is healthy and we expect it to remain so. I've always been very conservative with budgeting, and -- as many customers know -- I bootstrapped DPCI, opting not to take any loans out nor rely on any line of credit. In essence, while I probably could have grown DPCI to a much larger company, I chose to grow it steady, organically, so that it would be self-sustaining in all ways.

I don't know what will come for the economy in 2009, but I can only say that the talented, devoted project and operations staff here at DPCI -- all working together with tight operational protocols and strict attention to discipline and technique, will hold us in good stead for the difficult months that may come. We will continue to push hard to bring exceptional value to our customers and to each other, and we will work to help any customers that are being impacted by the economic conditions of the day to help them improve their efficiency as well as to help them seize new business opportunities through the use of content technologies.

Posted at 09:20 am by Joseph Bachana

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