One of the first things we decided would be valuable for me to do when I began working with Flatsourcing was to schedule regular calls with all of our clients. While that might seem antithetical to our focus on using web based collaboration tools, in reality it provides another vehicle to “flatten the world”.

These calls have a number of benefits for both Flatsourcing and our clients, and the primary purpose of the calls is to build a running dialogue so that we know how we are performing for our clients and they feel comfortable being completely honest with us. Regardless of how effectively we can work with our clients remotely, there is something inherently useful in having a routine call that allows everyone to identify potential issues before they become actual issues.

The primary benefits of these calls are:

• Giving the client an opportunity to be honest about our performance whether positive or negative.
• Allowing the client to share broader business goals with us so that we can keep the big picture in focus.
• Knowing what works and what doesn’t so that we can refine how we work with each client.

There are other ancillary benefits to these calls as well, including:

• Building a more personal relationship with our clients as individuals.
• Being able to plan for the future by understanding ever changing business environment in which we all work.
• Letting our clients know about our business and the factors that affect how we can help them.

All in all, having a monthly call with each clients strengthens our business and personal relationships in a way that allows for greater long term success. As with many of the processes we have put in place over the years, the goal is to build a relationship on a foundation of constant and honest communication.

As always, if you have a project that you think we can help you with or a team you need to grow, drop us a line and let us work with you to see if Flatsourcing can help you reach your business goals.

We decided to start process of training our designers to create nice and fancy design mock-ups. Since our guys are working mostly on creating and fixing XHTML, we kind of  lost the pulse of art-design and need to catch up.

I assumed that the most efficient way of training would be to copy and re-creating somebody’s designs. We will be re-drawing some of nice popular web-sites to learn the technics, styles, colors, software tools and other stuff.

Internal plan of such training course looked like this:

• 1-st week: 2-3 hours a day - copying already existing design of working and popular web-site. It’s prohibited to take any graphics, everything should be re-drawn from scratch.
• 2-nd week: 2-3 hours a day - changing PSD we’ve created on the 1-st week of training (having in mind that we’re creating design for the real estate company, for example). Designers need to choose:
  • New color scheme (prepared two color schemes for designers to choose from)
  • New logo (can be just a place-keeper)
  • New textures and backgrounds
  • New graphics (can be photo)
  • New menu - changing it to be tab-styled, for example

Here are the details that I will be paying attention to while checking the results:

After the first week of course:

• Similarity with the original design
• Colors
• Textures, main grid
• Choice of fonts
• Shadows
• Overall quality

After the second week of course:

• Quality of choosing new colors
• Ability to built a new logo in the design
• Choice of new textures
• Skills of creating or choosing suitable graphics
• Choice of new menu solution and quality of it’s preparing

As a result each designer has to prepare two mock-ups:

1. copy of original design
2. changed mock-up for the abstract real-estate company

Of course this training plan got a lowest priority among other projects, however I hope we will have some results in a couple of weeks.

Hi guys,

Just wanted to post an advice: when you travel to UK, do it the corporate way. Yes, the world is flat, however corporate stuff helps flatten it even smoother. No matter who you are, where you have traveled, what your intension are - do apply a visa using professional services of a company who specialize in this.

E.g. when applied for regular tourist visa to get to FOWA conference in UK with all my experience and even US visa in international passport here is the kind of reply I got. Didn’t take it personally, it’s probably quite a few tourist visa applications that embassy specialist have been processing at that time. That is why, no matter how world is flat, don’t forget to travel professionally.

(attachments: FOWA invitation, UK embassy reply)

For all time I spend talking about the world is getting flatter, occasionally I’m reminded how it’s not.

We’re working on a SMS notification gateway with a client right now, and have been trying to test the notifications.  Oleg & the development team have built out the notification system, but were having trouble testing testing it.  They couldn’t send SMS notifications to Russian cell phones on the system, and they didn’t have US cell phones to test the reciept of the messages on.

Enter Google Voice.  I love the system, and we set up accounts so that the Flatsourcing team can test the system by sending & receiving messages in Google Voice.

So now we have a US-based phone number that rings in Kazan thanks to Vonage, and a Google Voice number that receives texts.  World Flattened.

But, we’re even taking it a step further by sending several US-based cell phones from different carriers over to Kazan so that we are sure that we are testing this application with all carriers for this client.  It’s a committment that we want to make to our client to make sure that we have phones over there to test.  So this afternoon I’m buying 3 pre-paid cell phones and FedExing them over to Kazan which ain’t cheap. World Flattened.

One last thing.  We’re currently working on plans to bring Oleg, Timur & Alex over to the US for a conference and to work in our office here in New Orleans for a stretch.  I’ve been over to Kazan the last 5 years, and Peter went with me this year.  Now it’s time to bring them over here.  We’re looking at a conference calendar, maybe SXSW, FOWA RailsConf, or something else.  If anyone has any great ideas, please let us know.  Help us flatten the world even further.