One year ago I became the delivery director of NixonMcInnes.
Feedback is embedded in our culture. We discuss as a team, one on one and sometimes with clients how we did on meetings, conference calls or any other work we do.
It can be uncomfortable if you are a newcomer but soon you’ll be enjoying the benefits of being honest and sharing your feelings on how things are going.
To celebrate my year as a director I encouraged feedback (once again) by setting up an online survey (with closed and open questions) and asking everyone to let me know their thoughts.
And they did:
I got good to excellent on most of the “closed” questions (poor to excellent) like:
- “Commitment to our highly open, transparent and democratic company culture”
- “Ability to get things done”
- “Highly organised”
The toughest question on the survey was “my weaknesses and common pitfalls”. That is where the most powerful answers are: how your team mates think you can improve.
Some of the answers were:
- “I think sometimes you over commit things or have trouble prioritising”
- “Sometimes your mindset can be a bit rigid and analytical”
- “Your standard of English is good, but I wonder if it not being your first language contributes to … lost of value in reports and requests circulated to the team by email”
Great. I got feedback – now what?
The best way to ensure feedback is useful is to embrace it. Share it. Nurture it.
I immediately changed the way I do things:
- Avoid over committing and improve prioritisation: work on “say no” and ask for help prioritising
- Simplify: be less rigid/analytical and more practical when I start over analising
- Add value to reports: Make sure reports are clearer, valuable and have actions assign to them when possible
We all have our own job descriptions and salaries published on our internal wiki. The feedback will feed directly into it helping me to make it more accurate and useful.
And it was the inspiration for this blog post.
Feedback is amazing
I will keep the survey results very close – and refer back to it often. I will follow up with more feedback requests to assess how an I doing. I won’t let this die.
After all – it is all about how I can become a better director, a better team player and a better person.
It’s empowering and very useful to get honest feedback from the people closer to you. I encourage everyone to do it.
If you’d like to know more drop me an email.
Telmo wrote this on 21.09.09 – 2 comments
It's filed in the NixonMcInnes box
Users for the Private Reserves website can now request their wines to be delivered. We released the update to the website this morning.
If you are a wine connoisseur I recommend a visit to Private Reserves website. They are specialists in fine wine storage.
The first release of the website (a few weeks ago) enabled the users to view their wines and up to date tasting notes. Checkout the Sample Cellar .
Private Reserves customers can now ask for their wines to be delivered online.
This ties in perfectly with our new “What We Do” page. A good example of great work.
Telmo wrote this on 20.03.09 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Design, Development, NixonMcInnes, Our sites box
As I state on my profile: “I have a passion for web development. I have a passion for people. It feels great to work with amazing people in the development of Social Media.”
It’s true. But most people still are not fully aware of what Social Media is. The boundaries are not yet defined and I think they will never will: the growth of new technologies is quick.
Good examples of Social Media tools include: Read more…
Telmo wrote this on 19.06.08 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Industry news, Internet, NixonMcInnes, Social media, Web technology box
Blogging was never my specialty… until I used Wordpress to develop a blog for a client.
Wordpress is a Blog Tool and Weblog Platform.
Nowadays I love it! I wish I had more time to blog. I have a lot to say! :)
Back to the point… the new very much expected version of Wordpress 2.5!
I have just downloaded and installed my first version… I am so excited! Love to learn about new technologies and its updates.
What’s in it?
Read more…
Telmo wrote this on 07.04.08 – 41 comments
It's filed in the Blogging, Development, Free things, Internet, Social media, Web technology box
Note from the author: apologies if this post sounds like a Microsoft marketing campaign, but I am really excited about this technology!
Let’s say you have a website and you want to give your visitors the experience edge.
The media experience can be improved by using Microsoft Silverlight on your website. Some of the features include:
- Vector graphics with light, degrade and other effects
- Overlaying your HTML with Silverlight content
- React to keyboard input
- Video overlay
- Real-time data
- AJAX
Some impressive examples can be found on the Silverlight website. Here’s a few from the top of my head:
- Single coloured backgrounds? Forget about them! Create amazing forms, patterns, shades and colour rich backgrounds
- Animation effects, including menu transition, drag and drop, zoom, pop-ups, animated drop down, 3D wheel and “page turning”
- Better user experience patterns
Read more…
Telmo wrote this on 18.03.08 – 36 comments
It's filed in the Design, Development, Marketing, User experience box
I live in Brighton and NixonMcInnes is based close to the Brighton Pier.
Each and everyday I take a wander along the seafront and today was by no means an exception.
Even though a storm appeared to be in full swing, the rain and the wind didn’t put me off in the slightest. Gusts of wind pushed me back but I kept on walking toward the seafront and when I got there, an amazing spectacle of nature was taking place: massive waves were breaking below the Brighton Pier. Read more…
Telmo wrote this on 10.03.08 – 4 comments
It's filed in the Interesting, Social media, Social networks box
The analytics tool we use most often in NixonMcInnes websites is Google Analytics. Analytics tools help you gain detailed insight into how your customers are interacting with your website.
Google launched a new version of their free Google Analytics package a few weeks ago.
Benefits of the new implementation include:
- More reliable tracking capabilities
- Lighter code
- Advanced features and sophisticated reporting
- New Multi-line Graph (beta feature) that graphs two different metrics against each other over time
- Reports available in six additional languages, bringing the total number of supported languages to 25
Read more…
Telmo wrote this on 29.02.08 – 4 comments
It's filed in the Business, Development, Internet, Marketing, NixonMcInnes, Our sites, Strategy, User experience, Web analytics, Web technology, ebooks box
Here are remaining steps from previous post about publication:
Step 5: Everybody on Version Control System (VCS)
I do not know how many times I have drawn this diagram but it’s been a few! Here’s the best picture I got from it:
Our VCS in Subversion (SVN).
Golden Rule: No FTP access to project files (they must be in SVN to be published).
This illustrates how we work with VCS. All developers commit their code to SVN and update regularly to make sure their code is merged and still works with the latest updates.
Golden Rule: Always update your copy and test before committing your code.
Staging and live servers are a unidirectional working copy from SVN.
Golden Rule: Never commit anything from staging or the live servers
Read more…
Telmo wrote this on 28.11.07 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Development box
Publication is a fascinating area of web development. Especially for projects that involve blogs mixed with eCommerce, multi-lingual and multi-site projects.
It’s exciting to see a team of developers coding the brink of Social Media embedded in product pages of an online shop.
As projects grow the dev team grows with them. Developers hungry for coding join in and start doing their magic.
When you have more than one developer working on a project they can accidentally overwrite each other’s code by uploading files or simply by deleting required files, so the risk of publication processes increases.
To minimize the risk – and the delays they cause – software packages can be used, rules can be set and procedures followed… the goal is to achieve painless publication of a website and its updates.
Read more…
Telmo wrote this on 21.11.07 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Development box
I spent the last few days analysing Content Management Systems (CMS) for web applications.
We have a very brilliant open source ‘PHP/mySQL, in-house, 3-years-old, SEO Friendly (Search Engine Optimization Friendly)’ CMS – picture on the right – developed by half a dozen developers over the years. But, as projects are growing the need for more was clear. The search for the ultimate CMS had begun…
Read more…
Telmo wrote this on 16.11.07 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Development box
