One of the things we espouse here at PointClear is achieving a balance between work and life. We have an office but we can work from home whenever we want to or need to. We don’t have strict hours. The company supports our outside endeavors such as my cycling team, other employees’ kids softball and volleyball teams, and the famous Walker Street Opry bluegrass band.

A recent study by the Wake Forest University School of Medicine reports that setups like this result in healthier workers:

A flexible work life, including telecommuting and job shares, is good for your health, researchers said on Tuesday.

They found that if people have the ability to work from home and to compress work weeks, they are more likely to make healthier lifestyle choices, to exercise more and to sleep better.

“Perhaps it gives people the time to fit in healthier lifestyle into their everyday regimen or maybe it just enables people to better manage their time,” Professor Joseph G. Grzywacz, of Wake Forest University School of Medicine, said in an interview.

Another thing the article cited is that, while work/life balance initiatives are often started to help women balance work and family, they tend to benefit both men and women. We see this kind of phenomenon all the time. A classic example is curb cuts for the disabled who are in wheelchairs. These curb cuts benefit wheelchair users, true. But they also benefit people pushing strollers, pulling luggage, those who have bad knees, etc.

Perhaps the far-reaching benefits of this kind of work environment will urge more companies to implement policies that help their employees strike a balance and lead healthier lives.

Read the whole article about flexible work life at Yahoo!

David Karabinos, the host of ClearCast, has done an amazing job with a new series interviewing the winners of the 2007 Alabama Launchpad. This has gotten some well-deserved attention recently:

• Huntsville Times Article
• Birmingham Business Journal Article
• Alabama Launchpad Blog
• ClearCast Press Release

After I had left my last job and before I had really decided to start PointClear, I made up a list of “Lessons Learned in the Last 5 Years”.  Basically a brain dump of stuff I had learned about the IT consulting business and business in general.  I have that list posted at my desk where I can see it every day.  The goal being not to repeat the same dumb mistakes of the past, but to make only NEW mistakes…  (If you want to see the list just email me…)  One of the items is as follows:

• There is always a temptation to think that the grass is greener somewhere else.  This is why services companies want to move into products, government contractors want to “go commercial”, project-based consulting companies want to create a staffing arm, etc.  It rarely works and you lose focus…

Well, this year has been a good one at PointClear.  We have had some great successes and have built a really impressive team of folks – the best I have ever worked with.  But we have sort of bent the rule above.  I’ll explain how and why we are only “bending” the rule, not breaking it outright J

I just got back from the AL Code Camp where Keith, Lee and I spoke about our experiences creating Capmed’s Online Personal Healthcare Record application, which is a part of the new Microsoft Health Platform. The audience had some great questions for us, and our hope is that we saved them both aggrivation and debugging time on their future Ajax apps.

In our presentation, we mentioned several tools we use to monitor memory leaks, logging javascript applications, and client-side xsl transformations. Our notes (along with urls to download the tools) can be found here. I mentioned our strategy to solve the “IE freeze bug” previously on this blog, and our presentation slides and video can be found here.

Thanks again to Jeremy Chance and Todd Miranda for putting on such a great Code Camp! We had a great time and look forward to future events.

One of our clients, CapMed, is getting a lot of great press associated with the launch of the Microsoft HealthVault.

Here is a snippet from today’s press release:

Microsoft said CapMed, which already markets personal health record tools, will create an application for HealthVault, as will Kryptic Corp., whose program will help doctors send and receive information from HealthVault without having to switch from technology they already use.

Helping CapMed develop these personal health record tools has been the focus and passion of most our team over the past year or so, and we are all extremely excited to see it getting launched to the real world–as part of the new Microsoft Health solution, no less. Congratulations, CapMed! Woohoo!

See HealthVault here.

See news on these new tools for Microsoft here.

See the press release here.

See the CapMed icePHR solution that we helped build here.

See the Microsoft HealthVault Developer Center here.

See blog entry on the Health Care Blog here.

See blog entry on DiabetesMine here.

More blogs on this launch (sorry, this is a massive PR effort on Microsoft’s part and it’s fascinating to see it unfold) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Neal, Todd, David and I are headed to the Health2.0 conference in downtown SF tomorrow.  Should be fun.  They were expecting 100 folks and had to shut down the registrations at 400.  Lots of interesting heavy-hitters in the “consumer-centric” healthcare space.  Google, MSFT, WebMD and a whole bunch of startups like RevolutionHealth, Organized Wisdom, etc.

Our goal is to learn something and stay out of trouble.  Watch this space for a blog entry or two from the conference.

People in the user experience field will tell you, if you’re looking for a job, that it’s much smoother sailing if you go to a place where user experience is already well-understood and accepted. Trying to be a one-man or one-women champion for usability in a company where feature set drives product development is a tough row to hoe.

I left just such a place (where usability was well-accepted) to come to PointClear Solutions. I was part of a group of 6 usability engineers and we had clout in the development process. We designed the interactions, passed our designs to the development team, and were then allowed to QA and usability test the finished product to ensure that it met our users’ needs.

At PointClear, I started as the one-woman champion for usability. The others saw the need for what I was touting, but maybe they weren’t sure just how far it could go. However, I’m continually amazed at how user-centered thinking has permeated our organization. The developers don’t hesitate to suggest enhancements that would increase the usability of an application. We have great whiteboarding sessions where everyone is focused on the user’s task and how best to help them accomplish it.

Just today I was chatting with a developer about a new component to an application we’re building. He made a suggestion on how an interface I designed could be improved for usability. It got my wheels turning, and I asked if he could make the application behave a certain way, to support the user’s task even further. Before I could finish typing, he one-upped me with an even better suggestion. It just made me smile. No battles here, just a collaborative work pattern where the end user is sure to benefit.

Get your super-cool PointClear T-shirts and mugs here.

Way back in 2001, Joel Spolsky wrote a great essay, Big Macs vs. The Naked Chef that basically explained why most consulting companies do mediocre work.  You should go back and read it but the premise is that most consulting companies grow faster than they can attract top-notch people.  In order to compensate, they create “The Methodology”.  The purpose of “The Methodology” is to ensure consistency by making sure that all consultants do things in the same way.  Sort of a playbook, if you will.  So, you get consistency – consistent mediocrity for the reasons Joel so eloquently points out in his essay.

In thinking about how our own company, PointClear Solutions, can and should grow, I thought it interesting to explore alternatives to the “Methodology Driven” approach.  Before PointClear, I worked at a consulting company that faced these exact challenges.  We went through the development of “The Methodology”. A lot of good folks put in a lot of time on this – problem was, nobody used it.  The really great developers didn’t need it.  The not-so-great and inexperienced developers didn’t understand it.

But, even without “The Methodology” projects were still being completed and delivered.  Some were more successful than others, and, without fail, the successful projects were always led by the same consultants.  So, who are these consultants?  What are their characteristics?  Below are some of them, there are many more, of course…

• They have a long track record delivering actual working software that solves the business problem it is supposed to solve.
• They have been exposed to many different industries and worked in many different situations, such as large, internal IT organizations, software product companies and small, entrepreneurial tech startups.
• They know the software development lifecycle end to end.
• They know when to buy vs. build and are always looking out for the customers best interests with respect to cost, time and schedule.
• They are not technology bigots.  They realize that different tools are useful in different circumstances and one size does not fit all.
• They are good at helping the customer decide what they really want, as opposed to what they think they want.  The customer considers them a trusted advisor.
• They have great communication skills.  They are also good at project management and understand the sales process, too.

So, it seems obvious.  You simply build a company that is made up exclusively of these types of folks.  You certainly have an incredible delivery capability.  But, it seems you’ve traded one set of problems for another.  How do you find, attract and retain these folks?  How do you grow and “scale” this type of company?  At PointClear, we are addressing this thorough a combination of things such as a fairly unconventional compensation model based upon hours billed as well as a VERY flexible work schedule.  There are others.  Some will work and some will not, I’m sure.  In many ways this is an experiment and we are learning as we go.  I’ll be posting more on each of these in the days to come.

-Blaine

We are a small IT consultancy specializing in building usable software. We help companies create and deliver mission-critical software products – for both internal use and for sale as a part of their core offerings. We also are working on some of our own ideas for specialized applications. We are doing a lot of work around patient-centric software and interoperability in the healthcare world, but we have clients in other areas too – such as the music industry.

We’ll be blogging here on a lot of topics, such as:

· Entrepreneurship and issues related to growing a startup services company

· Usability and user-interface design

· Technical stuff around .NET, AJAX,

· Whatever other topics we feel like talking about

This is a new company and a new blog, so we’ll figure this out as we go. Should be fun…