Old, but brilliant post.

 They still think they can write software in house. Maybe they can, by the standards of the desktop world. But that world ended a few years ago.

This weekend I’ve participated on the first of two days of a Presentation Skills course that I’m attending to. It was great!

Everybody made a 3 minute presentation, and had comment and feedback from the audience and the teacher.

At the end of each presentation, the teacher gave us some insights about the attitude necessary to make a great presentation! He his one of the best on his field on the world! It’s been a privellege to have his guidance along all this years and I feel extremely grateful for that!

At the end of day, I made my presentation (I was the one before the last). It went really well! I’ve presented the idea for our first product on RUPEAL (Sorry! Can’t reveal it right now) and got really good feedback! Everyone tought it was a great, simple and viable idea!

The last thing we’ve got, was a check list that we should be mindful everytime we make a presentation.

The second day will be really tough. On the first day, we’ve got a really nice and supportive audience. On the second day, each presentation will face a different challenges from the audience! We will then be presented with the skills necessary to go through each challenge!

Fantastic!

I believe every company that is to survive in a long term has to have a very well defined and passionate mission statement.

A good mission statement must be clear and simple (I guess that both simple and clear walk side by side).

For me this is very difficult to talk about, since RUPEAL doesn’t have one. Believing that the Mission Statement is important is one thing, to have one that really does a difference is another.

Our mission statement is as generic as “To develop software and human resources that provide excellence on our customers information technologies infrastructure”.

Is this statement that makes myself go to work harder every day? Is this statement that makes my collegues/employees work harder and feel that they are part of something that really matters? Is this statement making any difference on the world?

Do all of our team members embrace this statement on their day by day basis?

I believe not. But I also believe that being conscious about this already makes a difference.

We’re in the process of creating a company that wants to be a small giant by being great instead of big.

We’re still finding the path to get there! Give us your comments! What would make a great mission statement? What would move you and make you excited to go to work everyday?

Criar Outra Escola (COE) is a project which aims to develop a new type of school. RUPEAL was chosen to develop the website and for the first time we used Wordpress as our CMS.

Instead of developing all from scratch we decided to give a try to Wordpress. It was a good choice, but not a perfect one.

Although it was really easy to develop a theme for the website, we noticed a few limitations on the platform:

• Wordpress is not a pure CMS system. It’s a blogging system that has the ability to be a simple CMS.
• Writing is limited to a small toolbar that doesn’t include a serie of features, like underlining text.
• You can’t include video (youtube, google, etc) out of the box, like you do on the hosted version of Wordpress

For future websites, including our own, we’re going to consider a full featured CMS like Joomla or some other made in Java.

What we’re looking for, is a platform that is easy to configure, is simple to develop a new theme and has a simple user interface for the content management.

Wordpress is easy to use, has a simple interface, but it’s not perfect. Got any suggestions?

Having a business unit that focus on outsourcing, one of our main needs is to hire qualified people to meet our clients requirements.

At RUPEAL we want our software business unit to specialize in one area: Java. We’re aiming to have the best team on Java development that we can have on the market.

Now the funny part is that as deep as we get on this market (of outsourcing to other companies), we’re finding out that the more versatile the consultant is, the more “marketable” he is!

Different clients, have different recruitment philosophies. For instance, one of our major clients, doesn’t give much value to experts on a given matter, like Java or .NET. The company cares more to know that the person has an attitude of “if I don’t know about the subject, I’ll go and find out as possible as I can”, to having a profile of a computer guru on a given matter! The computer skills aren’t irrelevant, but they tend to go to second place.

The fact is: The final client wants to “buy” a team to whom he expects to trust, and communicate their IT needs. If you buy a team of a bunch of geeks who doesn’t know how to do team work, communicate and ultimately make the client smile… it’s already a lost battle!

I’m learning that “computer gurus” most of the times, don’t have the social skills that are required for a consulting job! I’m talking about selling skills, presentation skills, persuasion skills and emotional intelligence! A lesson to learn here: Computer skills doesn’t bring the bacon home.

This has made me think about a lot of the kind of people that I want to hire for the Consulting business unit of RUPEAL. Do I really want to have a team of (only) geeks?

What would you do on this subject? What do you think about it?

Fluir is a website about Feng Shui, in portuguese, developed by RUPEAL and Ana Vieira.

After two months of part time development we’ve published the website, and we leave here the link for you to appreciate.

Alexandre Gama asked us to develop a website where he could introduce himself, his work, Feng Shui and what he does. Check it out and give us feedback!

The website was developed in Java, using the Spring framework and jQuery library for javascript. The webdesign is from Ana Vieira, who is our designer! She’s quite talented, don’t you think?

Hope you enjoy!

Note to self:

Don’t reinvent the wheel! Next project we’ll be using Wordpress. Have any suggestions for other engines to quickly build this kind of websites?

PS: 

If you find it awkward that the site doesn’t have many projects on the portfolio, it’s because Alexandre is still to upload them!

This is the weblog for my company: RUPEAL

RUPEAL is a startup company who’s purpose is to develop software and human resources that bring innovation and excelence to the business of our clients.

We’ve just started our journey, and this blog is meant to share our experience on creating a company from scratch.

Hope you enjoy!