For the last three years, I worked for an Australian Telco - having been a founding member of a tiny team tasked with the delivery of short, sweet web apps that can be delivered quickly, and will resolve “low hanging fruit” business problems. The team was created to rapidly respond to smaller business problems that were often overlooked, or subject to inappropriate costs as they were forced through a large project lifecycle.

The idea was simple:

1. deliver high value and incur low cost - use open source MVC framework, OS and Database (LAMP)
2. minimise overheads - one developer paired with the customer’s single representative
3. focus on delivery of small scope iterations and highest quality - 4 weeks to deliver a functional application
4. charge nothing to the business for application development and hosting

For a low operational cost (4 developers and 9 virtual machines running a LAMP stack), the team continues to deliver on all fronts.

For those interested, I have elaborated elsewhere about the business justifications for this team.

We had three tenets:

• integrate with nothing - build standalone apps (exception here is the integration with the company LDAP directory for SSO)
• never build a public facing application - your work lives on the intranet alone
• ensure you can deliver something useful and of value in maximum 4 weeks

For those interested, I have elaborated elsewhere about the technology used by this team.

I finished my tenure with the Express Solutions team on the 27th of January, 2011. I will miss the team, our leaders and our customers. Three years is a long time to do the same thing, and I have decided to move on in the spirit of challenging myself to continuously improve and learn.

Here’s a brain dump of the things I have learned.

• Work for engaged customers. There is no better partner than one who is motivated to deliver something of high value.
• Build a team of “(external) polymaths”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath. People who can write great code are not enough. They should be articulate, communicative and able to manage complex delivery.
• Quality is everything. A four week deliverable will never be lauded as huge success unless it works beautifully on day one.
• Reuse is paramount. Effort is cost - and it makes no sense to repeat your effort.
• Remove administrative overheads. Automate the creation of infrastructure, and empower yourself to impose change easily, safely and regularly.
• Move fast and be smart. Deliver something small every day if possible - especially in a 4 week life cycle.

So, about a year ago, I put in place a plan that sees me take the next step in my professional career.

I signed up for a business partnership with a focused, motivated and very decent individual and together we strive to do the above, and with a pretty interesting toolkit at our disposal. More about this later…for now feel free to check out our company website.

Suffice to say - Express Solutions is a team that means a lot to me - and I respectfully single out two great mates and colleagues. eHabib and Massive were my partners in the creation of the team, and I sincerely hope our paths continue to cross in many adventures.

Onwards…