Obviously alot of this can’t be fixed in a short period of time, but as the Tech person you can usually try to mitigate the bag of turd that will ultimately be left in your hands by starting to ask ALOT of questions before you’re handed the bag.  So introducing my  Technology Discovery Checklist:
Environments – Dev, QA, Staging
- Hosting – Is this on-platform or off?
- Operating system – Version of Operating Systems (Service Packs/Libraries)
- Load Balancer Configuration – Round Robin/Availability/Sticky
- Database – Type/Version
- Application Server – Framework (.NET/JBOSS), Languages (C#/JAVA)
- Source Code Repository – Type/Access
- Content Delivery Networks – Who provides it? What services do they provide? How is it executed?
- HTTPS – Do we have access?  Is there something special we need to do? What is required to get a SSL cert?

Deployment
- Security Review/Audit – Who does it?  How long does it take?
- Code Review – How long does it take? Where/What time zone is it done in? Who is responsible for what?
- Load Testing – Who does it? What do they need to test?
- Deployment Effort – How long does it take? Where/What time zone is it done in? Who is responsible for what?

Data
- Consumer Information – What do we need to do to store it? Is encryption required?
- Media – Where are videos/images/etc stored? Is there a third party involved? Contact Information.
- Metrics – Who is the provider? Contact Information

I think the major value that agencies offer brands is the ability to think outside the box and focus on strategy and creative vision to drive their product towards a specific message.  A great example of this is the ‘Old Spice’ campaign that did very well.  Wieden + Kennedy crafted a pinpoint message and delivered it in a very clever way that utilized social media perfectly with digital technology.  Part of the art in delivering that message was the storytelling, wordsmith and crafting that was so apparent in the tv ads, youtube responses, and tweets.

However, the bulk of agency work isn’t so technically simple as uploading videos to youtube and sending out tweets.  Most of the work that i’ve seen has required complicated CMS builds, API integration, and complex database schemas.  Something as “simple” as a Facebook app becomes an unwieldy problem for agencies when the app actually gain traction and starts to see hundreds of thousands of hits, if not millions.  While story telling is still the craft that agencies should focus on, what if the paper you’re printing it on falls apart when someone tries to hold it a story in their hands?

While agencies may not need to understand every technical complexity, they do need to gain basic understanding of what is necessary to get technical projects out the door.  Part of that is understanding the Agile development process (iterations) and the system development life cycle, at the least.  Another part is understanding what options are available on client servers and infrastructure.  Finally, agencies should staff some technical leads to help scope and manage vendors (if not an internal development team).

So, do agencies need to think like software companies?  Probably not, but they do need to understand what it takes to get a digital product out the door, maintained and supported.  I think the leading agencies of the future will be able to deliver both exceptional creative and technical service to their clients.

ps.  these reflections are my own and not associated to any place that I am currently (or not currently) working!

Here are some of the issues that i’ve come across so far:

- Timeframe: We were just on different time frames. I didn’t want to wait weeks for things to happen, I wanted them to happen in days. This may have been because I only work a part-time job, which allows me to spend time on my entrepreneurial ventures.

- Time: This is much different than timeframe, but they are tied together. I believe that each founder of the team needs to be willing to put in the same amount of time into the project.

- Skills: find people with complimentary skill sets. as a techie, alot of the times I think I can do it myself. While it may be the case, in reality doing it myself would take longer. having team members who have skills you don’t (marketing, customer service, UI/UX, sale)

- Hustle: this is probably related to time, but everyone on the team MUST have the same hustle. What is hustle? it’s doing whatever is necessary to get the job done. If I have to make 100 calls in a day, you just do it. I’ve found that when I have a different level of hustle with a co-founder, animosity forms because it feels like i’m doing more work than the other person.

Hopefully, this helps some other people out there trying to find the right team to work with and some of the things to look out for. Feel free to email me with your thoughts and comments!

Sadly, the past two weeks, I didn’t show up.  I got caught up with programming and inundated with emails about feedback for Snpptz and everything else faded to the background.  I got caught up and so focused on programming that I missed an important email and therefore missed two important events.   I didn’t show up (quite literally).  To counter this, I’m going back to something that i’ve strayed from since i’ve been focused on shipping Snpptz, which is getting back into a normal schedule and more importantly, getting organized.

So, how am I going to do this?

- Back to my to-do lists! I use a to-do list system that I built in my spare time called Simplizt.  It helps me get organized by just dropping all my to-dos in my head into simple lists.

- Back to a regular sleeping schedule. While I was focused on launching, I would stay up to late hours to fix bugs and get the product launched. I think I need to get back into a regular sleeping schedule to help me stay on a regular schedule

- Scheduling my own time. Part of the reason i missed the email was because I was multi-tasking and scanning twitter/facebook/email/coding.  This has been shown to NOT work.  Instead I’m going back to a scheduled time for each of those tasks and shutting down every other distraction.

- Getting back into ‘Getting Things Done’.  David Allen’s Getting things done really has helped me prioritize and organize my own tasks.  When in coding mode I tend to stray away from it.  Now that i’m out of shipping mode, I need to get back to getting organized and getting things done!

- Working out again. I tend to find when I ignore my body, everything else  seems to get disorganized.  Not sure why this is the case, but it’s time to clean up, get healthy again and start working out again!

Hopefully, all of this will help me so I can follow my own advice, and just show up.