I said I’d give some details about the work I’ve been doing with Yurii over the last few years…

Essentially we’ve been building a system that manages a team so we can:

1. Dispatch to clients articles on topics they want tracked
2. Send highly targeted news summaries to people/companies so they can easily follow developments on very precise topics
3. Automatically create personalized newsletters at scale, sending links to hand-picked articles and summaries of selected articles to individuals according to their personal selections

It’s hardly exciting stuff but it does fill a need and five or more people already use it daily as part of their work with us.  I’ll give more details about each function in later posts.

In all cases Yurii and I work like this: I sketch out our requirements and email them to him, usually clarifying things via MSN or Skype. He estimates the time needed and gives me a budget, then sets to work, asking questions as he goes. We pull in designers and other support as needed but mostly he does the work.

Sometimes the clarifying exchanges are intense but usually they run pretty smoothly – we both have a good sense of how the system works and how to fold-in changes. That said, conveying complicated ideas can be slow and frustrating. Relying on just email and IM means we can’t sketch out ideas or have a rapid exchange of clarifying thoughts and it can take a lot of patience (both sides) to make sure we have things clear. That’s a material inefficiency that I’d like to get past.

One upside is that the difficulty of conveying a requirement makes you focus on it a little more, because it’s just too much of a pain to specific one thing and later realize you wanted another!

The biggest advantage to us of working with someone remotely is cost; we simply couldn’t afford to experiment with different ideas and innovate as freely as we do. And the biggest downside is speed. Things don’t go fast, and they’re rarely on time. I’ve managed IT jobs before and this comes with the territory, but I find with remote work things mostly take longer. Our work with the system Yurii is building for us is important and I have great hopes for it but it’s not our core business and we wouldn’t be able to move so slowly if it were; we’ve traded speed for cost and that’s been ok so far but it will be interesting to see if meeting will make things faster.

Just over a week to go not and things are getting a little complex.

It turns out that there are just three trains daily from Kiev to Kharkov and only one is express, and it leaves at 6:00am. I’ve also learnt that it gets booked up and you need to reserve in advance…only you can’t seem to do that from overseas. Mmmm.

I also gather I can get to Kharkov by bus and plane, but they leave from different locations and at different times; if I go to the train station and can’t get on it I may not then be able to get the bus, and visa versa. I could get a plane but I’m a touch jittery about that.

Yurii has offered to come and meet me at the airport in Kiev but that puts the burden on him and defeats the object of visiting people in their home towns.

My current plan is to pitch up at the airport and see what’s on offer.

On the bright side, I’ve been reading a little about the country and it’s fascinating. Here’s the Wikipedia entry and here’s a list of some notable Ukrainians.

Today I booked a trip to the Ukraine – my first appointment to devirtualize my workplace. I’m going to meet someone that I’ve never met (or even spoken to) but have been working with for years.

In a few weeks I fly to Kiev then take a 6 hour train to Kharov which is right on the Russian border and where I will meet Yurii. We’ll spend a day trying to work (I say trying as we’re not actually sure we’ll be able to communicate face to face – so far we’ve just managed email and text).

(My fall back plan, should we completely be unable to understand each other, is to find a corner, log into Skype and text like we always do!)

Then I’ll turn around and head home.

In a few days I’ll show you some of the things we’ve been working on.

I’ve been a virtual worker for over a decade and I still find it somewhat mystifying. At a personal level I’m motivated by the quality of life it gives me – closeness to my family mainly, and the chance to manage my time over the day. I expect that’s the same for many people and that’s no surprise.

What I do find surprising is how stable, robust and effective it seems to be. Orthodoxy tells you that we need face-time and daily communication to build cohesive, functional teams – without it people get off message, do the wrong thing, waste time and generally are not that effective.

I can imagine that for many types of work this is indeed true. But for a lot of what we do it doesn’t apply. We seem to have stable and effective teams without the face time, without the daily communication. In fact, it’s more surprising than that – most of our team members have never met. Ever. And in many cases, our team members don’t even talk to each other. And more surprising yet, many have never talked to each other. Isn’t that amazing?

And yet they still churn out high quality, professional output that, for example:

• Is circulated at the executive level of Fortune 100 corporations
• Is used by brand managers to guide new development investments
• Is used by consultants in client presentations
• etc.

There is no magic to this – we work hard to find the right people (detail focused, experienced, driven by quality…), ensure high standards (poor performers don’t last) and have managers that rigorously check our work. And we communicate a lot via email and instant messaging and yes, sometimes by phone.

And we benefit from very low churn rates (2-5% at last estimate), which means we don’t need to spend time and money retesting and retraining people. The people we have are motivated to work with us (probably for similar reasons to my own but hopefully also because we pay a fair rate, provide interesting work and they see we are easy and honest to deal with).

For all this, I still find it surprising that year on year and on a weekly basis I work with well over 20 people that I’ve never met or spoken to. Some people I’ve worked with just for a few months and for others it’s a decade.

So I’ve decided to change things a little and get to meet (and talk!) to some of my ‘colleagues’. In coming months (and probably years) I’m going to visit some of the people that I work with to get to know them better. I’m not sure what this will achieve.

Perhaps I’ll get to understand virtual working better and maybe improve how it works. At a minimum, I hopefully won’t screw up something that works! Anyhow, stay tuned…

In recent month’s I’ve noticed some things are changing with our business. At first I thought they might be ephemeral but I no longer think so. To state the very obvious, things are getting more global – a change we’re seeing in a number of ways.

First, we’re doing more work in foreign languages. I just totted it up and worked out that we commonly work in about 20 languages, including most of the European ones and many of the Asian ones too.

Some of this is driven by requests for overseas research as companies in our traditional markets (the US and Europe) look farther afield for opportunities, investigating markets, local companies and competitor activity generally. We find companies are also looking to emerging markets for inspiration, innovation and ideas on new trends they can exploit back in their home territories. All of this requires that we track news sources in foreign languages and bring insights back into English.

Perhaps most interestingly, for the first time we are being approached by companies overseas (in Japan and China mainly) who want research on Europe and the US. Topics vary but they cover the usual range of competitor intelligence issues – consumer trends, innovation, market size and growth rates, competitor activity and the like. Clearly, the tide is slowly starting to turn.

There is an upside for us in all this as growth in foreign language work is one of the reasons 2011 is, so far at least, going well for us. Q1 is up over 30% on last year and the 5-year CAGR is now nearly 25%.

2010 was a rough year for most people and businesses. Job loses in the US continued to pile up and the economy’s growth was tepid at best. Going into 2010 I expected budget cuts and reduced workloads for us but luckily that hasn’t happened. Our revenue will be up over 50% (final numbers aren’t yet in) and 2010 saw some notable advances – we got some new clients (including the world’s largest technology company) and most clients increased the scope and volume of work they gave us.

More significantly I think things will brighten in 2011. In the latter part of 2010 we saw a good deal more innovation and new product development related work, suggesting companies are looking forward positively to emerging opportunities. Our contract workers also increased their billing rates, another good sign suggesting that companies are busier. These are small indications but judging from the chatter and client activity I see, things are much brighter now than 12 months ago.

Behind the scenes we’ve been developing some targeted newsletter sites and one of the things I’m excited about for 2011 is seeing them roll out. They are already in use by some clients and in coming weeks I look forward to introducing them more widely. More on that later.

Meanwhile, Happy New Year – here’s hoping it’s a good one…

I managed to skip a day in my work diary – sorry!

More productively:

• We’ve been engaged by a large manufacturer to conduct financial analysis to benchmark a number of a number of their distributors and today I spent a chunk of time going through various ways we could conduct and present the analysis.

• We recently won a new client – one of the world’s largest technology companies – which is great, but right now I’m having to go through the various ‘on-boarding’ requirements – procedures, admin, security… – never fun but it will be good to get stuck into the work.

Today I also reviewed some competitor profiles we’ve prepared companies before sending them to the client.

Last, I interviewed a researcher to help us with some ongoing client work.

Busy day:

• I got involved clarifying the requirements for a strategy brief for an ad agency needing material for an upcoming pitch, and at the other end of the work process I had a call to run through core findings and insights for another brief we wrote.
• I wrote a proposal for a client looking innovation philosophy and best in class practice at a set of consumer goods companies.
• New employment numbers came out today and I reviewed a brief we prepared on what they mean for the US economy and the consumers in particular (short answer: not a great cause for joy)
• Kicked off some market research work looking at the personal care market in about ten emerging countries

Friday evening – off for a drink…

My focus today was a couple of our newsletter sites http://www.healthandwellness360.com/ and http://www.foodbusiness360.com/

We have a number soon to come out of beta and I’ll talk more about them then, but today I worked with our developer to resolve some technical issues, spoke to a writer who is starting today and reviewed about 20 more applications.

Separately, I had a couple of conference calls with clients talking about larger projects – one is an ongoing requirement to prepare competitor profiles on target companies; the other was about ways to track emerging consumer trends.

Last, I worked on a request to locate a patented and recently launched industrial probiotic ingredient that can be used in functional foods. It turns out the patent holder is in New Zealand and we’re getting a sample shipped.

Then I spent a little time on TED – http://www.ted.com - which is great. I could spend hours at this site

Whenever I’m asked what I do I struggle to explain. Like many people’s jobs these days, it doesn’t fit neatly under a particular title or role. It’s amorphous, ill-defined and changes daily.

My confusion doesn’t end there; I also find it hard to explain what Business360 does, which too is amorphous, ill-defined and…

And starting tomorrow, and in an attempt to kill two birds with one stone I’m going to blog about it (can you tell that I’m already scraping the bottom of the barrel even though it’s just day 3 of my blog fest!).

Try and stay awake back there!