I never got to post some pictures of my trip to the Ukraine, so while it’s top of mind, here is a selection. They run from arrival in Kiev, via a train to Kharkov and back to Kiev…

Yurii duly arrived and we had a great time. We could communicate after all (although not without some difficulties now and then!) and we worked together at his home before walking around Kharkov and going to a restaurant.

I have a photo and when I get to download load it I’ll post it.

Looking back at my trip to the Ukraine to meet and work with Yurii I think I learnt two things:

• Yes, the world might be flat, as Thomas Friedman would have us believe, but in a funny kind of way mine has become more diverse because of it. Had I stayed in the corporate world there is no way Yurii and I would work together:  the corporate environment filters people out and makes for a very homogenous work place. People might have varied ethnic backgrounds and all but the selection process means that everyone who gets a job has the right sort of degree, the right sort of language and communication skills, and the right sort of attitude and so on.But with Yurii, none of that has happened; he was selected for one thing alone –his ability to develop a software system.   Virtual working means we have in Yurii someone who would fail at all the standard corporate filters but in the one thing that matters, he excels.Our virtual team is way more diverse than anything imaginable in the corporate world and I think this is a good thing.

• My other thought is that because we worked together for so long without meeting or talking, finally meeting up was more meaningful.It took a fair amount of effort for both of us – I traveled to Kiev then took a 6 hour train to Kharkov and he had to talk to me in English, something he wasn’t comfortable to do. It could easily have gone wrong – we might have been unable to understand each other, or not got on etc, so there was some risk to it. This doesn’t happen in a regular workplace where work relationships evolve gradually.We met only for a day but the bond established is stronger than many of the bonds I established in the corporate world where I daily met and interacted with people. I had a good working relationship with most of my corporate friends but I learnt little about their private lives and our relationships didn’t extend much beyond the workplace.But in the short time I was with Yurii I met his family, worked at his home with him, walked his dog and generally got a good insight into his life and how our work fits into it.  I rarely attained this level of understanding in the corporate environment and feel it has to enhance the working relationship that Yurii and I have.

My work with Yurii over the last few years has focused on developing a newsletter service that rests on a simple idea – we’ll send you (the client, the individual user) an email containing articles, links to articles and summaries of news that you want to follow. It sounds so simple but getting to this point has been surprisingly arduous and more than once we’ve had to rethink and restart.

With myriad free news trackers and newsletters available, many of which are really good, the obvious question is what can we offer that’s worthwhile, and the answer is…focus. Our thinking (hope) is that business professionals need more than just broad industry or market material. These days, with the proliferation of information there is usually good and useful literature on very specific topics that can help business managers but it’s simply too cumbersome for them to pull it together and read it all.

So while a general a newsfeed or newsletter on the food business can be good, it’s not sufficient for someone in NPD that is focused on, say, functional foods, who is probably interested in specific ingredients, the application of specific technologies, patents, specific competitor activity and so on. A brand manager is probably interested in marketing and promotions activity of specific competitors in specific retailers in specific countries, and so on. I think companies would value information delivery with this level of focus and that is what we’re trying to do.

We have developed three solutions to this problem. The first is to send clients articles that cover topics they are interested in, the second is to create and email ‘hand-made’, focused newsletters to subscribers; the third (that I’ll cover in another post) is to automatically generate newsletters according to individual user preferences.

It’s not easy to do any of this and, so far as I know, it’s not yet possible to reliably deliver it using just technology, so our solutions rely heavily on human input. To get a good understanding of the sorts of information clients want tracked we discuss requirements with them and identify the best sources (academic publications, trade journals, scientific studies, blogs etc) and build a search strategy with this in mind. We then daily and weekly visit target sites and run search strings to capture the information they need which is tabulated in our database according to subject.

Each day our system then sends out hundreds of emails with relevant articles to clients. Ongoing communication with clients allows us to tweak coverage as client information needs evolve.

We also have some writers who summarize a selection of these articles and the summaries are made available online and assembled into newsletters. These are in beta at the moment and we are working in just six areas, food business, health & wellness, sustainable business, diet news, innovation and personal care. For each area there are a number of newsletters people can choose to receive and you can see the topics we cover (most are for subscribers only but each site has at least one free newsletter that you can sign up for):

• Food Business (http://www.foodbusiness360.com/) which has these newsletters and past issues of free newsletters
• Sustainable Business (http://www.sustainablebusiness360.com/); newsletters past issues of free newsletters
• Health & Wellness (http://www.healthandwellness360.com/); newsletters, past issues of free newsletters
• Innovation (http://www.innov360.com/), newsletters, past issues of free newsletters
• Diet News (http://www.dietnews360.com/), newsletters, archive to free newsletters
• Personal Care (http://www.personalcarebusiness360.com/), newsletters, past issues of free newsletters

Six hours on the train and I arrived around noon in Kharkov, Ukraine’s second city and where Yurii lives.

We exchanged texts and he’s coming to my hotel in 30 min or so.

I completed the first step of my journey to Kharkov, leaving Heathrow this mornnig and arriving in Kiev today. I spent much of it walking around the city and using the subway – very clean and efficient. I’m not sure what expectations I had, but I’m surprised how beautiful Kiev is; lots of old world charm and modern sophistication.

Tomorrow I’m up at the crack of dawn to get a train to Kharkov…

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.