Michael Ong | On9 Systems » Business

Lot of time flying these days and more time to read

michael — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 18:37:20 +0000

Past 3 months have gone by rather quickly. With a new opportunity and managing a new team in KL, lots of challenges are encountered with the remote meetings and daily scrums.

Attend Certified ScrumMaster conducted by Jesse Fewell in KL from 8th to 10th November. The great part? I’m now a Certified ScrumMaster! With one year or more of practice, I’ll be applying to be a Certified Scrum Professional.

Scrum is a relatively common sense approach to project management, I’ve enjoyed learning about the process and how it reacts to dynamic business needs. For teams who are new to process (as in my team), it’s definitely challenging as it requires a high level of transparency to daily work and significant openness to embrace change. There are many barriers to bring a team to such a level ranging from old attitudes and behavior and tendency for most people to be very reserved with their opinions.

Couple of books have helped open my mind to how a business can benefit from having a sense of urgency and not being complacent about their success.

Leading Change

A Sense of Urgency

Our Iceberg is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions

Managed to read this in an hour or so while waiting for RT to start. Good book to read after you’ve read the previous two. Found myself laughing at some parallels to real life. They may be penguins in the story but lots of people behave a lot like that.

Managing Virtual Teams: Getting the Most from Wikis, Blogs, and Other Collaborative Tools

Currently we’re using Pivotal Tracker (coincidently met JB Steadman from Pivotal Labs Singapore during a networking session) with Google Docs for most real-time collaboration of documents.

Skype has been tremendous in helping bridge communications but I think Mumble or Ventrilo might be better to maintain better comms. Video might also be necessary soon as a lot of times, facial cues are an important part to communication

The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise

There are a lot of interesting lessons to learn from this book, still 1/3 of the way through it but the topics on hiring, capacity planning and team dynamics is a good read.

Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition

Great article on Why Websites Suck

michael — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 09:36:36 +0000

Been awhile since I visited WebSG’s blog and came across this.

We need to grow a pair and guide our paymasters to make business decisions, not technical or aesthetic ones they are ill-equipped to call.websg.org, WebSG – News and Views on the Singapore Web Scene, May 2010

You should read the whole article. Can’t wait for the next meetup!

Places I’ve worked in (and had a desk)

michael — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 08:47:49 +0000

Walked past the old office in Chinatown yesterday and realised that over the years, I’ve had a desk in various parts of Singapore and tried to recall where they were.

The list so far in chronological order

American Express - The Concourse, Beach Road
RBR Networks – KA Centre, 150 Kampong Ampat
JuzPC – Kallang Place and Circular Road
EdLabs – Chinatown (South Bridge Road)
Societe Generale – 80 Robinson Road
Asis-T Solutions - Choa Chu Kang and Ang Mo Kio
Cornet Technologies – Purvis Street and Chinatown (New Bridge Road)
VISA – Caltex (Chevron) House, 30 Raffles Place (Highlight was the Aeron chair!)
IConnectE – Circular Road
SPH – 1000 Toa Payoh North News Centre
iProperty – United Square, Singapore and The Boulevard, Mid Valley City, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Other places which I’ve had to frequent (almost felt like second office at one point!)

KC Dat – Lok Yang Way
Nippon Express – Alps Avenue and Toh Guan Road East

Offices I’ve visited and really liked the view/environment

NTUC and Microsoft – One Marina Boulevard (had the pleasure of being there when building was being built)
Google – Temasek Tower, 8 Shenton Way
Pivotal Labs Singapore – Tras Street

Map

View Places I’ve Worked in a larger map

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Rebooting

michael — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 03:19:40 +0000

It‘s been 9 days since I got back to the corporate life. Why after so many years of avoiding it? Hard reality was that running the business while enjoyable for its freedom meant a rather tiring schedule. Keeping everything juggling in the air without good support meant that inevitably things came crashing down when I faltered.

So after taking a good LONG break from work and taking stock of what I could achieve, I interviewed for a job at ST701 doing something I love (actual development versus lots of sales calls/meetings). Most folks probably do it differently, joining a large corporation when they start their first jobs and some might leave to realise their dreams.

I started by freelancing, joining a small firm and eventually learning about management, interacting with large firms and developing solutions along the way. The opportunity throughout the years to gain experience in design patterns, architecture, infrastructure, communicating with customers and solutions has been invaluable. While I won’t get to apply this experience within the current job scope, I’m sure it’ll come in useful down the road. It’ll take some time to get used to life in a large corporate entity but at least it’ll be a fresh journey to learn from.

A year into the future

michael — Thu, 14 May 2009 05:23:24 +0000

Had a pretty interesting casual meetup with a fellow business owner doing pretty much what I’ve been doing for the past few years. T is a year older than me and has been running his own firm with a small staff allowing him to do what he likes (programming and more programming!).

Interestingly, T observed during our meeting that programmer’s think alike and even dress alike! We had a good laugh and came to agreement that programmers (those who freelance only) these days are a rare breed.

Biege shirts – tucked out
Khaki Pants
Loafers w/o socks

Having a team really helps one focus on what needs to be done. For the past year, I’ve had trouble with that as being essentially a small outfit for so long meant juggling a lot on the plate while trying to achieve goals. I felt burnt-out and tired having to manage sales, development and maintenance. Moving forward, this partnership should free up more time to do what I love, essentially to program and reduce the day-to-day overhead of sales process.

Site upgrade completed

michael — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 11:32:37 +0000

It’s been some time since updates were posted on the site. A new theme has been installed with a cleaner look and with it, WordPress has been upgraded to 2.5.1 to take advantage of a new dashboard and security.

I’m also taking the opportunity to write up more on our products that have been under development for the past year, O9BMS (Building Management Systems) for Enterprise Mobile Inspections and Broad-Cast.net, an EDM and Corporate E-Card Portal since these products will be primary focus of the company this year.

Undergoing a facelift .. new look coming soon!

michael — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 04:28:58 +0000

The site is currently undergoing some maintenance work to have a new look. The great thing about using a content management system like WordPress is that the site can continue to function (with a minimal design) even while work is being done. Related posts:activeCollab gets a facelift with 1.0 nearing release Joomla! Singapore User Group [...] Related posts:

Updates for 2007 … What’s up for 2008?

michael — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 13:06:41 +0000

It’s been a pretty crazy work schedule the past few months as we juggled projects at IconnectE and K.C DAT since August.

In October, we finally launched Broad-Cast.net as a full service providing email marketing to the SME market. We had been offering the service for customers without a proper name to it so its a good start that we were also engaged by Avocent International Pte Ltd for their “Avocent Hero” EDM campaigns as well as VivoCity Pte Ltd to assist with their recent 1st year party invites. Also on the email marketing platform, we’ve been hard at work creating a corporate eCard portal for Mapletree Investments Pte Ltd that would allow them to personalize each greeting card that gets sent by the company staff.

In November, Max Cole and On9 Systems got our heads together to plan how we could grow our businesses and in doing so, we migrated our servers to a proper rack with Viewqwest (great support from Boon Hian, Nathan and Thames). Doing this got us nice 2 x Linksys SRW2024 24-Port 10/100/1000 Gigabit Switch. It has some great features like bandwidth monitoring and throttling (a very neat feature!). Mike Veltman and Robert Roach are serious dudes into security and I’m glad to be working with them on this as we get serious about hosting. By offering Virtualization as an option to SMEs, this creates a great platform for us to create some serious applications for companies.

With December creeping into its second week and 2008 looming, our pipeline is full till the first quarter where we’ll be doing a major project utilizing Drupal as well as another project for a B2B Art Rental Store coming up too. I’m glad we’re getting a good start into 2008!

Are you ready for word-of-mouth marketing?

michael — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:46:28 +0000

Imagine an organization with a proven system for 24 years, over 100,000 members worldwide in more than 37 countries, who can assist you in growing your business and open new doors to global opportunities. Raffles Chapter would like to invite you to our Visitor’s Day on 21st Sept 2007. For more details, view the slideshow below or contact me today!

On9 Systems – Blogs for Business

michael — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 06:31:10 +0000

Received a SMS on Wednesday from a fellow BNI member that she couldn’t attend this morning’s breakfast meeting and if I minded switching over. I readily agreed before remembering that my slide desk was skewed towards customers to have an overview of the company. Spent about 3-4 hours last night improving a 4 slide version I had previously used in my flip-chart presentaton and here’s the results

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