3 Ways Processes Are Hurting Your Business

Everybody Knows that companies need to have processes, but I wouldn't mind betting that if you work in a middling to large enterprise that you can think of at least a couple of processes that are inefficient, cumbersome or even just redundant. True some businesses have been successful thanks to their process and procedure, but what if your processes are actually hurting your business?

Negating  the Benefits of Technology Investments

It is only too easy to fall into the trap of using a process because it's simply been in place for a long time; as I have written before, if you don't update your thinking when you update your tools and technology, then there is more than a fair chance that you're not getting the maximum out of your investment. 

Checking The Boxes, Getting The Input:

Sometimes you expect a problem to have a simple solution, but when it turns out that such an assumption is false, needs dictate that you find a method anyway; usually once that method is found you'll re-use it, again and again, and probably never think to try something else. Times change, and circumstances change, and if you re-visit a problem with an updated set of tools, you may well find a much more graceful solution than the one you used before.

The Problem

Visualforce provides a simple mechanism for displaying a list of checkboxes which are grouped together. Where it starts to struggle is when you break that grouping and are more interested in finding out which selections a user has made, without tying those selections to an SObject field.

Three Reasons Why You Should Write Proper Tests

As anybody who has worked with me will know, I've not always been a fan of the enforced test methods that need to be written when working with Salesforce.com. I've written as much on this blog, but over time opinions can change, and even though mine have I don't believe in shuffling previous thoughts aside; I chose long ago to leave old blog posts here because honesty and transparency is key to many, if not all, of lifes encounters.

Why Test? Because Good

The subtitle above was one of the notes I made for this post, but I've let it stand simply because a few minutes after tweeting about finding a blog topic for today, the ineffably brilliant FAKEGRIMLOCK happened to be retweeted by someone I very much admire for their work, Adam Seligman.

TESTING: BECAUSE AWESOME POSTER A twitter.com/FAKEGRIMLOCK/s…
— FAKEGRIMLOCK (@FAKEGRIMLOCK) March 15, 2013

Open For Business: Getting Started on the AppExchange

As alluded to in my last post of 2012, and further detailed in my previous post, this year started off with myself and Kris Moyse (@MoysieK—one of the best consultants and idea-heads around) forming the S. P. Keasey Trading Co., and as the name is intended to imply, our intention is to have some fun and break away from the traditional idea of a 'professional' business.

We're embracing the cloud so that we can be productive wherever we might be, sure we both have desks to use because having a big monitor is always nice, but if we want to work on a plane, in a cafe, at a bar or even on the bus en-route to a day of snowboarding we can. And we do.

The Cloud Revolution Is Dead

The revolution that has effected a long and brutal assault on businesses and their IT departments has ended. Software consultants and vendors pushing large scale implementations that take years are no longer fighting against cloud based options. They aren't fighting because they're too busy trying to remain relevant. The cloud revolution is dead because it has run its course, and it has been a success.

 

Why would any business want to maintain racks of expensive hardware, running operating systems and networks that need to be maintained, secured, upgraded and load balanced, when it could pay a relatively small cost for another business to do the same? And not just any business, but a business whose whole model depends on them taking care of those things, and a business that hires the best people in the world to ensure its success.

Arithmetic Conversion: Why Is My Result Rounded?

On a few occasions I have come across developers struggling to understand why a mathematical expression fails to produce the value they were expecting; the latest instance of this was in a StackExchange question today. In this situation in particular the phrasing of the question (which is asking how to specify the precision of a decimal variable) demonstrates just how confusing this issue can be. The behaviour being observed is due to something called arithmetic conversion and specifically the rules which govern its behaviour.

Internet Explorer's Compatibility Mode: Has IE Come of Age?

As indicated no so long ago, I am currently working on a new venture with a good friend who is one of the best consultants in the business, and one thing any new venture needs is a website. Naturally our site is powered by Salesforce using sites, and I was having the usual fun and games that inevitably arise in web development due to the plethora of browsers and devices out in the wild.

Being Responsive

This is a bit of an aside, but something I wanted to mention. The site (which will be uncovered soon) has a familiar column based layout, and I wanted to ensure that it works well on all form factors given that three vertical columns are not a great fit for small phone screens which are often held in portrait mode. I stumbled across Twitter Bootstrap and decided to give it a go, and I can't recommend it highly enough; it took no time at all to convert the layout I'd already built to use it, and once I'd done so it was definitely an improvement. The responsive elements are super easy to include and now on small devices the content is displayed in a single column, with certain (more decorative) parts being hidden altogether.