You can read the show notes and listen to the podcast here.
Michaela 0:02
Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Jorge Reyes from Ortus solutions, and we're gonna be talking about high performance cold fusion teams. We've got 15 tips and techniques that can make your competition teams really blossom. So we'll look at why you might want to have a high performance team. You don't have one already, and what exactly who he means by that. And we'll also look at how you can support your people over the process. And agile teams when everyone knows that we're all and you can help the T team and the team members evolve and look at some different ways you can improve the skills of your teams, and also some tool for work with distributed teams. So welcome. Whoa. Hey,
Jorge Reyes 0:47
Michael. Thanks for having me again.
Michaela 0:49
know, so yeah, you're so welcome. So maybe we should just start out with, you know, why why should someone have a high performance team? I know, that seems to seem we have a silly question, but not everyone has them. So yeah, not
Jorge Reyes 1:03
not everyone has them. And I'm not sure if everyone can, I hope he can. But just to clarify what I mean by Hey, hyper for maybe,
Michaela 1:15
maybe they need to be in a high performance company, you
Jorge Reyes 1:17
know, yeah, that's true.
There are many aspects to consider when you're managing a team, or you're part of a project team that are related to performance. And when I mean, High Performance Team, I mean, something very, very specifically, I'm very focused, because on one hand, for example, we have specific development tools and processes that you have in place, right, that influences hope, the performance of your team, I've seen people not even using source control this point. So that's kind of crazy to think you can achieve some, some performance in the, in the generic sense of the word, right? continuous integration, automated testing, the infrastructure use for development. You got different methodologies, Scrum, Cambon extreme programming, whatever, right? But what I mean high performance teams for this matter is only focus on team dynamics, right team members interacting with each other, interacting with project requirements. So technology agnostic approach of team management and team development, basically.
So just that clarification upfront, we're not going to talk about any specific processes outside of the team dynamics themselves.
Michaela 2:42
But of course, the team dynamics of the thing that make or break a software project tipping. Yeah, yeah, sure. You know, you could have all the clever tools you like. But if the team doesn't get on with each other, you're just not going to get good results.
Jorge Reyes 2:57
That is correct.
Michaela 3:00
So what are some of the problems you've seen when people don't have a high performance team?
Jorge Reyes 3:07
Well, it doesn't, it doesn't mean that number, high performance teams don't deliver anything like that. It's just an ideal state to aim for. Right? Even if you don't maintain everything, and all the characteristics are for high performers seem it's an ideal place to be at. So there are a lot of different levels below that what we're going to review right now. But some of the things that I'm playing against a team delivering a project are things like internal distrust, right people afraid to speak up their minds and lack of commitment, lack of motivation, no accountability there in attention to the project deliverables or
the disconnection between the project angle and the tasks that they have at hand,
when that happens, projects are are undertaking not to keep everybody busy right there, and then taken to create value and for a specific purpose. So not having a high performance team doesn't mean you're gonna fail, or you're gonna not deliver on time or anything like that. But it is all about increasing the chances of success, right, increasing the chances that your projects going to be successful. And also going even beyond that I'm making the project development an enjoyable experience for everybody, right? Because high performance me means a lot, not only for the business, but also for the sanity and emotional stability of the team members.
Michaela 4:56
So what that means is not only to do you get results in this project, but the people stay around and they don't quit or burnout.
Jorge Reyes 5:07
That is correct. That is correct. I mean, at least not intentionally, we should always account for people entering and leaving a project just because of, you know, life. But, um, yeah, if you have a healthy healthy environment where your team then
Michaela 5:30
your, your rotation decreases, for sure. Right. And as we discussed in a previous episode on cold fusion, suicide, you know, sometimes people take a really bad way to get out of a bad work situation. So
I'll put that link in the show notes for anyone who's got that kind of serious issue with a low performance team.
But maybe we can move forward and look at a exactly what kind of things if you had a high performance team? What could you expect to have? What do you mean by performance here? Yeah,
Jorge Reyes 6:09
high performance in in our industry, right, software development for us high performance teams on how specific characteristics and there's, there's an entire process of
project team for me that I don't think we're going to have time to this cost that but, um, basically, when they first meet, and they get together and everybody's starting to keep their stuff on for themselves, and how, at that point, the project manager, she, you know, step up and you do some some discussions and people getting to know each other, and, and then there's an entire storming stage where they fight against each other, you got to see the different personalities take place, who is kind of dominant, who is more power aggressive, and things like that. And then then it's, it's the norm inform that normal stage, right, where things kind of settle and they you almost have a team there, then you have up the performing stage, well, everybody knows what they are supposed to be doing. The the team members have already created interdependencies between each other and they tackle things and move things forward. And then you have a potential High Performance Team when you're already at that stage. And one of the things and that you have with a high performance team is that you have efficiency gains, they are reliable so whenever you're doing scheduling or things like that delivery dates, um, things become more reliable, more accurate use your your ability to forecast future events related to the project team becomes easier because they're consistent right they're predictable and there are a lot of processes that need to be in place even the culture around them I mean the company culture around and needs to allow them to be high performance What I mean is that I've seen companies where the project managers are you know all about command and control I do everything I I decide on budget on on your requirements and changes solutions that are going to be implemented so the entire philosophy of of High Performance Team in the Agile sense for software development is that
the team the project team organizes themselves right they there they have a maturity that allows them to make decisions on scope and budget and things like that of course they need somebody to keep them check but it's not it's not a command and control role for a project manager but more of a facilitator facilitate and I'm someone that helps them you know move things out of their way and make life easier for them so it's a it's what it's typically called a servant leader right
Michaela 9:29
so when you have a project manager who's a servant to that team as opposed to a dictator
Jorge Reyes 9:46
so there are a few things you need to make sure you achieve before doing that right
you cannot just group a bunch of people together and say okay you're a team here's a Go Go right so I'm not saying that should happen and ever but once part of the project goals right for every project you start with
chances are if you work with or tues you're gonna be working with new people or people you didn't work with and your last project because you we we grew people together depending to the project needs right so
internally or tues for example the only goal is not to achieve
whatever the the client goals are but also to first achieve self empowerment and self organizing team that's part of the project will all the time and achieve high performance is two seconds what do I mean by that that is a ppm on the early stages you said the rules straight set the goal straight As for the project and for the product team and you say explicitly, we need to make sure you guys are familiar with enough with the requirements are close enough to the client and our
knowledge enough about what needs to happen. And so connected with the project goals that you guys can take decisions, right and react to changes that are going to be thrown into the in the middle of the project execution. Right. And when when new solutions need to be implemented. You allow them to, to,
to fail, even implementing new new solutions, right.
It's called fail fast and fail how to say it fail fast and fail early healthy. But I'm
a lot of this was we have implemented for products come for from client projects, actually, when people just you know are improvising and creating new things for solving real life problems. Right. And we have failed sometimes, right? It takes, I don't know, 40 hours, 80 hours to do an implementation that didn't work at the end, we cannot charge that to the client. Right? That is
a risk we take. But
from that experimentation process is where true innovation comes. And people need to be encouraged to do so. Right. I need to know it's, it's okay, if they fail, right, because they were trying to do something. And when you allow them to feel comfortable about trying new things that's crucially important for beyond the project scope.
Michaela 13:00
So if, if you if the other people more important than the process or is the process more important than the people for sure. So
Jorge Reyes 13:10
it's always people before processes and tools like one of the Agile principles that is our mantra here for sure yet people is web deliver things, right people is what creates value,
Unknown 13:25
at least
Jorge Reyes 13:28
now, I don't know 50 years.
Michaela 13:31
But well, who knows what will be happening 30 years from now in the software industry, I'm sure will be a lot for a
other innovations that we already see that happening now. So
so you help the team to grow. And this way the team is, is more than the sum of the individual people. If you have three people on the team, it's it's more powerful than three individuals, you know, it's a That's correct,
Jorge Reyes 14:00
I mean, database or teamwork to be actually, you know, worth the time and effort of coordinating the group instead of individuals,
the output as a group must be a multiple of the outputs of every one of the team members individually working alone, right? That's kind of that the idea of working together. But if there's no synergy between the members of the group's I'm 10, you're not either
really taking advantage of the efficiency gains that you can have for from working as a team, right. So
there are a lot of team dynamics, for sure. And there's also the personal side of everything, right, they need to be really aware off
and you need to be prepare as a project manager or as a team member to be able to provide personal knowledge support, emotional support, as much as technical support, right, because life happens and people have family issues, you they have secret parents, they have child province of school, they have their their own health problems, sometimes they're dealing with anxiety, stress, right? So you need to really make sure you give people space, you leave the door open for anybody to reach out and say, I'm not having a good time right now. And you help right need to be visible depressant and definitely requests as accept requests for time off, right. Listen, when someone wants to be heard, and let them know it's important. Take care of themselves first, right. So basically just be be human. Yeah, it's important.
Michaela 15:52
I think that's very important. And it's also important to listen to people's, you know, technical challenges, because a minor experience sometimes developers don't speak up when this talking on a technical problem. Yeah, they want to solve it themselves, instead of reaching out to other team members or other resources. Yeah, and
Jorge Reyes 16:11
I'm not sure. But I think a lot of companies that we worked with at least work in a virtualized environment, right. And that introduces more challenges for what kind of putting two developers together for to exchange knowledge, right? And experience because it's easier not to ask, so for a project manager, or a team leader needs to really be aware of and intentionally put those or create those opportunities for the knowledge interaction, making sure that the more the more experienced developers help the least experienced developers. And actually one one of the traits, one of the important train so far of a high performance team is that everybody is a general likes and specialist, right. And what that means is that you can do a lot of things not only wanting, so you're not just a tester, you're not just a front end developer, you're not just a back end developer,
you know about everything, right? Maybe you're not the best at everything, or you're not an expert at everything. But you know, how to tackle problems that arise from multiple fronts, right? That helps you be very, very efficient and deal with where I've only bottlenecks, right, whenever somebody's not available for whatever reason, then, you know, you gotta cover at least temporarily, right? Yeah,
Michaela 17:55
I definitely agree with I've seen teams where the was somewhat only one person could do the database stuff for the soul for complex cold fusion issues. And then, of course, they get scheduled out on every single project and and then you can't move forward as far so great point there. And, you know, a week in it. We had an episode with Peter Ivan on virtual teams that talks about,
you know, working on distributed teams, I'll link that in the show notes as well. But I'm sure you have a lot more insights on virtual teams.
Unknown 18:31
Well, yeah, I don't think we we don't have two people co located in the same place. So everybody's remote.
Unknown 18:40
So yes,
Unknown 18:42
we
Jorge Reyes 18:43
Yeah, that's the only way we work. And
Unknown 18:47
I cannot emphasize enough how important communication is
Jorge Reyes 18:54
old town, anywhere vertical base, but we're virtualized companies. It's just critical, right? We cannot see if you're at the office,
we just need to know if you're available. And things need to be communicated more diligently for sure.
Michaela 19:11
Yeah, you need to have a higher what they call a cue for emotional intelligence, people are able to speak up about issues and communicate clearly.
Now, you talked about agile teams, and that's what you use all artists, how does that compare to traditional hierarchical teams?
Unknown 19:34
Well,
Jorge Reyes 19:36
at least on our end, how that compares to a typical
hierarchical project is that well, first, they want very obvious, there's no hierarchy, there's no boss, there's no no one, you know, to blame for. It's either the theme losers or a team wins, right? So it's a shame, responsibility. And the point so there's, there's no one bigger or smaller than, than the rest. So, um, it's a matter why do you do if you're part of the project team, then then you you're sharing everything you're supposed to share the team values, team goals and team responsibility. And we deal a lot with the concept of emerging leadership a lot. So sometimes that what that means is that different people can lead the team on the same project on different phases of a project, for example, like when you first start a project, we should they start a custom development project, starting from scratch, for example, we usually start with the same face, Ryan designing the, the mockups, and I'm the user experience, and nor the workflows and all that. So I'm a web designer could could, you know, take the lead on that naturally. And then when implementation comes, I mean, the back end, then the, the cold fusion developer will pick it up, right. But everybody is aware of what's going on, right. So when we do, for example, the standards, even if you you're not working on specific tickets, right now, you are part of the standard you were listening to what's been sand. And
because we call it a small boutique communication, right? It's really important that you pick up things from those conversations that are happening, because they're going to be relevant to you at some point. And you can always be a few things that are going to be useful for what you're going to be doing yourself. So
Unknown 21:47
that's another thing. Another thing is that the client
Jorge Reyes 21:51
I'm or the business or the project owner, or the sponsor, whoever is representing the client, it's always fighting of our meetings, always. So he's just part of a of a team. He's part of the team, right? So
I realized when I read your nodes, that by looking at the slide
that I had created, he seemed like there were some tasks that were not assigned to the business owner or business representative. But that's not the case. The image is actually a business guy in a suit just laying down like this, right. So the, the entire, you know, this is not allowed symbol was for, for business representatives, saying, I'm gonna just monitor things and see what's going on from time to time. But I'm not going to do what my role actually dictates that as be part of the stand ups, keep customer feedback review implementations in every spring retrospective and making sure where the delivering what the client wants to know that responsibility becomes part of the of the business owner or business representative. And we do stand up with the clients and if we don't do stand up with them, we do at least at the very least the spring retrospective with them, for sure.
Michaela 23:20
And just for people who haven't done that a child stand up me into daily stand up meeting, and you might literally be standing up if it was in an office so that the meeting is kept to like 15 minutes, because no one wants to be standing up for an hour long meeting.
Do you actually stand up when you're all remote? I don't have a standing desk. But if I had one, I would you need a standing desk, man. I just go on their amazing. I've got one of these things that converts me sitting and standing so I can stand shit.
Jorge Reyes 23:57
I know I needed. So it's just the price tag. That doesn't interest me that much. Oh, there's always something else I can do without money.
Michaela 24:05
There you go. I was only 170 bucks on Amazon.
Unknown 24:09
Oh, man. Yeah. Cool.
Unknown 24:13
Michael that you have on my son. I don't have my missing here since
Michaela 24:17
Oh, I got it when I visited the US. I ordered it and then schlepped it back anyway. Let's
let's talk a bit more about the different roles. You mentioned. The business representative for all one of the roles are in the agile team that you run.
Unknown 24:36
And so in the agile team,
Jorge Reyes 24:40
it's basically a few a few roles, right? Is the team members what we call the
development team, right? The actual team implementing things right. Then we have the business owner or business representative. And then we have the project manager where he could be the scrum master right now. Whatever you call, it doesn't matter. Um, and that's basically the rules that we have. It's not the
Michaela 25:08
and why just to people who haven't, don't use the term Scrum Master that that's what you have the stand up meeting they call the scrum.
Jorge Reyes 25:18
Is that right? Yeah. Scrum.
Michaela 25:21
Yeah. So it's another word word for stand up meetings. Scrum? I guess that means every was all together, figuring out the issues?
Unknown 25:30
That's correct.
Jorge Reyes 25:32
I mean, on the team, what we call the development team, there are different roles, of course, right. This usually somebody specialized on the front end specialized on the backend specialist infrastructure
specialize in something, right. And then like I say, we have a general likes and specialist. Hopefully, that can do many of the tasks that the port pro requires, but they do have a main role in the project, right, depending on their their experience, the ability and the project requirements. Now, what
Michaela 26:11
how do you do sometimes developers a like a like prima donnas, that they're like, the genius and in that particular area, or is that how you all with these teams? Or is the team more important than the individual developer?
Unknown 26:26
Can you ask? Again, Michael didn't understand.
Michaela 26:30
Sure. So it you know, sometimes in development teams, you have star developers who like
Unknown 26:37
that, that kind
Michaela 26:38
of more importantly, the team is that how these teams will cool. Oh, no, not at all. Um, like I said, everybody's just saying, you know, even if, even if the CEO of artists, you know, Lewis who does a lot of development, even if he's on the team, he may not be the number one person, right. Yeah,
Unknown 26:59
I mean,
Jorge Reyes 27:02
sometimes it leads, just joins for completing a few tasks, right? So he's part of the team and it doesn't matter. He's the CEO, he just plays with a team, right? And great discussions are kept like that, or at least that's the intention. Sometimes we just have to educate people, right? And let them know, you know, what, it's okay to speak your mind, it doesn't matter who's on the call, just, you know, if you're, if you're not, it's, it's really valuable when people do not agree with something and they share that with really encourage that. But obviously, just saying no to things just because you don't want to do it, or just because of for the sake of saying no, that does not what I mean, but you know, when you have a different approach, a different way of doing things, your mind for us is extremely valuable that you share that with the team free, it doesn't matter if we're going to do it or not. But there's always value in that so that we don't want people keeping their, their, their thoughts and ideas to themselves, no matter at all.
Michaela 28:21
Is there a limit to how big you can have a high performance team, do you think? Oh,
Jorge Reyes 28:26
um, I think there's not a limit per se. But the bigger the team, the more difficult it gets, of course,
Unknown 28:37
there's
Jorge Reyes 28:39
Somewhere I read an article one, and I posted a tweet about it, that software had these economies of scale in some aspects. So the bigger the team I have seen, you might experience the more complicated things to manage. So it is possible to be performance with with a big team, possibly, yes? Does it require a lot of work a more work, not a smaller team, then yes, of course, what I've seen work,
or at least by experience, what we have worked with its, you know, no more than 12 members, including even including the client representative. So more or less like that, anything below that, it's, it's easier to manage, right. I have seen teams and I've worked with teams where they're like, 6080 developers, and they have, you have like different groups, and each group has their own Scrum and then the scrum masters for from those groups. They have their own Scrum and then you have Scrum of scrums of storms. So it's getting it gets a little bit crazy.
Michaela 29:51
Ryan, add the overhead that you know, so you talked about how you can have, you know, mutual accountability, the team members for the team call How do you get team members committed to the common vision of the project?
Jorge Reyes 30:09
Yeah, that's a good question. Part of that is you need to make sure people buying into your company culture and values first, because if they do that, they're one step from committing to any project goal that comes their way because they're know why they are part of this company. And what they're doing things for does that that's kind of the first thing I would say. And then once they understand the value, that how we value a client work, you know, how the, the importance of they have a team member
and contributed to the project, then it as an entire mind shift, right, I'm seeing things from that perspective, that you are really an important piece of apostle. So if
that's more or less how you we don't force them, we don't make them we just
we we make them one to participate on the project and feel responsible about what what needs to happen.
Unknown 31:21
So
Michaela 31:24
when you have this, you know, the team members share the ownership of the outcome, which means they'll go the extra mile to fix problems or, or communicate clearly when their challenge instead of doing some of that office politics, stuff that happens on traditional teams
where people stab each other in the back or hide information because, you know, developer the heights, the most information gets paid the most, you know,
Jorge Reyes 31:52
they're there are two things that are going to get you in trouble here. But immediately one speaking badly about one of your teammates, mates, right, that get you in trouble real quick. And the other thing is saying, This is not my job.
If you say that you get in trouble with
Michaela 32:19
that, that makes sense. How do you deal when when two people on the team have a conflict? How are they supposed to deal with it, if they're not allowed to say a the other person is doing a bad job,
Jorge Reyes 32:32
Darrell, they're allowed to give constructive feedback for sure. But, um, I was just replying to the entire concept you mention about stabbing somebody in the back. And I that will get you in trouble here. And we and we don't like that. And we are all about 100% transparency, right? So you want to say something about somebody, then let's just meet the discuss the performance issues and let's try to find a solution. Right.
And we usually very good at managing
conflict because we focus on finding a solution instead on someone to blame, right?
Michaela 33:20
Well, that's totally different from how most organizations operate. Usually, organizations are looking for someone to blame.
Jorge Reyes 33:28
Yeah, it's true. It's true, because they are the management comes down hard on the corporate so and they're looking for one. So
yeah, unfortunately, that happens in some of the companies we
Unknown 33:46
we do encourage for you to take responsibility for your mistakes.
Jorge Reyes 33:52
So that's something we all have to deal with at some point. And we know we all made mistakes and so many mistakes. All mistakes are forgettable. forgivable, right? That doesn't mean
there are no, no. So mistakes are not going to get you out of
of a project. Right. Some mistakes, everything is forget forgettable, forgivable sorry. But some things cannot happen. Or again, like issues with honesty and things like that
are more serious than any technical issues that you may introducing a project right, because they're
Michaela 34:35
breaking the company culture. Yeah,
Unknown 34:37
that's correct.
Michaela 34:39
Whereas if you tried an experiment to solve a programming problem, and it didn't work out that a different level of faith
Jorge Reyes 34:48
that is correct. So I'm issues with values and things like that about, I want to see transparency, you know, responsibility, those things are more important, any of your development skills, right, that you can actually learn from the more experienced developers Hmm, that's actually one very important thing that we do is that, um, we, we,
we have all trained with, with a coach at least, and in school, or whatever, you know, when you train for, for soccer, football, or whatever sport you did when you were younger, I don't know. But we will have seen the difference when people push you a little bit further than what you used to pushing yourself. So we do that in order to see here in another way. And we would call it throwing people into the fire, right, we usually going to give somebody that just joined our ranks, a task that we know is going to be a little bit above their experience a little bit above their current skill set, right. But we, we let them know that there's going to be people ready for them to to ask for help, right. And we have officially explicitly assigned mentors and everything. And the culture around our work is that we always share our knowledge, right with others. And I've have dealt with people that if you ask them a question, it's like, you know, why I spend so much time heating my hand to understand that now, it's your time to, you know, go nuts, I'm not just going to share with you everything, I know, we don't do that here, right. Because we, we have the team mentality, right. And that's very important. So we throw people into the fire, that means into specific assignments that we know are a little bit above where they know, not too far away from what they know, but a little bit above. And if they need any help, we meet them halfway, right, and no ready baked solution, just meet them halfway. And that's how we prepare people to
to go beyond what they know, gaining knowledge, gain more experience. And that keeps them very motivated. Because there is an inherent motivation on being better at what you do. Right, right. And now, I think the knowledge is there available for somebody to share with you.
Michaela 37:33
So this is a system for experimenting and being able to fail safely in the team.
Unknown 37:40
Correct.
Michaela 37:43
So you mentioned you do use some technology, what what kind of techie used to help the team work? Well, typically that given that it's distributed,
Unknown 37:55
yeah, actually,
Jorge Reyes 37:58
it's not a complicated technology we use, we use, I think, like, four or five things to manage or two, and they're very basic, it's soon, right? For videoconferencing.
We do have as a policy that we have our cameras on all the time.
Unknown 38:20
So why man,
Jorge Reyes 38:23
you know, I think more he said, with the body language than anything else.
Unknown 38:29
So I can see you're rolling your eyes or,
Jorge Reyes 38:33
you know, you're tired, or Yes, your your facial expression can give away so much so
Michaela 38:39
as well. And it also means you have to also means you have to focus on the meeting, you can't be doing something else.
Jorge Reyes 38:48
Yeah, that's true. But it's more for that missing communication that goes when you're not seeing face to face, you know, it's really important and we use for communicating with each other
as synchronously and we use slack and email slack has been a game changer for us until your truth. So pretty cool. And then we use
I'm sorry, you cut off my, our slack again, Agent boy, oh, my God, before there were like, thousand different threads going on, on on your email, and no, no clear way of separating things project or, you know, high level activity, at least it was just messy and was just
a spaghetti of emails and now it's like you have dedicated channels for for all the projects and any major or, or big activity there, you can just create a channel for its automatically organized for you. And if you're paying for for storage, you have limited storage, limited history, and that goes a long way
and those model to for Yeah, and we use DERA for managing software projects. For small and presentations. We use travel, and even sometimes we combine trailer and JIRA just because travel is a lot quicker, not only the connection to travel squeaker, because we use a JIRA cloud version.
And for open source projects, we use a lot JIRA. And
it's really useful because you keep track of a lot of things in a granular level for proper software management, right. But for quicker projects, we use trailer a lot. And for internal stuff, we use trailer then just whatever calendar application using,
Unknown 41:05
that's why we use
Michaela 41:11
All right, so when you're doing these stand up, so other conference calls, do you have any tips for people? Because I know that's where a lot of developers, managers for mental issues conference on patient go on to law? Yeah, no,
Unknown 41:28
definitely. And
Jorge Reyes 41:30
I think we all struggle with this. So I'm going to tell you a few things that I should be doing myself, but just just, you know, guidelines for everybody. And for myself as well. Well,
Michaela 41:42
now, you now you telling them as publicly on the podcast, or Hey, you have no excuse to not do these things anymore? Yeah,
Jorge Reyes 41:51
these are goals for everybody, including myself. And
yeah, one of the hardest things for me, at least, is to make sure for example, a stand up speak the minutes enough, no more
Michaela 42:07
than one 515, right? Not five, zero, yeah,
Jorge Reyes 42:10
one, five, or whatever meeting for that matter, to keep it in, you know, on the schedule a lot of time for that. So no bleeding like, like this code. For example, I'm not sure if we're going to go above, but unless somebody has a heart that line we usually go above the time. So to keep things on track. And on time, there needs to be you know, what, what you do before this call to create notes and create the meeting minute that goes a long way as well. It's like, you have a structure, you know, what one you have an idea of how much a section or specific topics would take. So you can prioritize things and say, if I hit the the time that I can avoid or skip this topics, and just focus on what's important. But be very, very diligent on not going above the time for two reasons. First, because it's a matter of discipline, right? And when you have when you're trying to promote a culture of discipline in the company, one of the things is, you know, you schedule the meeting for for this time, so be on time and leave on time. So, Michael, you know, already that I'm not good with the first one. So, the, the other one, I
Michaela 43:36
figured that was because you were born in El Salvador or something. Yeah, but Swiss hoy a very precise about time you need more Swiss influence I think it was the wife for some tips here.
Unknown 43:50
And I'll definitely definitely but
Unknown 43:54
I'm not used to having meetings that bizarrely
Jorge Reyes 43:59
although is a three pm my time that's usually the time I spent with with with the family because my day starts around this time where we're Louise's work waking up. So
So that's kind of tricky to manage. But then, um, yeah, keep the answers coming. Of course, when you ask something, it's okay to, to hear everybody's attention, but be a good mediator, right? And be very
clear about what what the others should expect from your behavior. So if you caught them, they don't get mad. Just Just let them know upfront before you meet with anybody for the first time that you are just a mediator, you need to make sure you you finish on time. So you might cut them more or deviate or guide the conversation and all the path so that's that's something that needs to be said upfront kind of the rules of engagement have a have a meeting and I'm keep a document that of course that's that's very important. We we either record the meetings or or take notes or both, but we keep them documented. More importantly when we do with the client just make sure you ask for permission if you're recording
so you're getting into trouble even if you're doing audio recording. Just Just ask I have no one but one
Unknown 45:32
client tell me not to record him
Jorge Reyes 45:36
because we are there were screen sharing and they were screen sharing their production database and they don't want to reveal any user data or anything like that. So that's the one time but
the other times it's totally fine that you record and it's pretty useful because you can share that we any new team members or anybody in the future you want them to get up to speed with some requirements or some policy changes or whatever you have the recording there
Michaela 46:09
so we've only got a few minutes left just to go into my timekeeping role yes and I know you're going to be attending CF summit out What are you looking forward to this year CF summit
Jorge Reyes 46:25
last year was my first time it was really great to see so many people interested in or two solutions, products, no cool books, textbooks, come on books, content books, all the boxes not and what's really, really exciting to to see how we got a lot of work from that conference. And I'm saying I was glad for that. Because we when i when i mean work is basically we were able to help somebody with their problems. And most of them were people that hadn't use our products ever. And they were struggling with legacy applications, which is kind of the the most common symptom in a cold fusion
legacy applications. But it was great to see that they were willing to move into modern times, and that we could help them. So that will be the one I'm looking forward the most to meet new people that are wanting to move away from legacy into modern times. And we can help them
Michaela 47:31
and don't you have some training in Las Vegas after the summit? Yeah, that
Jorge Reyes 47:36
is correct. We have a posh conference this time, it's going to be after the conference for two days in a hotel very close to the venue of
CF summit. And it's called box from zero to hero. And now Yeah, that we started that workshop for into the box or yearly conference in Texas on April and it will it's sold out. And then everybody was really happy about it, because he really takes you through hands on, you know, get your hands dirty with coal books, and a little bit of command boats and liver test box and things like that. So it's pretty exciting. It's a little bit intense, but it's good, and people are happy about it. And we decided, let's keep that a trifle for Las Vegas. And
it's almost sold out now. So that's pretty exciting. Wow,
Michaela 48:32
is exciting. Yeah. So you know, as you know, I'm writing a book on making Kochi fusion more alive I'm curious you know what you think what would it take to make cold fusion more alive this year,
Jorge Reyes 48:50
um, it is it is a matter of consistency. So it's going to be more or less the same as last year
Unknown 48:59
it's going to be good consistently
Jorge Reyes 49:02
changing people's mind and adopting new technology and making our language beautiful or and our community beautiful for others to join right because first of our our goal for the short term right one two years from now used to get as much as people living with legacy applications to getting to modern times right and then long term we want people more people joining the community because the language is awesomely cool and you have all the development tools that you could find in other web development language so
that that is for me for the next two years to be really consistent at our strategy modernizing people right get mother nines get up to date, please our upgrade your software and do best practices
Michaela 50:05
that those will sound like a great thing to me. So if people want to find you online, one of the best ways to do that the best
Jorge Reyes 50:13
way to do that is to Twitter probably or the Ortus solutions dot com page on the contact email. I always get a copy of that. So
Michaela 50:28
all right, so I'll put those together with your email address in the links so people can reach out to you that curious about this stuff and appreciate you coming on the podcast today. Boy, thank you for your time.
