In the following article I’m exposing how our startup is trying to stay focused on the essential matters and what does our customers mean to us.

A couple of days ago I read about another hot Finnish startup called Jolla and the way they are leading their crew. Jolla is continuing Nokia’s work on MeeGo based smartphones and is recruiting new employees at an accelerated pace. Jolla’s CEO Jussi Hurmola told in the article that the employees of Jolla form new teams very month with coordination from the management team based on tasks need to be done. They are calling them as iteration rounds like in agile development.

What a wonderful idea I thought and started thinking of how those methods would work for our startup Onrego Ltd. Suddenly I realized that we are already working almost like that even though our iteration round is one week rather than Jolla’s one month. We have a management team meeting weekly which lasts for two hours. In the meeting we summarize what we have done within the week and what should we do next. We are mostly concentrating on developing our cloud services and discussing about the meetings with clients, with which we have had great discussions about their expectations of IT services now and in the near future. We are very thankful to our clients for all the meetings so far!

Many of our friends have been asking how it feels to be a startup entrepreneur. I may have replied as “excellent” but what I meant was, was “quite dizzy” :). That’s because there one million and more tasks to fulfill because basically you have no processes, no infrastructure, nor any assistants. You have to build everything from the ground up. That’s why Onrego has milestones and targets which should lead our way and help us stay focused on the essential matters. The milestones also help us achieve something, and let us feel success, which is essential for every company and its employees.

Because our hands are full of tasks, we are trying to get rid of garbage. For example we are using internal discussion forum to minimize email traffic, which normally creates lots of interruptions. We are also teleworking whenever it’s useful and have quick chats with some of our clients and our partners using Microsoft Lync, as I wrote couple of weeks ago. I have also been fan of Lean techniques for quite some time now and I try to implement them to Onrego’s daily work. If you don’t know what Lean is I suggest you take a look. While Lean was first developed for manufacturing goods, Lean has also been used for service production and for knowledge work as well.

Currently we are in the start-up phase developing our cloud services but as soon as we enter the production phase, we need to adjust our way to work a little bit. We are going to implement Balanced Scorecard as a framework which lets us to monitor our performance. One very important measure to Onrego is customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is so important that Kenneth, our Chief Customer Officer, will have his eyes and ears on the heartbeat of our clients and informs the management team of how we have succeeded.

I might open up our working methods a little bit more in the future when we hit the production phase with our cloud services.