Vinay Pai

Returning to My Old Blog

Now that the acquisition of PayCycle by Intuit has completed, I imagine we'll integrate web properties in the near future. (I don't have any details or timing, but this seems like a pretty safe bet.) As a result, I will return to my personal blog: http://vinaypai.blogspot.com/ If you've enjoyed my posts, feel free to follow me to my personal blog, home to numerous posts since January 2007. See you on the other side. :-)

What Are Your Data Centers Doing This Summer?

Ahh, school's out. Kids are sleeping in, watching lots of TV, and heading off to different camps. But here at PayCycle, we've got a lot going on-- in our data centers. Summer is the best time of year to upgrade and start gearing up for the January "peak season." And it's also a great time of year to get deals on gear from enterprise vendors. Many have a fiscal year that ends in June, and they're always looking to close their books with a great quarter. So the discounts are ripe for the picking-- something Daniel, my Director of Operations, knows very well. Daniel's got an uncanny ability to extract great savings from enterprise Sales reps and VAR's, much to their dismay, but much to our CFO's delight.

Okay, back to our data centers. Earlier in June, we made some significant upgrades to our enterprise SAN. We upgraded the heads, added several disk shelves, and upgraded some older disk shelves as well. As a result, we've got more capacity and more bandwidth, which translate into faster response times for customers. 

In July, we're taking a breather from any upgrades, however, since this is a quarterly tax filing month for customers. But in August, we've got some additional upgrades planned-- some new database hardware and some new load balancers. Daniel's team just loves this stuff. It's like opening presents under the tree, but the presents are a little too big to wrap! 

So stay tuned. In the next few posts, I'll talk more about our data centers. In the meantime, have a safe and enjoyable summer.

Pigs, and Chickens, and Agile, Oh My!

Apologies in advance to the Wizard of Oz folks, but it's a very memorable line. One of the concepts we've used in our implementation of agile has been the notion of pigs and chickens to define roles in a sprint team. The terms actually derive from the joke about breakfast. The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.

• A pig is a team member who owns a deliverable in a sprint and must complete tasks for that sprint. Examples: product managers, user experience, developers, QA, docs.
• A chicken is a stakeholder who has input into the deliverables but is not directly responsible for producing the deliverable(s). My fellow managers and I are chickens, for the most part.

Agile is all about empowering the pigs to make decisions and get their work done in the most efficient manner. Pigs and chickens can attend scrums, but it's the pigs who do the talking. If they need information from a chicken, they can ask the chicken. But the scrum meeting is pig domain. It's the place where the team members who are responsible for deliverables talk about their deliverables. The scrums have become efficient, focused meetings where the team gets down to business. It's been a pretty cool transformation to watch!

Automatic Posts to Twitter

After some messing around with TypePad, I think I've got our blogs set to post automatically to our twitter feeds. Trying it out now. (Fingers crossed.)

Agile Fosters Teamwork, Transparency, and Trust

In a previous post, I discussed PayCycle's transition to an agile development process. Since making the switch, we've seen many tangible benefits with the new process. In our process, we follow the "scrum" model where each sprint team meets every morning in the agile "war room." (Okay, it's just a conference room, but war room sounds more cool.) The daily scrum is a 15-minute meeting where each team member answers three questions:

1. What did I do in the last 24 hours?
2. What will I work on in the next 24 hours? 
3. Am I blocked, or do I need help? 

The updates are quick, and there's definitely a focus on results and deliverables. What did you finish? What will you finish? Also, there's an opportunity to raise any blockers in the scrum. If you're waiting on a deliverable from another team member, such as a user interface design or clarification on requirements, just let folks know. If the issue can't be resolved during the scrum, the individuals can work offline after the scrum and provide an update at the next scrum. 

I've been happily surprised to find that the engineers really like the daily scrums. They like the fact that the meetings are focused, efficient, and results-oriented. Also, they never go more than 24 hours while being blocked on an issue. The structure of the meetings is ideal for folks who appreciate (and sometimes need) the follow-up on deliverables and tasks.

And the burn-down charts, which track the team's progress, provide an accurate and daily update on the project's status. The scrum master and project owner have great visibility into the project status. When we're getting close to the end of the sprint, tasks that can not get completed can be returned to the backlog. Instead of wishful thinking to complete a project, the team has the accurate data to make informed decisions about what can really get done in the alloted amount of time. 

Over the next few posts, I'll talk more about the tools we're using and the details of the process. Stay tuned...

Life in an Agile World

Earlier this year, PayCycle transitioned to an agile development process with monthly sprints. There were many motivations for the change, some internally driven and some externally driven. Agile is not a new concept. In fact, it's been around for many years. Since PayCycle is headquartered in Silicon Valley, we have the opportunity to take advantage of innovation and best practices that are happening in our neck of the woods. Agile is just one of those best practices that we're making part of our culture. There are also some tangible business benefits for us. We're able to develop features more iteratively, include key stakeholders in the development process, and incorporate customer feedback throughout the development process.  

We are following a scrum methodology that involves five stages for each sprint team:

• A product planning meeting with the sprint team and key stakeholders.
• A sprint planning meeting with the sprint team
• Daily scrums, which are 15-minute stand-up meetings where team members discuss status, plans, and any blocking issues that need resolution. The scrums have improved collaboration and have allowed teams to focus on the deliverables for that month's sprint.
• A demo meeting where the sprint team shows stakeholders their completed deliverable and gets feedback, which can be incorporated into the next sprint.
• A retrospective meeting where the sprint team discusses key learnings from the sprint so that they can improve the process for the next sprint.

In this new agile world, we start the month with a series of demos from the previous month's sprints and then launch into the planning meetings for the new sprints that are starting this month. We've just recently aligned all of the sprints so that they all start and end at the same time. Right now our biggest challenge is conference room space! We'll see how it's going after another few sprint cycles and make adjustments as needed. Even as we defined our new agile development process, we've been agile about it. We fine-tuned and improved the process with the feedback and lessons we learned along the way.

Throughout the year, I'll blog about our progress. And if you've got thoughts you'd like to share, post a comment or send me an e-mail: vinay@paycycle.com.

Welcome

Welcome to the new PayCycle blog. I'm Vinay Pai, the Vice President of Product Development at PayCycle. In my blog, I'll talk about various technology topics from Web 2.0 to mobile devices, and I'll also share how tips and techniques from what we've learned at PayCycle. After all, we have one of the leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) implementations in the payroll space. And over the past 9 years, we've developed a base of over 85,000 customers who pay over 500,000 employees using our service. 

In PD, we've got a lot of things cooking, and I hope to give you some insights into what we're doing. There will be some things I can't share, naturally, but I hope you can benefit from some of our experiences.

New Blog on the Launch Pad (I mean Type Pad)

We're almost ready to launch the new PayCycle blog. Kyle's been busy getting the blog site ready to go, and he's also turned into our local blog evangelist-- enlisting contributors, getting them onboarded, and spreading the "gospel." Guy Kawasaki, watch out! 

I won't be moving all the content from my old blog. If you want to check out my musings, go to http://vinaypai.blogspot.com/

T-10, T-9, T-8, (Kyle are all systems go?),...

Sun-IBM. It's Deja-Vu All Over Again

I started my technology career in 1988 in the cold midwest. As a bright-eyed college graduate, with CS and EE degrees in hand, I donned my tie and joined the ranks at IBM in Rochester, Minnesota. That was a long time ago, in a place far, far away. I still remember the apartment that I rented in an old victorian house across from the Mayo Clinic. The sprawling IBM campus was the business unit for the midrange systems-- S/34, S/36, and AS/400. Since IBM was still in the middle of the ongoing anti-trust investigation, it was preparing for a potential break-up of the company. Each business unit operated independently with its own engineering and manufacturing for systems, software, and peripherals. Ahh, memory lane...

As a Sun alum, I wonder what the acquisition of Sun by IBM will bring? 

Keynotes from the Web 2.0 Summit

Well, I've read my fair share of O'Reilly books (mostly about the LAMP stack), but this is the first Tim O'Reilly keynote that I've attended. Mercifully, the keynotes for this conference are after lunch and not the usual breakfast keynote. (I guess these guys like to sleep in as well.) So here I am sitting next to Martin in the Palace Hotel's grand ballroom, listening to the keynotes. During this afternoon's keynotes, Tim and John Battelle are interviewing several guests in a format similar to a late-night talkshow. Here are some highlights from the keynotes:

Larry Brilliant - Google.org. 1% of the equity of google, 1% of the profits, and 1% of employee time will be used for non-profit purposes. The 1% model was "borrowed" from Marc Benioff at Salesforce. They use a VC-like model to decide which causes to fund. They go after "big problems" that need solving where Google can make a unique difference.

Mary Meeker - Morgan Stanley

• Lots of financial data on the economy. (slides)
• Facebook: 161M visitors
• Youtube: 329M visitors
• Skype: 370M visitors
• Paypal: 65M visitors - $15B total payment volume (TPV). Non-eBay payment volume up +49% Y/Y.
• Ad supply > demand, so CPM's are dropping.
• China added 73M Internet users in 2007. USA added 9.8M.
• China added 86M mobine subscribers in 2007, India added 68M.

Rajesh Jain - MD Netcore Solutions

• Novatium: $100 network computer for Indian market. 50M middle-class households in India, but only 8M have computers. Their market: the 30M households who visit cybercafes.
• NetCore: using SMS for news channels & search on cell phones. SMS is also being used for advertising on phones in India. 4x the traffic of twitter.

John Doerr - Kleiner Perkins
His priorities

• Increase US government spend in green energy to $1B/yr. (E.g., healthcare: $32B/yr)
• Double the number of engineering and science graduates in the USA (from 30K/yr to 60K/yr)
• Restore DARPA to its former self as a research driver, but focused on energy.
• 2000: $100B VC money invested (50% in Internet ventures)
• 2007: $37B VC money
• 2008: $15B VC money
• 2009: $8B VC money
• Doesn't think there will be a market for exits for a couple of years. Prepare and "hunker down"
• Kleiner: spending 30% in digital, 30% in green, life sciences a little smaller.

Tips

1. Act now. Get a loan or secure more financing.
2. Protect the vital core of the business. Cut once, cut deep enough.
3. Make sure you have 18 months of cash on conservative revenue forecast. Talk to current investors and ask for additional funding now.
4. Defer facilities expansion, capital, and software.
5. Re-evaluate R&D priorities.
6. Renegotiate any and all current contracts & leases.
7. Everyone in the company should be selling the company's value prop.
8. Offer equity instead of cash.
9. Secure cash in government-backed securities instead of money-market funds. Still thinks a major bank will fail.
10. Know your revenue plan. Understand the leading indicators. React quickly.
11. Over-communicate. Do not sugarcoat.