Last Friday night we had our company party which is for the entire family of employees.  This year we gathered at a local movie theatre.  The kids had their picture taken with Santa, got popcorn, and everyone watched a holiday movie.  As the children left, they discovered Santa had left them behind a present.

Today, we gather to celebrate around food that everyone has brought, especially the Sardis, SC style barbeque.  In keeping with the spirit of giving, along with the entire company, the department has gathered toys to give for multiple children in need this season as well.

And Santa, all I really want this Christmas is a Ruby on Rails developer.  Any elves got any resumes to send me? Oh, and congress and President Obama would you please decide on federal tax changes for 2012 before 2012 actually starts!

I also heard that Steve Jobs died.

It’s hard to measure the impact Jobs and Apple have had on my life as a consumer. It’s even harder to measure the impact he made on me and countless others as members of the software development community. One quick story illustrates this. Back in 2005 or 2006 a friend and I were discussing how much we loved our iPods. The style was certainly part of the allure, but the intuitive user experience was truly what we loved. I remember saying I wish they would add the phone functions in my Treo to the iPod. My friend mentioned that it would be almost impossible to be successful with that approach and the end result would likely be “clunky”.

Of course, a short time later the iPhone was released. What’s the opposite of clunky? Streamlined, smooth, sleek, effortless. I remember thinking the thing actually anticipates my needs. Beyond a hugely successful consumer item, the iPhone was an example of awesome user experience. Jobs was not satisfied with the merely good. It had to be awesome.

Often in the software business we settle for average, but we know good can get in the way of great. We should aspire to a higher goal. There’s plenty of average (and more bad) user experiences out there. So for now, I will take a moment and say Thank You. Thank you Steve Jobs for making an awesome impact on my life. May I in some way, in my work at ACS Technologies, bring “awesome” to others.

We recently held a Crazy Shirt contest and ice cream party. A few brave souls fully embraced the Crazy Shirt competition, and everyone enjoyed the ice cream.

Here’s the 2nd and 3rd place winners:

One change that led directly to this celebration was the reorganization of teams focused on the ACS family of products. We converted three large teams into five smaller ones.

There are several key reasons for the team restructure. First, there is ample evidence that Scrum teams are most effective when appropriately sized (five to seven nine members).  With smaller teams we see benefits of more constructive communication, less time coordinating effort, increased importance of each team member’s contribution, less specialization and higher job satisfaction among team members.

A second factor in the restructure is to provide opportunities to our employees to grow, to learn, and to shine. We are challenging them to step out of their comfort zone, learn new skills and contribute in new ways.

Lastly, we restructured to better serve our customers needs. This is the motivating factor behind everything we do at ACS Technologies.

As mentioned, we also like to have fun. The winner:

The ACS Financials development team was responsible for the work on contributions and much of the Enterprise level stuff.  I’m very proud of their accomplishments!

Here’s the team:

During our little photo shoot I interviewed the team and asked, “What’s your favorite new feature?” and “What was the greatest challenge?”

From left to right:

Leslie Lee (Senior Tester)

“My favorite is the ability to void transactions and create returns in a single step. This has been widely requested for several years and will make those giving entry clerks happy. My biggest challenge was learning the business rules of how contributions worked in the past and creating new rules that allowed for new functionality but that were also compatible with the old system.”

Scarlett Gibbs (Senior Tester)

“My best feature was the new date range based reports. We believe this will make more sense to users and make reporting much more flexible. It was definitely a challenge to ensure that reports provided the same utility and delivered the same results under the new system.”

Rhonda Howell (Product Owner)

“I love the new workflow for Enter and Post Contributions. We worked hard to encompass many new features while at the same time simplifying the steps required to enter, verify, and post transactions. Ensuring that the key strokes required to actually enter gifts into the system did not change was harder than you can imagine. We know introducing even one new tab or selection into the flow would slow user’s productivity.”

Bob Hitch (Senior Developer/Scrum Master)

“It’s cool that we now allow multiple users different levels of control over the enter/post process. So, a user can be allowed to enter gifts but be restricted from posting. Another user can oversee batches of all users and be the one responsible for posting. When you factor in multi-campus, there are lot’s of possibilities.  The implementation of security around all this was a fun problem to solve.”

Nicole Wright (Senior Developer)

“The new Pledge/Gift Comparison report is my favorite. I’m in charge of custom programming and this single report eliminates the need for many custom requests! Figuring out how to include pre-payments and arrears payments on a single statement was a really hard problem to solve. It was worth it, though, because we knew this would satisfy many requests in Get Satisfaction.”

Alex White (Software Developer)

“I’m proud of the multi-campus features throughout contributions, searching, and reporting. We know the multi-campus movement is growing rapidly and there is a strong need for tools to help manage it. While the business rules and security around multi-campus are complex, we worked hard to present an easily understandable view of this to admins and admin assistants.”

We’re officially releasing this to our beta group this week. You will be notified of the general availability of the 11.0 upgrade soon. To find out more about the ACS Enterprise, contact a sales representative at 1.800.736.7425.

Effective May 6,  Keith was promoted to Programming Manager and took on the responsible for leading programmers on several development teams.

Keith graduated from Clemson University in 1993 with a degree in English and Computer Science, and began his career at ACS Technologies in 1994 as a Support Representative. He quickly moved to the programming department and has made a significant impact on many products over the years.  He eventually progressed to Senior Software Developer and also took on the role of Scrum Master in 2010.

While working for ACS Tech, Keith attended the Dallas Theological Seminary and received a Masters in Theology in 2003.   During this time he also worked on staff at High Pointe Baptist Church in Cedar Hill, TX.  Keith brings energy, experience, and a strong passion for ministry to the new role. He believes it is his calling to help churches through proper use of technology.  He joins Jamey McElveen as a key leader in R&D at ACS Technologies.

Welcome to your new role, Keith!

The Android release was well timed given new research that indicates Android phones and applications are becoming as popular as iPhone and iOS applications.

Come on Windows Mobile people!

We are working on designs for the next round of updates to the mobile apps for release later this year.  Possibilities include mobile giving, small group attendance marking and communications, and others.  We’ll be usability testing these designs  at the Ideas to Impact conference in Cincinnati in less than two weeks!  So, if you’re planning on attending the conference come by the usability booth (run by Pam Griggs and Darci Shelley) and sign up to help. We’ll also have a few surprises to show.

If you’re not yet registered for the conference it’s not too late.  Click here to register.

We hope to see you there.

A member of the team, Steve Crocker, created a humble approach to communicating the team’s results. He called these RFCs or Request for Comments. 

Steve said it like this:

Most of us were graduate students and we expected that a professional crew would show up eventually to take over the problems we were dealing with. We had accumulated a few notes on the design of DEL and other matters, and we decided to put them together in a set of notes. The basic ground rules were that anyone could say anything and that nothing was official. And to emphasize the point, I labeled the notes ‘Request for Comments.’

This work formed the foundation for the internet we know and love today. So, what does all this have to do with ACS Technologies? Well, we’ve been researching how churches measure engagement or involvement in their church community and would like feedback on how you do it at your church. We came up with some basic concepts, that I would like to put out there as a request for comment.

We break down involvement into four categories: Stressed, Healthy, Stalled, and Disengaged with a point system to measure where individual’s fit. The point system is based on the following questions:

Are you…

- A regular attender?
- A regular giver?
- A regular volunteer?
- A group member?
- A group leader?

The points could be weighted based on the culture of the church, and other aspects of the system would be customizable (i.e. the descriptions of the categories, what constitutes a regular attender, a regular giver). We would also measure movement over time as trends and at an individual level.

How would you measure this? Do these categories make sense? How do you define regular attenders, givers, etc.? How does being a group leader compare to other types of volunteer activities? What are reasonable time frames for measuring trends (monthly, quarterly, yearly, other)?

Please comment!

During the past thirty years we’ve created versions of ACS software on many platforms. Sometimes it was our desire to do so and sometimes the world changed so we had to change to survive.

Over the years versions of ACS Technologies’ CMSs existing on the following Operating Systems: Datapoint, CP/M, PC-DOS, MS-DOS, AIX, XENIX, Netware, Windows 3.11, Window XP and so on.

Some of these links lead to sites that are appropriately ugly – sorry. 

Most of these worked out for us. Some did not.  We spent a good amount of time in the early ’90s porting our DOS product to AIX and the IBM RS/6000.  It was going to be the next big thing for us.  It wasn’t.  Here’s me with my old friend:

In more recent years we’ve worked to provide solutions on the web and through extension to the Mac world.  The point is that we survived in this industry because we’ve always responded to changes in the world of technology with changes in our solutions. 

Of course, the latest shift is upon us – the shift to mobile applications.  This is especially true among the 18 to 29 year old age group.  Some statistics from PEW Mobile 2010:

• 95% send and receive texts
• 65% access the internet
• 52% send and receive email
• 48% have accessed a social networking site
• 46% used instant messaging
• 20% made a purchase
• 19% made a charitable donation

Its clear that many users have already shifted to the mobile world and this shift will only increase in the future.  You can be sure that ACS Technologies will continue to invest in developing these types of applications in 2011. 

We’ll do this because it’s fun but also because it is necessary to satisfy the needs of our customers and their constituents.

As you can see 2010 was a busy year for our teams.  In fact, there were twenty major upgrades to products in six customer groups.  There was at least one unplanned upgrade – the recent tax Federal tax update.   The decrease to the Employee Fica percentage (while keeping the Employer percentage the same) was a definite knuckle ball to all Payroll systems. Our Payroll teams dealt with this problem on short notice so our customers wouldn’t have to.

We also offficially released a new product – Remote Deposit Capture – that is being widely accepted by churches as a way to save time simplify the deposit process.

Just as we were  busy programming, testing, and writing we were also busy expanding and enhancing the department.   We added a new Programming Manager, a new Product Owner, and a new R&D support group with a new leader.  In addition, we began implementation of Scrum and Agile methodologies in all of our development teams.  These changes will help us meet the challenges we face in 2011.

I updated our release board today with the 1st six releases scheduled for 2011.

We expect to have another ten or more upgrades as well as the release of at least two new products in 2011!  We will also continue to implement Agile and Scrum in 2011.  Stay tuned!

Michael has worked in software development for the past fifteen years as a Programmer and Senior Software Developer.  In his last job prior to joining ACS Technologies, he was Project Manager and Lead Developer of a nationally deployed and marketed software package called Medical Courier Elite.  Michael brings a wide array of knowledge and skills in programming on web and mobile platforms and a strong passion for development to our team.

Michael is also a talented singer and actor and has been involved in multiple shows at the Florence Little Theater.  First and foremost, though, Michael combines his passion for music with his passion for serving his church as a member of the Praise Team at the Church of Sandhurst in Florence, SC.

We’re really excited to have Michael join our team!

If you share in Michael’s interest in developing software products and for serving the faith based market, please send your resume to resume@acstechnologies.com or contact me directly.  We are continuing to grow our team so we can better serve our cutomers and currently have several open positions.