We started Spider Strategies to bring web technologies to the task of managing “performance” in organizations. However, if you search for “performance management” or “corporate performance management” on the internet, it doesn’t look like managing “performance” is an easy target! Managing “performance” covers corporate strategy, employee motivation, processes, documents, projects, planning, data, and on and on and on!

We recognized early on that targeting such a broad area would not be easy. We also thought that it shouldn’t really be hard. Robert Shiller wrote “The ability to focus attention on important things is a defining characteristic of intelligence”. That is the key: bring intelligent focus to important things.

So what are the important things to an organization? That list could also go on and on and on! At Spider Strategies, we believe, however, that the important things can be grouped into three areas: People, Processes and Paper.

Therefore, our vision is to bring 21st century technology to improving an organizations ability to focus on the better performance of its people, its processes and the documentation that supports communication across the enterprise.

We’ll be using the Performance Management section of Spider Bytes to discuss what that means today and how that is evolving as we continue to interact with our users and add functionality to meet their specific needs.

We’ve recently stumbled onto a book by 37signals (the people behind Ruby on Rails) that has gotten us fired up all over again about the advantages of being a small web-based software company. Sure, we’ve been using many of the concepts they talked about over the past several years, but we were surprised to find several ways of thinking about things that were different than the ways we had approached them in the past.

One concept in particular that I loved was the idea of development debt. They stress that it’s ok to not get everything perfect the first time, and if you try to wait until everything is, you’ll never release a product. It’s important, however, to consider this imperfect software as a debt that you have to repay. On a regular basis you need to go back in and repay your loans. For us, this includes reducing clutter and eliminating areas in the app that aren’t intuitive.

We’ll continue adding new functionality like reporting and meetings over the next few months, but a major push for us will be identifying the areas of the app that aren’t quite working and clean them up. We want someone who has never used the app before to be able to sit down and start using it without a manual.

The book is called Getting Real and has an online version that’s free. If you’re at all interested in software development, I highly recommend taking a look. It’s a very quick read and is packed with all kinds of good stuff.

This is the first post on our public Spider Bytes blog. We intend on making this a space where you can get a glimpse at what happens behind the scenes at Spider Strategies and how we approach the development of cutting edge web applications.