It’s that time again. After only 6.5 months at Points I’ve decided to move to The Jonah Group in a somewhat similar role as I was in before. Specifically, it looks like I will be testing functionality for the RouteOne (not to be confused with Route 1) application, all the while trying to mature their overall QA process.

As for why I left Points… (or ‘How to tell Adam it is time to leave even if that wasn’t what you were trying to say’)

  • Being managed quarter-to-quarter is no fun – There are now hedge funds on the board at Points who will be wanting their money out of their investment. In order to do that, the stock needs to rise. The stock will rise when you beat guidance on a quarterly basis. This leads to short-term planning and poor choices being made in order to book revenue in the current quarter. Been there, done that, don’t want to do it again. This isn’t to say that Jonah doesn’t have similar targets as I am sure they do, but planning doesn’t have to be so short term.
  • Taking advantage of partner lock-in – Points has some pretty good partner lock-in, but rather than leverage it and generate good-will, there seems to always be some thorn in some key partner’s side. The backlog of requests from partners was pretty substantial at one point until they went back to everyone and asked “do you want that thing you requested 3 months ago still done?” at which point the partner said no. It’s under control now, but how much revenue and good-will was lost? Partners are the lifeblood of companies like this, if you screw up existing relationships because you have everyone working on applications which will bring in new revenue (see above point) then you have your priorities mixed up.
  • Ability to execute – There are a number of Quality items I felt needed some attention, most notably a new bug tracking system which would consolidate the various systems in place and addressing unresolved exceptions that are produced in production. I was unable to get any movement on those or any other issue while I was in charge of Quality. I shouldn’t feel bad though as the CIO cannot push through upgrading the production server OS, database or application server and that was on his to-do list for 2006.
  • Staffing – There a number of challenges facing Points in the area of staffing, none of which are going to be addressed anytime soon.
    • The moral in the tech area is pretty bad. There were some heavy cuts in the summer (q2) to setup for positive IBIDTA in q4, but they had a greater disruption in things than I think they anticipated. Theres not much blood left to bleed until theres a full staffing rotation with has nasty repercussions for knowledge loss. This is a huge problem, especially in QA where the tester with the most experience clocks in at 6 months (ish)
    • Because of the cuts, there is not enough people to adequately deal with new work, and existing application so quality gets rushed or partners get annoyed. Or both.
    • Also due to the staff shortage, team leads do not get to lead. They are instead engaged in day-to-day activities. Team leads should be leveraging their experience to help the rest of their team. For instance, I had (and still do actually) a number of ideas how some testing could be automated but never had the opportunity to develop them.
  • Change of Management – The entire layer of management above me had changed since I joined and while I don’t think they will do a bad job, I don’t feel as in sync with them as I did with the incumbents.

The above is not meant as a bash against Points as I continue to think they are a good company that has (basically) created themselves a license to print money. But in the long run, I’m all about the Quality of the product and if that takes a back seat to a tonne of other thing then it’s time for me to go somewhere else.