05/30/2012
Laura Wainwright
Each quarter, XS Inc. has the “Quarterly Company Meeting” to provide employees insight on several topics pertaining to XS Inc. The principals review our strategy, mission and values, as well as our goals and objectives. Team leads and managers go over previous and current quarter team goals and how they are being measured. Our accounting department presents an overview of our finances and discusses how we are meeting the overall budget plan. The sales and marketing teams go over the sales funnel, current and future opportunities, and give us an update on our social media initiatives. Before we wrap up the business portion of the meeting we typically close by sharing upcoming client visits and other topics relating to the …[ MORE ]
05/23/2012
Hollie
I used to work for a large, multinational corporation that prided themselves on providing a fun, nurturing work environment. They promoted phrases like “work-life balance” and “work hard, play hard”. To further prove that they were “the best place to work”, they began an awards program I’ll call the Besties. The Bestie award was the Medal of Honor for corporate recognition. Winners received a bonus check and a nice trophy, and at the end of the year, all winners and their guests were treated to an all-expense paid tropical getaway. It was a Very Big Deal, and for a company employing 60,000 people, an excellent way to stand out from the masses. As the years passed, hundreds of people received …[ MORE ]
05/14/2012
Chad Ingham
I’ll be up front, I’ve drunk the Agile Scrum Kool Aid. I’m such a believer in the value of Agile that I’ve been seriously contemplating using it at home to help prioritize, plan, and achieve our individual and family goals. But that’s a story for a future entry… There are many reasons I find great value in the Agile Scrum process, but here I would like to share with you one of my favorites – the Retrospective. What is it? The Retrospective is a team meeting at the end of every Sprint (a Sprint being a two to four week block of time in the Agile Scrum process). During this meeting the team both celebrates its successes together and discusses its …[ MORE ]
05/08/2012
Darren Patterson
XS is not in the networking and hardware business but making sure we have the right support in these areas is critical to our applications’ success. XS hosts a server farm in a secure environment within its offices, but for production, XS has a co-lo agreement with a tier one hosting provider. Essentially, XS manages its own private cloud and provides this service to its clients. XS’s private cloud is outfitted with some of the best technology in the market. Our databases are running off of highly available SANs that use solid state drives and the latest generation of high performance drives that can offer IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) capacity that was many multiples of our previous SAN. The …[ MORE ]
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