DSi Goes Live!

Note: This is NOT an official company release. It is a
personal email sent to personal friends who I work with. It
is not a press release. It is not a news story. It is not a
PR-created official thing. It is unofficial. It is not the
opinion of TeamStaff.

In fact, TeamStaff was so concerned about
its content being considered official they asked me to remove
it. When I asked why they did not answer as a person, but immediately slung legal
documents at me and clearly indicated that keeping this post would
be detrimental to my career. Which is odd because I can't find anything
potentially offensive in this post. It's a post celebrating teamwork.
So I'm putting this massive disclaimer on the top to make sure that everybody
knows that it is only I that value the work of my fellow team members.

My integrity is worth more than my career. I believe in giving credit where
credit is due.

It is definitely not an official position of TeamStaff to support team
members. This post in no way reflects official positions of
TeamStaff or DSI Payroll Services.

And TeamStaff appeared proud of the fact that I was pressured on this issue.
Which is why I'm comfortable to not be
working with them any more. Despite mouth time on subjects like employee
motivation, integrity and innovation, posting a web entry like this one
was not well received. This incident and many others like it clearly
showed a massive disconnect between company leadership goals and
company morale. To me it was disheartening to see. I argued as much
as I could but the old school notions of public relations were
too deeply rooted.

To this day I'm absolutely amazed that they forced me to take
this entry down. Any company I work with should be proud to have
a post like this from one of its team members.

Kinda ironic that the company preventing this post is called TeamStaff, eh?

-----Original Message-----

From: Joe Reger, Jr. [mailto:jreger@brightlane.com]

Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2003 5:39 PM

To: [All Internal Team Members]


WahoO! The DSi Online Payroll Application is live!

https://www.dsipayrollservices.com

Congratulations to everybody involved in this eighteen month
project! As one of the only web-based construction payroll
applications available it's poised to help our payroll
business continue to grow and prosper!

The New Jersey members of our team are excited about the site
and have already begun the process of launching it to payroll
customers.

The project began as screen sketches, turned into an html
prototype, found itself documented a time or two, got coded
in
Java, grew out of Oracle, was tested in Atlanta and New
Jersey
and now resides fully deployed on super-reliable servers in
the Atlanta data center. Along the way we had a weekly
Friday
10:30AM conference call which was followed throughout the
week
by a weekly flurry of activity, a weekly "uh oh" moment, a
weekly "oh oh"
problem resolution and a weekly light-hearted "well-we-
learned-
something-from-that" moment.

This project certainly had its share of ups and downs...
it's
share of hurdles and challenges. But everybody performed
admirably as a geo-separated cross-functional team to provide
a better-than-expected piece of web-enabled software. In the
coming months we'll make it even better as we collect user
feedback, listen to the sales force and field feature
requests.

We need to thank our New Jersey component for their continued
support and enthusiasm... Atlanta put New Jersey through
the "detail ringer" and New Jersey put Atlanta through
the "payroll ringer" but we all came out like champs.
Atlanta
learned about payroll processing("QDL what?") and New Jersey
learned about web enablement("Why can't I just hit enter?").
Drop them a line or a quick email when you get a chance.

And we need to celebrate! Send your recommendations. Think
of something fiscally viable yet representative of the vast
efforts that the team has put into this project.

:)