Time, Time, Ticking

And that is what I did on my Christmas vacation, Mrs Herman. All joking aside I was busy doing a review of the project from stem to stern in terms of what could be done to improve the time and speed of our delivery. As you could see I was not too concerned about our cost. We can always justify our cost if our value proposition is being met. The existing business model of the bureaucracy provides us with a baseline for our value proposition. Cost isn't the issue, it will be the time that we take to deliver our product to the market. If the bureaucracy. Scratch that. When the bureaucracy fails there will need to be an alternative in the marketplace as quickly as possible. We will need to be there before (ideally) anyone realizes there has been a wholesale failure. As it stands today that is the opportunity we currently have in hand.

In terms of making the People, Ideas & Objects organization faster and lighter, 2015’s version seems remarkably nimble and flexible. The decisions that I announced to you of the cloud computing infrastructure for the development environment and deployment to the industry may not seem that significant to you at this time. From my point of view they are significant. I was able to cross off many boxes within our organization that don’t have to be filled now. A number of them were very senior positions. Our costs in terms of time, effort and the most important commodity energy. Are saved for our primary concern, our user community. We can keep our focus more clearly on our target without the distraction of tedious physical constraints of hardware issues.

And when we go to deploy our application to the producers through our service providers. Both of those communities will experience higher levels of hardware performance as a result of Oracles significant investment in the cloud. Something that we would never have been able to match. And something that we are able to attain by simply flipping a switch. Again without the significant deployment of capital, people, physical effort and energy to setup a facility that we might have ended up failing at in the end. The decision to go to the cloud in both the development environment and our deployment were decisions that I had to consciously make. I had always personally had the vision of the physical machinery within our own domain of control and never questioned it. The speed and lightness that this decision has made on our delivery could make the difference between our ultimate success or failure and may be responsible for reducing up to a full year in terms of our delivery time.

The other major decision that was announced. I made many decisions that I did not announce, some where the impact is too minimal or of little consequence to you. The other decision was to ignore the bureaucracy. As I stated to the investors and users the impact on them is significant. The impact on People, Ideas & Objects is sizable in terms of the time that will be required for us to deliver our product into the marketplace. This too may take a full year off our delivery time. But more importantly, as I stated, it may be responsible for removing 10,000 man years of frustration and heartache from the user community in having to deal with the compromises and contradictions of dealing with the bureaucrats. What could be more valuable?

Accelerating our speed to market will be a pressure that we all will begin to feel soon. It should be something that all members of the user community should ignore and disregard. It is beyond what can be dealt with in your day to day efforts. What is important is the quality of your efforts in making sure that the oil and gas producers attain the most profitable means of oil and gas operations. I’ll take care of the time of delivery issues and how we can make sure our efforts are more efficient. Its decisions like these that can save years, frustrations and heartache that are far more effective than what you can do to “speed up” your work. You can only affect quality. And by feeling the pressure to deliver sooner you’re going to affect your quality negatively. So don't concern yourself with speed and be assured that whatever can be done about the time to delivery is being done on your behalf.

The Preliminary Specification and user community provides the oil and gas producer with the most dynamic, innovative and profitable means of oil and gas operations. People, Ideas & Objects Revenue Model specifies the means in which investors can participate in these user defined software developments. Users are welcome to join me here. Together we can begin to meet the future demands for energy. And don't forget to join our network on Twitter @piobiz anyone can contact me at 403-200-2302 or email here. 

To The Oil & Gas Investor

As an oil and gas investor you may have some difficulties with People, Ideas & Objects. That we understand. Let me try to explain. The first issue that is of concern is the budget that we have proposed. It is significant and includes elements that may be controversial in that they involve payments of royalties for Intellectual Property and healthy margins. The royalties on the Intellectual Property that I have developed over the past decades is how I am compensated for the work that I have done. This work is how the value in our value proposition is generated and is the basis that its equity is assessed. The firms profits are a feature of any commercial software developer. I would expect that after many decades of effort you would realize that I think now is the time in which I should collect payment for my efforts. I am therefore establishing these criteria for the Intellectual Property and the profitability of People, Ideas & Objects. It is an alternative we propose in replacement to the current bureaucracy. It provides for a profitable oil and gas industry and is therefore a reasonable proposal.

Bureaucrats will never change. Until you put in place a system that replaces the current bureaucracy you will continue to receive news of record oil production in the U.S. as of January 2015. There is a well established history here. Even after five years of financial losses in Natural Gas there is record production in that commodity. They will continue to destroy the commodity markets until such time as someone such as yourself takes the keys to industry away from them. It is almost like they don’t care, isn't it? People, Ideas & Objects are providing you with a tool in which to manage your oil and gas assets once you have taken control of those assets. But the software needs to be developed first. We have kept our powder dry and our candle lit for the day in which we can begin developments and take the responsibility away from the bureaucracy. If you can't see the end of the oil and gas industry at this point, then I can’t help you.

Recently Goldman Sachs suggested that there needed to be maximum pain to be realized in the oil and gas marketplace before a turnaround would happen. The BBC was quoted as saying that the creditors of the oil and gas companies were the targets of the Saudis actions. They, the ones who loaned the shale producers the money to drill, are the ones who have to be taught that the oil and gas producers are too high of a credit risk. If its the creditors they're trying to teach a lesson that means that you, the investor have been eliminated from the landscape.

What is it that you expect to come from the situation as it stands today? What possibly positive outcome is the result of today’s oil and gas industry? I can not see a viable industry in the North American marketplace under the current management and their strategy. Their inability to produce profitably will continue as long as someone else’s money is on offer. We clearly see that everyone is on to the game and its about to be seen as the ponzi scheme that it has been. If you were a bureaucrat and you knew where all the skeletons in the industry were, what would you do? Would you stick around? Or would you have been harvesting what you could for the past few years while the going was good and make sure that the exit plan was well in place? And don't act so surprised at the thought.

What this situation requires is action. I think it has required action since the financial crisis of 2008. Which I think was a warning that our system of organization wasn’t working. Just as the former Soviet Union’s system of organization wasn’t working. We complain that there’s no growth. Bureaucracies are finished, they can no longer provide for the needs of society and the writing of that should have become more and more evident to those that are operating in the investor class. New models are needed for the oil and gas industry to deal with the issues and opportunities that it faces. The way that it is organized and the manner in which people interact can't be on the basis of hierarchies and stuffing paper into printers. There are better ways and they have been detailed here in the Preliminary Specification with our user community, and the service providers. Someone recently referenced the term “Network Society” as the direction society was moving towards. That’s where we are heading. We just need your money.

And we can wait, certainly there is nothing urgent calling us to action that brings us to a life or death situation. Unlike what the oil and gas industry is facing. We'll be here in the years to come no matter the state of the industry. But understand it will take time to develop our solution. We have received none of the industries resources from the bureaucrats. We were weaned off of oil and gas when we first came up with the idea of using the Joint Operating Committee in August of 2003. As it was clear then the bureaucracy had to get rid of us, because if you use the Joint Operating Committee it is pretty clear that you don't need a bureaucracy. That would have been the time, if I were a bureaucrat, that I would have started planning for the escape from the industry when everything inevitably fell apart.

Its easy to write this dissertation off as one looney tunes rantings. I would agree. But I would also take a good close look around this earnings season and tell me how things will improve from here. How will this ship right itself? When will the captain jump ship? And how shallow is the water? Are People, Ideas & Objects offering you the opportunity to shift the makeup of the oil and gas industry in a manner that enables you to control the industry more effectively? If so then you'll need to contact me and we can go from there.

The Preliminary Specification and user community provides the oil and gas producer with the most dynamic, innovative and profitable means of oil and gas operations. People, Ideas & Objects Revenue Model specifies the means in which investors can participate in these user defined software developments. Users are welcome to join me here. Together we can begin to meet the future demands for energy. And don't forget to join our network on Twitter @piobiz anyone can contact me at 403-200-2302 or email here. 

To The User Community Members

It is a bit of a change of our strategic position when we state that we will no longer work with the bureaucrats. Their choice to run the industry into the ground is something that we are going to watch from the sidelines and quite frankly enjoy with popcorn and refreshments. Their inability to work with us over the past decade was a choice that they made. They may wish to make a change and start to work with us to mitigate the damages that they are causing the industry. We however are not going to cooperate or participate in anyway. There are reasons for that and one of the primary reasons is the user community.

Making a clean break with the status quo helps in many ways. It helps you the user community participant the most. No longer will you need to consider the situation that exists today, or the concerns of how things are done today. Ours will be a clean slate approach where the optimal solution can be adopted. No compromises with the ways and means of the “thats how we did it in the past” or the “but we don't do it that way” type of arguments. Those won't stand and we can move on from those and formulate new processes and new positions for the oil and gas producers based on the most profitable means of oil and gas operations.

When we take the Joint Operating Committee and make it the key organizational construct of the dynamic, innovative and profitable oil and gas producer. We introduce conflicts and contradictions between it and the bureaucracy. If we try to reconcile these conflicts and contradictions then we are moving away from the purer sense of the opportunity of what is at hand here at People, Ideas & Objects. By stating we will not be working with the bureaucrats we have eliminated the conflicts and contradictions that we would otherwise have had to reconcile. Your job in designing and developing the Preliminary Specification into the software that you will use as service providers will be able to be developed quicker and more easily with a more consistent approach to the Joint Operating Committee. The natural, cultural ways and means of the oil and gas industry.

Its when we try to add humans to the mix that the problems come into play. And we will have those problems. What we won’t have is the problems of humans that are stratified in a hierarchy with their unnecessary rules and regulations that are necessary to make that entity function. I feel it is my job to remove as many of the obstruction from your path as I possibly can. In terms of obstructions, the bureaucrats and their way of life are the biggest obstructions known to man. That we can eliminate them is cause for celebration. Everyone should get up and quietly do a happy dance.

Declaration of the death of the bureaucracy may be seen, and may come to be, premature. It will be inevitable though. Our time is coming and our patience will be rewarded. We have shaved years off of our development time today, and 10,000 man years of frustration and heartache from our user community. Bureaucracies do not change and their ability to adapt to the current environment is well beyond what their cash and capital reserves will allow. The investors have been on strike for a long time. At least as long as 2008. Bureaucrats have been living off borrowed funds since then. Banks have not been loaning any money any more as they knew the game was fixed and they were the mark. That left the junk bond market as the only place to get funds. The primary source of funds of all healthy industries. Bureaucrats used $1.2 trillion of junk bonds in the past two years. Now that path is closed as well. Therefore they are left with the money they are able to earn in the marketplace. And they will produce as much as they can to try to generate as much cash as they can before they all go broke from low commodity prices. The ultimate example of circular thinking on a grand scale.

The business model of using other peoples money is at the end of its road. They've destroyed both commodity markets, all the credit markets and the investors faith, what else is there. They never knew how to produce a real profit. Only accounting profits based on full cost accounting where everything, including royalties apparently (remember PennWest), are capitalized. If you gave five people ten million dollars each. Where only one was a brilliant geologist who found nothing but oil and gas. And four people who knew nothing about oil and gas. When you came back a year later and looked at their financial statements they would all look the same. You would not be able to tell who was the superstar geologist from the financial statements. What kind of accounting is that? I digress. The point is that the business model was never sustainable and the day in which its reckoning is upon us. The Saudis know it, I know it, and a few more people are beginning to realize it each and every day.

People, Ideas & Objects provide a viable alternative for which we can rebuild the industry. One where we provide the producer with the most dynamic, innovative and profitable means of oil and gas operations. The user community is our focus and the key to our quality. With this decision to ignore the bureaucracy we are able to move faster with less constraints. And for that reason alone its a good decision.

The Preliminary Specification and user community provides the oil and gas producer with the most dynamic, innovative and profitable means of oil and gas operations. People, Ideas & Objects Revenue Model specifies the means in which investors can participate in these user defined software developments. Users are welcome to join me here. Together we can begin to meet the future demands for energy. And don't forget to join our network on Twitter @piobiz anyone can contact me at 403-200-2302 or email here. 

Pick Your Fights Carefully

And that is what I have done. That is, that is what I hope I have done. Picked this fight carefully. The fight I'm talking about is with the oil and gas bureaucracy. A few weeks ago I stated that I will not work with them and that is the position that we have taken here at People, Ideas & Objects. We've picked the fight that we want to have. And we intend to win this fight to ensure that we provide the oil and gas producers with the most profitable means of oil and gas operations. And the user community remains the primary and only focus of our software development efforts today and always in the future.

Oil and gas commodity prices might be causing the bureaucrats backs to bend a bit towards working with us. I hope I've made it clear to them that they should keep a good stiff posture and ride their business model to the grave. I'm giving them no option in which to change. Its a position that we are taking that makes the oil and gas investors choice as stark as is possible. The bureaucrats and their losing ways or People, Ideas & Objects with their dedication to providing the oil and gas producers with the most profitable means of oil and gas operations. We will not be compromising with the bureaucrats to bail them out of a situation of their making. Its their bed let them lie in it.

I don’t expect that the future holds much promise for the oil and gas producers as they are currently configured. I see a series of events being triggered from these low oil and gas prices that will make the organizational performance of these firms continue to degrade permanently. First we will see the losses that prices will create. The inevitable layoffs and reorganizations that will provide no relief to the issues. The bankruptcy of a large percentage of the industry due to their binging on credit the past number of years. The concern that this will raise in the banking sector as to the viability of the oil and gas industry. Which will lead to the demand for payment of the outstanding debts at the major banks as a credit crisis is felt in oil and gas, and not the banking industry this time.

Of course the investors who are treated with such respect and concern for their investments throughout this process will be standing there looking for some scalps. By this time the bureaucrats will have hightailed it out of oil and gas and will be establishing themselves in the next great employment opportunity, whatever industry that may be. The destruction that will be left in the wake of this price collapse, that could have been dealt with by now, if only, will be one for the history books. Liz Ann Sonders who we have quoted here before thinks this is the end of the commodity super cycle. The investors should consider what the bureaucrats provided them during this commodity super cycle. I'll remind them. Nothing, absolutely nothing. They would have been better off participating in the commodity exchanges.

Or maybe I'm wrong and the sun will shine tomorrow and the natural gas price will triple with the migration of the Monarch Butterfly. Bureaucrats will be seen as the effective solution over technology throughout government and industry. And countries like Russia and Belarus will be seen as the prototypes for harmony and efficiency.

This is a fight that we can win. They have a losing hand and little to nothing to augment their position. We have speed, dynamism, innovation and profitability to offer the oil and gas investor. And a pile of future profits the size of the U.S. Federal Reserve. We don't need the bureaucrats, we don't want them and they provide no value to us, our users or the oil and gas investors. Its time to cut any possible ties to them and establish the first blow by stating their on their own. Don't look to us to bail you out. And don’t think to touch any of our Intellectual Property, again. Its not for your use or purchase. Its time to sink or swim and there are no life rafts, preservers or help from us. Goodbye!

The Preliminary Specification and user community provides the oil and gas producer with the most dynamic, innovative and profitable means of oil and gas operations. People, Ideas & Objects Revenue Model specifies the means in which investors can participate in these user defined software developments. Users are welcome to join me here. Together we can begin to meet the future demands for energy. And don't forget to join our network on Twitter @piobiz anyone can contact me at 403-200-2302 or email here.

Budgetary Changes

One of the things that I did during the time that I was off was I took a sharp pencil to the proposed organizational makeup of People, Ideas & Objects. To see if there was any way that we could make the organization perform better in the future to meet the needs of the user community and the oil and gas industry. What a difference. The question that I asked myself is if we were such big believers in cloud computing why were we not implementing these technologies within our own organization at every turn. To date we have implemented them and have benefited greatly from them. One look at our budget however and you can see that we took the mindset that was very typical of the 20th century bureaucrat. We had allocated $200 million to build our own cloud computing facility to host the People, Ideas & Objects application when it was complete. The question was, was this the appropriate direction?

This questioning also involved our software development environment. Many services are springing up that provide the horsepower necessary to host a software development environment that would meet the needs of a development environment that People, Ideas & Objects requires. What we would need is an excessive amount of computing power for those times in which we would build elements of the application. Oracle is now one of these firms offering these software development hosting services. This removes a significant amount of capital from our development budget but it also reduces our organizational overhead in many ways. We don't have to concern ourselves with the minutiae of keeping servers up and running and backing up everything as many times as possible. These services will be provided to us by using Oracle services. Providing us with lower costs, easier administration but most importantly the speed of our development team will be enhanced and our focus sharpened.

Offering our application in a cloud computing configuration to the dynamic, innovative and profitable oil and gas producer was always the consideration. Under the decentralized production model, when we move the administrative and accounting resources to the service providers, why would we leave the IT staff at the oil and gas producer? We wouldn’t. The point is instead of providing that service ourselves by buying Oracle hardware and running it ourselves, we will be purchasing Oracle cloud computing services to run our application on their servers and deliver our applications in that manner. The oil and gas producers won't know the difference. Other than the fact that Oracle will have sizably larger facilities and therefore much higher performance than what we would have been able to provide. We will save the $200 million in capital that we allocated to build the facility. Reduce our overhead and organizational complexity by the costs of maintaining that facility. And most importantly again pick up a factor of speed in which we are able to deliver our product to the marketplace, and sharpen our focus. We are not currently hardware experts. We were going to have to become hardware experts. Now we have Oracle, who are hardware experts, now we don't have to be hardware experts. Speed to deliver the application in terms of time of this type is an important point. We may have been able to deliver the world’s best application and failed to deliver it due to our inability to get the hardware right. This is a critical change in our makeup, our strategy, organization and time to deliver. It also reduces substantially our technical risk.

And look at that change in our budget. Some might think that reduces our budget by $400 million! And some would be wrong. I have reallocated these funds across the Oracle budget categories to enhance the work that they will be doing for us. This is in order to recognize the cost of the rental of the computer time for the cloud computing services of the development environment and application delivery. A $100 million boost to the Oracle Developers category to shore up the number of people we are able to access from the mother ship. And an overall loosening of the budget constraints of the other categories. What we are approaching in the oil and gas industry is unique and necessary. Our success is critical to the success of the profitable oil and gas producer. Our value proposition dictates that this money won't be missed. Therefore we are deploying it to the areas that will increase the probability of our success.

The Preliminary Specification and user community provides the oil and gas producer with the most dynamic, innovative and profitable means of oil and gas operations. People, Ideas & Objects Revenue Model specifies the means in which investors can participate in these user defined software developments. Users are welcome to join me here. Together we can begin to meet the future demands for energy. And don't forget to join our network on Twitter @piobiz anyone can contact me at 403-200-2302 or email here.

The Product Owner in our Leadership Team Part III

We have been discussing the Product Owner position in detail this past week. This position is a key part of our leadership team that we are currently recruiting. If you have an interest in the Product Owner position for one of our modules or technologies please contact me below. In the last post we discussed the Leader and Team Player attributes of the position. Today we continue with several other attributes of the Product Owner. Quotations are from the book “Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love” by Roman Pichler.

People, Ideas & Objects state that we are filling a “gap” between the oil and gas, and Information Technology industries. Creating a sub-industry where nothing exists today. This “gap” exists as the technologies have become too specialized and as a result technology firms are unable to fully understand the needs of its customers, the oil and gas firms. What we are doing in filling this “gap” is providing a means of communication between the oil and gas and Information Technology industries so that they operate more effectively. In the book Roman Pichler states that the Product Owner is an effective communicator and negotiator that operates to “communicate with and aligns different parties, including customers, users, development and engineering, marketing, sales, service, operations, and management. The Product Owner is the voice of the customer, communicating customer needs and requirements and bridging the gap between ‘the suits’ and ‘the techies.’” It is this role as communicator and negotiator that we are placing so much emphasis on the Product Owner role within our leadership team of the user community.

The next two attributes that an effective Product Owner requires are to be empowered and committed. The ability to present new projects for development, and the ability to cancel poorly performing ones are necessary for the continuous improvement of the modules. The Product Owner also needs to have budgetary control of the module they are responsible for. These attributes impute a senior level of responsibility, especially considering the size of the user community budget for each module. Therefore an executive level of commitment is expected in return and as the book states “A successful Product Owner is confident, enthusiastic, energetic, and trustworthy.”

The physical location of the Product Owners matters. Our development team will be based in Houston. Therefore the Product Owners will be based in Houston. The need to have the Product Owners interact with the development team for their individual modules on a regular basis is a necessity. And this requirement would mean a minimum of two days per week. The offices of the Product Owners and user community resources will be located with the development team, therefore this will not be an issue.

Another key role in the development team is what is called the ScrumMaster. “The ScrumMaster supports the Product Owner and the development team, protects the team and the process, and intervenes appropriately when required to ensure that the pace of work is sustainable, that the team stays healthy and motivated, and that no technical debt is incurred.” And “The Product Owner is primarily responsible for the “what” -- creating the right product. The ScrumMaster is primarily responsible for the “how” -- using Scrum the right way. Only when the right product is created with the right process is enduring success achieved.”

The Preliminary Specification and user community provides the oil and gas producer with the most dynamic, innovative and profitable means of oil and gas operations. People, Ideas & Objects Revenue Model specifies the means in which investors can participate in these user defined software developments. Users are welcome to join me here. Together we can begin to meet the future demands for energy. And don't forget to join our network on Twitter @piobiz anyone can contact me at 403-200-2302 or email here. 

Not Your Normal Business Operation

The number of times that I've thought that this project should be funded and proceed is beyond my capacity to count. What we have in our value proposition is evidence that the bureaucracy will never act, ever. It is reasonable to assume at this stage that producers are paying capital derived in some form in order to produce oil and gas. That is to say the industry is generating negative cash flows. Their argument of course is that the commodity prices could be just as far on the beneficial side of industry. And of course their correct, when you sit and wait for events to happen to you there are good and bad things that can happen. That however doesn’t mitigate the losses that they are incurring currently. I think what they, the bureaucrats, have to look at is how seriously they have put their firms and the industry in North America in jeopardy of significant failure. And unnecessarily so.

What we propose in the Preliminary Specification, the user community and our service providers is a radically different way in which to operate the industry. One that has a value proposition that is approximately $350 billion greater than the bureaucrats for 2015. The cost of doing this is incidental in terms of the value that is generated. However the cost is still $4 billion and we are a start up. The chances of that happening on a sunny day are approximately one in one zillion years. The thing is its not very sunny in oil and gas and the way that the industry is headed seems to be one of those times when action needs to be taken.

Now I could say that I could do this for $5 and some of the bureaucrats would find that attractive because they would know that it would be impossible. And hence they get to stay in power a little longer and we would be destined to fail. Or I can choose to be open about what the costs are and expect that the situation be evaluated on the cold hard facts of the situation. I’m not the one who is bringing the problem to the investors, we are the ones that are bringing the solution.

We are most certainly thankful for the situation in the commodity marketplace today. It makes our job much easier. And this situation may come and go over the next few years as producers muddle along. The appearance of shale gas on the market is the guarantee that we will have pricing issues for the next 40 years if the bureaucrats are kept in place. The nature of the reserves bring a new dynamic and characteristic that the bureaucrats have proven themselves to be unable to deal with. Without the decentralized production model as provided by People, Ideas & Objects et al there is no alternative to the price maker strategy. And we are protected by copyright.

To make the decision to proceed with People, Ideas & Objects et al would be something unique, one of a kind decision and dependent on the situation. Its not subject to the normal business rules of what a business does and how it generates its business. We are adversaries of the people we want to replace, our current customers! However, if I were failing in such a wholesale manner as the bureaucracy is today, I would hope that there was someone holding me to account. And in that sense the market seems to be working. However, on a much larger scale than what we have seen in the last hundred years.

Information Technology is providing us with opportunities to conduct our business in different ways. The thing that is stopping us from making these changes is the way that we do things today. The problem is that its not only getting in the way its also dragging us down and we need to break away from it as quickly as we can. People, Ideas & Objects seems radical but its also what we need right now.

The Preliminary Specification and user community provides the oil and gas producer with the most dynamic, innovative and profitable means of oil and gas operations. People, Ideas & Objects Revenue Model specifies the means in which investors can participate in these user defined software developments. Users are welcome to join me here. Together we can begin to meet the future demands for energy. And don't forget to join our network on Twitter @piobiz anyone can contact me at 403-200-2302 or email here. 

The Product Owner in our Leadership Team Part II

Our second installment of the Product Owner positions series begins to look at the desirable characteristics of the individuals in these roles. I will be quoting heavily from the book “Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love” by Roman Pichler. As Product Owners I want them to be the individuals that are responsible for the success of the module that they work with. That their user community is how they achieve that success and they hold our development team to be accountable to the needs of the user community. In order to achieve the oil and gas industry wide software development capability that I think is necessary. One that identifies and overcomes the industries issues and implements its opportunities on a real time basis. I think this is what will be required on a minimum basis.

I have always classified the world into two types of people. Thinkers and doers. I'm a thinker and thankfully there are few of us. The rest are doers. And the book by Roman Pichler says that the Product Owner needs to be a visionary and a doer. I don't think I've personally met anyone with those qualifications but we'll take his word. He defines the Product Owner as an “entrepreneur, the product owner facilitates creativity; encourages innovation; and is comfortable with change, ambiguity, debate, conflict, playfulness, experimentation, and informed risk taking.” All attributes that everyone would encourage.

The next attributes that are highlighted are “Leader and Team Player” and the author has highlighted a phenomenal quotation that I've quoted below.

The Entrepreneurial Team 

We sometimes focus on an individual as the amazing entrepreneur or the outstanding leader -- thinking of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and other celebrity leaders. In reality, very few innovations are a stroke of genius attained by one person. And even if the product owner is Mrs. or Mr. Innovation, the individual still needs a team to bring the product to life. No entrepreneurial genius can make all the right decisions. In fact, neuroscientific research reveals that even the best qualified person in the right job at the right place can make wrong decisions -- if that person decides alone. Finkelstein and his coauthors attribute this to the way human cognition works (2009). They recommend using at least one other person as a sounding board. A team provides plenty of sparring partners to test ideas and arrive at the right decision. Ed Catmull, president of Pixar (2008, 68), says this: 

… if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works. 

The wisdom of many is preferable to the brilliance of one.

Which says all there really needs to be said about what we are trying to achieve here at People, Ideas & Objects. The user community is the key to the success of the oil and gas industry in terms of its abilities and capabilities. Software defines and supports organizations. The user community defines the software. Therefore a great team positioned in the user community would be the objective that we should all be pursuing to ensure a successful oil and gas industry. And the Product Owner has an interesting view of these events.

The Preliminary Specification and user community provides the oil and gas producer with the most dynamic, innovative and profitable means of oil and gas operations. People, Ideas & Objects Revenue Model specifies the means in which investors can participate in these user defined software developments. Users are welcome to join me here. Together we can begin to meet the future demands for energy. And don't forget to join our network on Twitter @piobiz anyone can contact me at 403-200-2302 or email here.

A Choice for the Oil and Gas Investor

Commodity prices are not behaving as the bureaucracy would want or expect them to. It would seem to me at this stage in the oil and gas industries development that we would have figured out that if we were going to produce oil and gas that it would at least be profitable. It seems rather wasteful to be taking the commodity that is irretrievably lost once its used and dispose of it with a handful of financial losses with it. The value that the oil and gas industry provides other industries and consumers doesn’t seem to earn the respect of the bureaucrats who just produce oil and gas no matter the consequences. I'm pretty sure we'll look back on this era as a time when we'll regret our waste and the havoc that has been caused in the financial markets. But please note the important criteria that none of the bureaucrats jobs have been lost in this effort, nor have any pension funds been un-vested with any of their pensions, if un-vested is a term. And if things do get bad for them they do have other choices in other industries.

Why should the industry be focused on profits? The simple answer is that we have a lot of work to do. We can't rely on the capital markets forever. This is a mature business, which would indicate that it provides for its investors and has some control over its day to day. Neither can be stated to be the case in oil and gas today. The investors are unhappy, and only the bureaucrats are happy that they have construction for the cabin’s expansion underway this winter. Oil and gas is sold at whatever price is available today. And don't ask them about the cost of what that property is. That only makes the bureaucrats blush. All this talk that it takes $50 oil for shale to make money is what the analysts are determining. Not the producers.

People, Ideas & Objects offers the oil and gas investors a fundamentally different business model that we call the decentralized production model. It is part of our Preliminary Specification. It provides the dynamic, innovative and profitable oil and gas producer with the capability to employ the “price maker” strategy for their oil and gas production. Simply if the property can be produced at a profit then it is placed on production. If not, it is shut-in and worked on by the geologists and engineers to determine how to make it produce profitably at the commodity prices in the marketplace. And when the Preliminary Specification determines the profits it will be the actual profits of the property. The revenue less royalties less operating costs less accounting and administration costs that are incurred by the property. The actual costs, not estimates or accruals, actual costs.

The advantages of doing this are simple however significant. Based on the decentralized production model we have calculated our value proposition in the trillions of dollars. When a property is shut-in it keeps the reserves that would otherwise incur a financial loss and be wasted. And saves them for a time when they can be produced profitably. The producer will increase their profits during the financial period as a result of shutting-in unprofitable production. Even though their production profile will be lower their profits will be higher as they will not be carrying any unprofitable properties. And the best part is that the commodity markets have less oil or gas in the marketplace placing upward pressure on the commodities prices. Moving the commodity markets to the marginal costs. The key to our value propositions creation of value. As evidence by today’s market prices, and actions by the bureaucracy which shows they can’t, won’t, don’t, will not do this, ever. Bureaucracies do not change, ever. People, Ideas & Objects is offering a choice as the only alternative to this insanity in the marketplace.

If this seems logical and simple to you go ask a bureaucrat why they don't implement it. Watch them explode. The net effect of implementing the Preliminary Specification is that the bureaucrats are put out to pasture permanently. They're not needed and will be rendered useless in no short order. Much like the record store manager was by Apple iTunes. This is why the bureaucrats are being careful what they say. Making sure they don't get caught in a trap they can’t get themselves out of. Like saying they can cut back on production. Which of course they can't because they're just not built that way.

The Preliminary Specification and user community provides the oil and gas producer with the most dynamic, innovative and profitable means of oil and gas operations. People, Ideas & Objects Revenue Model specifies the means in which investors can participate in these user defined software developments. Users are welcome to join me here. Together we can begin to meet the future demands for energy. And don't forget to join our network on Twitter @piobiz anyone can contact me at 403-200-2302 or email here. 

The Product Owner in our Leadership Team Part I

Something people have to keep in mind about People, Ideas & Objects is that we are currently in development. By focusing on developing the user community, this is a key part of the software development and the software development capability that we will be providing to the industry. It may seem to the casual reader that things are static at this point, however, as this year develops we will see that this development in the user community will bring about many of the desired outcomes that we anticipate. Stay tuned, I promise this will be an interesting year.

One of the things that we are experiencing is that with the Internet and cloud computing our progress is able to move at the speed at which change is happening. We are not being constrained by the traditional resources of a software developer. Everything is virtual at this point and as a result is able to accommodate the needs of the people we are appealing to and the oil and gas industry. We have a lightweight footprint that is unconstrained by the physical world.

One of our objectives is to recruit the user communities leadership team and have them represent the user community to the oil and gas investors. This was to secure the funding necessary to develop the Preliminary Specification and have the user community and service providers developed. I recently changed my mind on this point. We will continue to recruit these positions, however, we are not going to expose any of these individuals to the antics of the bureaucracies vindictive ways. There is no reason that these people need to take on any career risk by being named here. Therefore from the point of view of what will be expressed to the investors, what you currently see, is what you get.

I am therefore going to begin to detail the specific positions that we are looking to fill in the leadership team and what those positions will be doing. The first position I want to discuss is the Product Owner positions of the user community. We expect that there may be upwards of 20 out of the total of 30 leadership team positions being Product Owners. Starting today I want to begin a discussion of that role and what they provide to the user community, the development team and to the software quality.

The quotations that I will be making are from the book, “Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love” by Roman Pichler. What he suggests as the reason that the Product Owner role exists is to solve the issue of having too many cooks spoiling the soup. Having a single individual leading the development of the product from beginning to end provides this solution. Making one person responsible for ensuring its success and ensuring that everyone involved has a shared vision of the product is the Product Owner role in the development. In the broad scope and scale of the Preliminary Specification I am more or less its Product Owner. But each Product Owner in the leadership team will be either responsible for one module of the Preliminary Specification or some element of the technology. For example the data model, the user interface etc. So for example we will have a very senior individual who will be the Product Owner for the Partnership Accounting Module, and they will have the authority and responsibility for that module.

In the book the Product Owner role is defined as,

The Product Owner is the one and only person responsible for the managing the Product Backlog and ensuring the value of the work the team performs. This person maintains the Product Backlog and ensures that it is visible to everyone. 

If we think for a minute we may have 250 to 300 users in the Partnership Accounting module. This being a simple mathematical representation of the total of 3,000 people in the user population. There may be a need for far more people, especially considering the Material Balance Report which is a critical part of the module. The scope of the module is very broad, however it is consistent in terms of the type of work that is being done and therefore can be handled by one leader or Product Owner. Ensuring that the user community has considered the differences present in the People, Ideas & Objects Preliminary Specification. Having adopted those differences in their input and their analysis of what is required in their systems. It is then the responsibility of the Product Owner to ensure that the development team delivers that product to the user community.

The background of the Product Owners for People, Ideas & Objects purposes is from the business domain. Although a key member of the development team, their understanding of the business domain is what is required. Particularly with respect to the manner in which their understanding of these critical oil and gas processes are handled. It can take years, and sometimes decades before people are fully aware of the total scope of the processes under management in modules such as the Partnership Accounting module. A technological focus is not what we need to ensure product quality or to represent the user community. There will be significant developer and user collaborations and interactions throughout the course of product design and development. And the developers will have time to understand the nuances of the particular parts of the module from individual users, however there is the bigger picture that needs to be captured as well. And from a business perspective, that needs to be provided from the Product Owner.

We'll be discussing the Product Owner position in more detail in the next few days. If you have an interest in these positions, or any of our leadership teams positions please contact me.

The Preliminary Specification and user community provides the oil and gas producer with the most dynamic, innovative and profitable means of oil and gas operations. People, Ideas & Objects Revenue Model specifies the means in which investors can participate in these user defined software developments. Users are welcome to join me here. Together we can begin to meet the future demands for energy. And don't forget to join our network on Twitter @piobiz anyone can contact me at 403-200-2302 or email here.