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Countable Ops Manual

Countable Web’s Open Source Ops Manual

Table of Contents

What Is This?

This is the Countable Web Productions Inc. open source corporation operations manual:

  • It’s a living record of how our company works, and is constantly evolving as we learn.
  • Our whole team proposes amendments in order to constantly improve the material here.
  • Like for an open source software project, our processes and other information assets are publicly available for anyone to use under the MIT license.
  • However, just as an open source software project does not disclose its database contents, this repository does not include any of our clients’ and team’s private data.

Purpose

Why does this repository exist?

  • The purpose of this repository is simply as a record of what worked well in the past and what to avoid.
  • In some cases, we may reference outside resources but primarily this is a living record of what our company has learned.

In some (rare) cases, we may document exact processes:

PROCEDURE

which must be followed.

In general, though, this manual is intended as a guide to help improve individual and team performance by sharing what has worked for us, and documenting conventions so we can coordinate better.

In the words of Matt Mochary in “The Great CEO Within”:

Whenever you find yourself saying something for a second time (to a second audience, or in a second situation), it is highly likely that you will end up saying it again and again in the future. To vastly improve the quality of the communication, and reduce the amount of time that you spend communicating it … write it down.
Then, the next time you need to communicate that message, you can simply share it in written form. If it is something that all members of the team should know and remember, put it in a company-wide Wiki. If it is truly seminal to the organization, post it on a wall for all to see.

Second, why is it open source?

To promote our core shared value of transparency.

Scope

Unless specifically marked as a “Procedure”, everything in this manual is a “Convention”. We don’t explicitly mark conventions since they are the default.

What do we mean by convention?

  • Guidelines based on what worked well (or poorly) for us in the past.
  • Conventions in order to help us communicate and collaborate efficiently.
  • Processes which should be carefully followed, unless you have a good reason not to.
  • The Articles of Incorporation and other general corporate documents. Countable is a CCPC, but it’s possible some of these documents may be useful for other organization structures.
  • We will not publish information here that would compromise the privacy or property of our employees, clients or customers.
    • Any shared templates, processes, or document types will be provided with example data only, if any. No real data from clients or the team will be included.
    • Occasionally, external links will be included to real platforms like Trello, Google Drive, or Miro. These are for the convenient navigation of our team and collaborators, and if the linked documents are used in production or projects, they will be invite-only.
      • Reach out to our operations team if you can’t open a linked URL, and you think you should be able to!

What is Countable?

Countable is a Web Technology Solutions Development Firm. We build things with web technology.

There are tens of thousands of companies that do this. What makes us different?

  • We are obsessed with feedback.
    • As a remote and global team, feedback loops are harder to establish and even more critical to our ability to deliver great work.
    • At Countable, feedback is sacred, and everyone is encouraged to maximize thoughtful feedback to one another as much as possible.
    • We want our clients to see our work as we’re doing it and be as visible as possible.
  • We’re intently attentive to the 3 main failure modes of software projects (over budget, overdue, and incorrect requirements) and continuously refining how we prevent these risks.
    • We do this first and foremost by prototyping (the art of simulating an experience with the minimum effort).
    • We work hard to be transparent, interactive, and have fun. When teams are supportive and enjoy working with one another, their members can be more honest and effective in collaboration.
  • We focus on tackling the hardest problems in sectors that struggle with achieving great software.
    • Some of our greatest achievements have been in healthcare and telehealth, complex data portals for government agencies, and interoperating software systems with advanced manufacturing, supply chain, and IOT devices.
    • Our team is always interested in exploring elaborate data and design challenges to uncover the most elegant and intuitive solutions possible.

Read more about the purpose of Countable.

Who is Countable?

We are selective in order to embody our values. This starts with hiring, all the way to the kinds of partners we seek out in our clients and collaborators.

In the end, we want to bring together people to have a big impact by improving all the industries we engage with, through better technology designed by the end users themselves.

Those users are the ones who understand their problems and need to given a voice to control the technology they depend on. Now that’s a feedback loop!

Recruiting

Finding the right people is one of our biggest challenges, so we need every advantage we can find in this way.

Marketing

Helps us find the best partners and team members who share our passion.

Getting Started

If you’re a new Countable team member, start here!

If you’re a new client, start here!

Engineering

The purpose of this section is to standardize key (not all) product/engineering processes in order to improve the team’s performance, and take advantage of an experience curve by eliminating arbitrary process differences.

Consulting

How to provide the best results for clients.

Operations

Contributing

Technical things to learn when working on this manual: Contributing

If you want to suggest a change to Countable Web Productions, make a pull request. The rules:

  • Important: Never commit private data or protected intellectual property. Nothing specific to our employees, clients, or finances should go in here.
  • Organize by “context”. The documents in here are intended to be actionable. So, for any document, place it with a name and folder structure that matches what someone is doing when they need this information. For example, a timesheet template should go in the GETTING_STARTED folder, since it will be used by new employees.
  • Link prolifically. Wherever you can, link words of your pages to other pages or other websites.
  • Keep it concise, to-the-point, actionable. If you do use an abstraction, provide a corresponding example.
  • Each page should state it’s purpose for existing, as related to the company’s mission. Clarity and utility over completeness. Try to maximize “usefulness density”, or the total benefit (ie, in saved time, dollars) of the content divided by its length (in characters).
  • This repository is intended for a specific company (Countable Web Productions Inc.), if you want to use it for another company, please fork it.

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