Today is the 5th anniversary of the incorporation of Improving Enterprises. Happy birthday, Improving!
To commemorate the occasion, I want to tell a little story about how Improving came to be, at least from my perspective. Everyone involved has a different angle, so hopefully others will comment or blog their own experience to add to the story.
In 1993, I was in the contract programming business and ran across this crazy English bloke named Graham Glass who was a co-founder of ObjectSpace and ended up becoming my close friend and mentor in iterative/incremental software development using object-oriented concepts. In 1994, I joined ObjectSpace as a very young senior consultant and my first large consulting gig was with E-Systems on the Commercial Remote Sensing System (CRSS) project, building a global satellite imaging system. On that project, I worked with the best manager I’ve ever encountered, Barry Rogers, and a few newly graduated software developers, including one who always wore a suit and was driven towards greater things named Curtis Hite.
In 1995 after Raytheon acquired E-Systems and I had spent a year and a half with the CRSS team, I left the project to do a variety of other things and the superior group of engineers went on to become internal consultants within Raytheon across many projects. At the same time, ObjectSpace started its bootcamp program to hire aspiring object technologists with great potential and to train them in “the ObjectSpace way”. Jef Newsom was one of the first and most gifted students of the internal bootcamps and graduated to become an excellent instructor. In 1996, the adventurous Jef moved to Washington D.C. to be a part of ObjectSpace’s first satellite office and in 1997 I worked on a project in D.C. for about 6 mos, where Jef and I became fast friends, bonding over software & skateboarding, billiards & beer, and jokes about Texans.
In 1998 the Raytheon team, frustrated with the ability-agnostic pay structures of government contractors, looked around for another place to land. ObjectSpace couldn’t hire them because they were client personnel, so they joined a newly forming company called Expeed which eventually became the North American branch of Valtech. Also in ‘98, Jef left ObjectSpace for another entrepreneurial adventure in Dallas and in 1999 I left for one in northern Virginia, as well. In 2000, ObjectSpace was facing trouble and sold its training division, with Ken Howard and Diana Hoogland as heads of operations and sales, respectively, to Curtis, Barry, and the gang at Valtech.
Jumping ahead a few years to 2003, Jef was consulting on a project in the social networking space where they wanted a like-minded person to head up the development team. I took the job and moved back to Dallas to get schooled by Jef in .NET architecture and C# development. Meanwhile, Valtech was going strong with the leadership of Curtis, Barry, and Ric DeAnda, with many other great people in the ranks. In early 2004, my social networking company ran into financial problems just as we were growing a user base, so we shut down that line of business and I started making plans to move on. Jef was doing independent consulting elsewhere at the time and looking for the next big thing. When I told him that I was ready to leave and start something new, he asked “Do you want to start a company together?” Without even knowing what we would do, I blurted out “Yes!” We started planning and working toward incorporation and signed the papers on August 15th, 2004 for Improving Enterprises, LLC.
We began as a consulting and training firm specializing in .NET development and applying our valuable experience in object-oriented, agile development from the Java world. We started as a registered Microsoft partner, and through years of hard work and earning a long list of customer references, became Microsoft Certified and eventually a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner for both Learning Solutions and Custom Development Solutions.
In 2006, the international leadership of Valtech, suffering an extremely severe case of rectal-cranial inversion, decided they didn’t like the profitable direction of the North American branch, and systematically pushed out the entire leadership and sales teams. The leadership team, composed of former CRSS and ObjectSpace team members, formed a new think-tank called The Blue Ocean Group, which in early 2007 Jef and I convinced to join forces with us to form the stronger, faster, and healthier Improving Enterprises, Inc. We now have many people from the original Raytheon CRSS team and from ObjectSpace, as well as many other talented and excellence-focused people from the software development industry in our area. On this special occasion, thanks go to everyone for making this company more capable and self-sustaining than we dared imagine in the beginning. It’s a pleasure to work with everyone in the company and to continue to experience the great success that we have been fortunate enough to enjoy up to this point. Thanks also go to our customers and partners who give us fun and challenging work to do. We plan to continue bringing great business value and the spirit of improving to everything we do, for many years to come.
