Great meeting with Russell. We spent the whole time going over management type topics (managing code developers and software guys/gals, and IT/Server type people). Here are some of my notes:

- Talking about being really up front and open, right off the bat. Firing people - giving them a chance to change. Having agreements and expectations in place. Russell, decided that he is going to start saying things (sooner). Learning lessons and then applying that knowledge. 

- We were talking about how to measure things. Get a project that was/is of equal complexity and then seeing how long it takes. Checking on productivity. Measuring hours and lines of code. Performance metrics. Tracking insertions and deletions (time divided by insertions). Other factors - such as: Was it exploratory? What was the difficulty? What kind of code type (language, type, mix)? How much pressure was there (timelines, budget, other)? Was it a new project, old (re-vamp or refactor), or research based? Were the tasks and direction known or unknown? Great questions.

- Talking about different topics - managers, code time, review, project management, decisions, complexity

- Things that help (in the bigger picture) - making code modular and having/doing tests - this allows you to be able to refactor things quickly.

- What do you want to be (as a company)? We are being forced down the big boy path. We are a SaaS company (software as a service). That requires project management, dev ops, budgets, senior devs, it/servers, order, etc.

- Looking at budget and charging more for our services. If you want this, this is custom.

- Other software costs a lot of money - for Fox Pest Control - they went with Salesforce - it was 80K build, 40k yearly, and 20k maintenance fee - those numbers didn't include project management and design. That was only one project.

- Going into old code may end up doubling your time - updating existing or going new into existing.

- Familiarity - do you know what is going on and where possible problems may be? That is huge.

- Standards and consistency - good coding practices

- Product managers and project managers - they are different. We could use both...

- Charging for projects and maintenance of those projects. Don't forget the maintenance - that is a huge part of the puzzle.

- If no one is managing... you have to accept the hodgepodge house.

- Hard to mix managing and coding - super hard to be both... Too much pressure. Who is the leader, who is out exploring, who is managing, who is coding?

- Who can handle the one-liners (self-exploratory projects) vs everything lined out - some people don't know what is needed or what is wanted. Sometimes we give them too much rope and they hang themselves. Certain people can handle the self-exploratory projects and others need to be guided - almost step-by-step.

- Consistency - little drips vs floods