URL is Life
Hello again, humans. Oof. So so many things have been really happening over the past few months and we’re not even in the last quarter of the year yet. Don’t get us wrong, we do love remote work (see story: Making the Most Out of Remote Work). The flexibility, the focus, and most of all, the freedom to use most of the time we have for the things we actually need to do. We love it and for sure our efforts, resources, and investments revolve around it.
Humans Easing in the Next Phase of the “New Normal”
As our world slowly balances communicating and collaborating between digital and physical experiences over 2021 and 2022, we got more and more chances to meet the humans we’re working with. Since we started last 2019, we really only got to do IRL stuff for half a year until everything went full URL. So going back was a pretty much interesting experience for us. From doing our monthly meetings to our mid-year planning, client and partner meetings, onboarding training, attending events, and even public speaking.
Check out how Hoomans met with Humans IRL in a URL world:
Mid-year Planning + Agency Outing Out of Town with Hoomans!
Last July, we celebrated our 3rd year anniversary as a #HumanAgency, and as part of our annual operating plans, we always dedicate a day or two halfway through the year to do a review of how we’re doing and how we need to push forward for the remainder of the year. And of course, celebrate our founding anniversary too since it happens every July 12. During the height of the pandemic, we did it either virtually or in private places in Metro Manila when there are no lockdown restrictions. This year, we decided to try and do the mid-year review + planning out of town and hold our first-ever agency outing. We were able to finally meet some of the humans we only have ever met virtually and got to have a road trip, board games, movies, and hangout sessions with them IRL. We spent half of a week in a house in Subic to review the year and plan ahead. Hence our recent 2021 Report on What’s Up, What’s New, and What’s Next with Hooman. And yes, yes, I know, it’s a long entry. Sorry!
Doing Monthly IRL Meetings with Hoomans
Lately, we’ve also started to return to doing our end-of-month review meetings face to face. We’re really happy to have been able to have our operations run digitally (I mean, we can’t be offering digital services to our clients and run our ops on sheets of paper, right? Like, that’s… that’s just wrong.). Though we are running digitally, there are still a couple of legacy things in running a business that needs to be finalized on paper like some legal, accounting, or government stuff. Stuff that somehow still requires to be physically signed on an actual physical paper, so we try to use these monthly meeting sessions to do that too. This reminds me, I should really start owning a pen. One with ink and writes on paper.
Discovering New Opportunities in Literal Table-Top Discussions with Humans
As being actively involved in the discovery phase of our overall customer journey, I must say I really enjoy what we built. Being able to have our website collect leads and automate the scheduling of our discovery sessions with potential customers without the need for me to juggle between looking at my calendar and asking the client when they’re free. Then from there, everything happens on the CRM Module of our ERP. Whether it be for clients, partners, suppliers, or even job applicants, this process really worked for me.
Since this process really works for us and it allows us to continually be as lean as we can be to make our offerings as accessible as possible, we think digital discussions whether by email or by virtual meetings remain a good contender in saving everyone’s time and resources. It allows us to focus more on making sure the solutions work rather than other non-essential stuff.
We’d like to reserve the time and effort to do face-to-face meetings with clearer objectives and opportunities. Like recently, as we expanded our offerings with Cloud Management Services, we were in active collaboration with Sir Joel Carbonilla and the Computrade Technology Team to find even more options and more choices for both our customers to find true end-to-end digital transformation. From coffee shop discussions to consultation sessions in their HQ, hanging out and actually working again with my mentor’s really a fun ride for me. (and yes, the coffee and other things that came with it really sweetened the ride 😅). We also did a couple of visits to some of our multi-solution clients to discuss their digital transformation roadmap for the year and explore how the new hybrid approaches can be further augmented with Hoomans. Was really interesting since some of them we’ve been actively communicating with for 1-2 years and we’ve never really met each other face-to-face until recently. Indescribable feeling. Haha.
Visiting Renewing Humans with On-site Training Sessions
Similar to our customer acquisition processes, our onboarding processes are also streamlined with our tools and procedures. We utilize both our ERP and LMS along with virtual sessions to monitor and deploy a client’s onboarding. Though asynchronous sessions do work, we do understand that some clients do require a more hand-holding approach so we are open for face-to-face training sessions when our schedule permits. Like this month, we were able to visit Ymage Trading, one of our ERP clients to give them a refresher about the ERP, its modules, and case studies on implementation as they are in a transition in terms of their adoption.
Our Chief Dedication Officer and ERP Projects Lead, Jillian, went hands-on with the Ymage team to guide them on navigating the many different possibilities of streamlining and documenting operations with an all-in-one business management platform. Interactions were fun, and interesting, and I think what I appreciate is it being real-time. Without having the need to wait for latent audio or video.
Aside from Ymage, we also visited one of my favorite accounts, Divine Wisdom, one of our LMS clients. I really have to admit that I may have an unmetered bias for education efforts but given the recent requirement of DepEd for schools to start doing face-to-face classes again, we thought it might be best to visit our academe clients to see how they’re planning to cope and explore how we can help them. We recently visited their school to do a refresher training for teachers to discover and discuss more means for them to augment their learning experiences whether it be for virtual or real-life classes. We also helped them better utilize features like interactive content, assignments, and real-time attendance monitoring for the teachers, students, and parents. More or less helping them comply with the Department of Education’s requirement to have parents be able to know in real-time if their kids are in school perimeter.
Exploring the Ecosystem Through IRL Events
Though the past two years didn’t allow a lot of face-to-face events to occur, we were able to attend a few and were even able to participate in some interviews like CXO Innovation Summit’s Deep Dive and getting featured on Village 88’s Top 500 Tech Companies in the Philippines. This year, as more doors go opened, through partners like CompuTrade Tech, we were able to attend exclusive events where they aim to showcase new solutions and services that could allow their partners and allies to expand their solutions.
My favorite recent one is the Partnership Launch and Tech Update between Cloudflare and CTP, I’ve been using Cloudflare for over a decade now in boosting the cloud stuff I’ve been building. Definitely a non-negotiable for me if we’re talking about digital performance. Really pumped to see that it has grown so much and beyond. The New Cloudflare One offers an all-in-one suite for protection and performance not just of a website or an app, but even for a whole organization with SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) Essentially eliminating the immediate need to install security hardware, especially for hybrid setups. Also, it’s so easy to use. More about this very soon.
Hooman Shares Experiences with Humans in Public
Another one of the many opportunities being provided to us by CTP’s access to their labs for new and existing tech so we can further understand and build POCs for the solutions we imagine. Some of these techs aren’t even out in the market yet.
Like, recently, we were lucky enough to be one of the first alpha testers of a new serverless gateway platform with a theoretically powerful rules engine that could allow us to automate and create intelligent cloud services management in one platform. Stuff like A/B Testing for UX Design, conditional landing pages for social and search ads, location-based access for ERP, and even simplifying migration from staging to production deployment. All of these things were things we were able to explore with Snowowl. One of CTP’s latest addition to their strong cloud portfolio.
As they recently launched their partnership here in the Philippines through another exclusive event, we were invited to share the experience we had with Snowowl and discuss with CTP’s partners and end users the possibilities of a serverless gateway controller. Really fun meeting new humans and exploring even more possibilities for digital transformation.
Wew. Fun fun activities and TBH, the highlight of my going out is being able to dine-in in restaurants and enjoy a proper meal with proper care. (Slightly) worth the dreadful traffic. Slightly. Traffic still eats a lot of time. But good thing the cloud’s always there to keep things going.
Oh. BTW. Forgot that there should be a CTA for articles I publish. Though, I just really wanted to document and share our recent experiences in lengthy written narratives with 3D rendered art. But yea, anyway, here you go: Check out What’s Up, What’s New, and What’s Next for Hooman in our recently released Mid-Year Report for 2022.
