A few months ago, we asked our support staff (which is made up of project managers, and developers, and others) to focus on one word: delight. Ultimately, we feel like making customers happy is the most important thing we can do as a company. So we reminded the crew that delight was important, and encouraged them to find a way to watch that. Through our help desk software, we’re able to ask our customers how we’re doing as we close out tickets. This was an interruption that we didn’t want to impose on our customers, but it’s pretty light, and it’s pretty important, so we went ahead with it. The data from this feedback shows up on our big board in our gathering room constantly. In a competitive office (OK, I’m competitive), scoreboards help us know how we’re doing. Of late, I’ve heard a few of the folks who work on support walking around muttering about "getting one more happy face". Why the muttering? This is our scoreboard. Every time someone answers the question, "How did we do?" it adds a new face to the top of the queue, and pushes one off the bottom. And now you, too, can see why the obsession is cranked up right now. The team is on the verge of pushing their approval rating from 98% to 99%.  Speaking generally, SCORM professionals are probably as beloved as say, tax professionals. People don’t usually get happy about SCORM. But our support crew (which includes most of the people who work here in one way or another) is killing it.  So, thanks to Joe, and Jena, and Troy, and the Thomases, and all of the other folks who work with tickets for being obsessed enough to push from 98% to 99%, even though 98% would be good enough. Thanks for being delightful. Oh, and thanks to the 100 people who have rated our support since my last ticket was rated. The blame for keeping us at 97% for a while was crushing me.  

These are busy times at Rustici Software.  Between all of the activity around Tin Can, some new employees, and a bunch of new Engine customers, we have a lot going on.  As part of a recent contract negotiation, I was asked to justify the integration cost or to do it on an hourly basis.  I said, "No," to the hourly option and here’s why: We’re always going to take a full service approach to implementations, and believe strongly that hourly setups aren’t good for anyone.  They incent us to move slowly, and encourage you to count the minutes.  So, we set a fixed fee, and take the implementation personally.

For years, every single sales call at Rustici Software was handled by yours truly. We’re selling a very technical solution to a difficult problem (SCORM), and my experience as a developer really helped me in those conversations. We’ve grown over the years, though, and having all of the sales conversations go through one person had become too much, so we’ve brought on some SCORM Cloud experts, and we’ve asked Chris to start helping out with SCORM Engine and SCORM Driver sales. We still aren’t the kind of company that does pushy sales; Chris is just here to help you find the right product and answer your questions, but even that requires expertise. On May 1st, Chris happened to come to work dressed like me, and he happened to close a SCORM Engine sale that day. He joked that, "If all I have to do to close sales is to dress like Tim, I’ll do it!" Well, the people of Rustici Software called him on his hairstyle, and in typical Chris fashion, he took the bait. "Sure, I’d shave my head if that’s all it takes." Negotiations were complete, and the bet was set. If we could close 6 new SCORM Engine deals over the course of May, Chris would shave his head to look ever more beautiful. Note: This is where you learn that Chris is not good at betting. First of all, he’s doing something we all want him to do. Second, there’s no "winning" side of the bet for Chris. Regardless… Friday, May 25th arrived, and so did the 6th new SCORM Engine contract. That, my friends, is a big month (that’s only gotten bigger since, we’re on 7 now). We’re pretty fired up about the Engine implementations and what we’ve got going on with Tin Can these days too. These are exciting times. And as for Chris? He’s a mensch.

Introducing TinCanAPI.com. My name is Andy and I’ll be your tour guide today.  Let’s go!  First stop: What is Tin Can?  Here you’ll learn what the Tin Can API is, how it works, and why it matters. This is also where we’ll showing you who the current adopters are and how they’re using the Tin Can API. You want to be a part of this group. If you’re working with the Tin Can API and want to be added to the Current Adopters page, let us know. Next stop: Developers Are you a developer interested in building a Learning Record Store or an application that sends Tin Can statements to an LRS? Are you interested in making a contribution to the Tin Can API Spec? Then you’ll want to stop by the Developers section of the site.  Here you’ll find a number of valuable resources as well as opportunities to ask us questions and ways to join in Tin Can discussions. Stop #3: Our Solutions Ready to get started working with the Tin Can API, but don’t want to go at it alone? Here’s where we’ll walk you through a few options for how we can help. Option 1:  Get a locally installed LRS with SCORM Engine + Tin Can API Are you an LMS solution and you want to support the Tin Can API? This is the place for you. Option 2:  Get a hosted LRS with SCORM Cloud + Tin Can API Do you want to get up and running fast with an LRS and you don’t want to deal with the pains of maintaining it yourself? This is the place for you. Option 3:  Create Tin Can Activities with SCORM Driver + Tin Can API Are you an e-learning content provider and you want to track and report on your content in a Learning Record Store using the Tin Can API? This is the place for you. Last stop: Tin Can Chatter There is much going on in the world of Tin Can and we want this site to be a destination for you to stay in the loop. We’ll be sharing our thoughts via the TinCanAPI.com blog, curating Tin Can news and talk via the Community Chatter page, providing quick links to past TinCanAPI.com newsletters, and sharing #TinCanAPI tweets via the Twitter page. The Tin Can Chatter section will be updated frequently, so check back often. We’ve already crammed a lot into this site, but there is much more to come.  If you ever have trouble finding what you’re looking for, let us know.  We want to help you!  If you have suggestions for things to add, let us know. Thanks for visiting and enjoy!   The post Welcome to TinCanAPI.com appeared first on SCORM.

How cool would it be if we could look inside our brains and see what we’re learning and how we’re learning it? But we can’t do it. We can’t manage learning. So what the heck are we doing with ourselves? Why are we building learning management systems and specifications that help them work better? It comes down to this: learning is so important that we have to try. We have to do everything in our power to put our students, kids, learners, employees, and volunteers in the environment that gives them the best chance to succeed. Success, in all its varied definitions, is a goal that we can all get behind. Try this exercise: If you had to guess whether or not someone was going to succeed in the task they are about to attempt, if your life depended on it, what would you want to know more than anything else? The task could be anything. Will Michael Jordan make the game winning shot? Will Sally make her sales quota? Will Chuck crash his forklift into the wall? What would you want to know? I’d want to know that Michael’s made that shot time and time again. I’d also like to know just how many times he’s practiced that shot in that situation. I’d want to know if Sally has ever had a sales quota before. I’d want to know how many books she’s read about sales techniques. I’d want to know how much research Sally has done to learn about the product she’s going to sell. I’d want to know if Chuck has crashed his forklift before. I’d want to know if he’s crashed his car. I’d want to know if he’s completed the required forklift driving training course. I’d want to know if Chuck has ever has a conversation with a mentor, perhaps one who’s had a forklift accident before. I’d want to have a deep understand of their respective experience. Is there any better predictor of future success than prior experience? We may never be able to look inside our brains and see what we’re learning, but if we can increase our understanding of experiences and their connection to success, then we’ll have accomplished something. If we can collectively build "success management systems", I think we’ll really have accomplished something. The post Inside Your Brain appeared first on SCORM - .

No, we’re not going to get into politics, there’s waaay too much of that coming to the blogosphere this year already. This post is about four more reasons I love working at Rustici Software. The Next Four Welcome to Rustici Software Andy Whitaker, Megan Bowe, Jaffer Ibrahim and Brian Miller (who as the second of his name will hereafter be referred to as "Bobby", ask Tim or I for that backstory sometime). Andy and Megan come to us to keep the snowballing momentum behind the Tin Can API moving forward. They’ve been at it for a little while already. If you haven’t already heard from them, you probably will soon. They will be active over at tincanapi.com. Jaffer and Brian bring more serious development horsepower into the mix. They’ll be coding away behind the scenes as we roll out new products that fully realize the potential of the Tin Can API. Well, come to think of it, maybe we should talk politics for a bit. We haven’t introduced "The Thomases" to you all yet. The Thomases TJ Seabrooks (the "T" is for Thomas) and Freddie O’Connell (real name "Thomas", see "Bobby" above, but he did this on his own) have been with us since the start of the year. The Thomas’s spend their days bringing #delight to our SCORM Engine implementations. As for the politics, you see TJ’s a bit of a conservative and Freddie’s a bit of a liberal. We decided to hire them both and put them in the same office just to see what would happen. It should make for a fun election season. I’m pretty fired up about the talent that’s cranking out great stuff at Rustici Software. This is really an amazing crew of people producing some phenomenal work. It just seems to get better with each batch of hires. The post Four More… appeared first on SCORM - .

All work and no play, well, that’s just not how we do things.   The first thing people usually learn about our company is that we work with e-learning standards like SCORM and the Tin Can API. The second thing that people tend to learn about us is that we have fun. Part of the fun we have at the office revolves around ping pong — singles matches, doubles matches, inventing new variations of pong (we have one called "grand canyon pong"), and keeping track of our office rankings on the "Pong Ladder". We even have our own language around the pong table…almost every score combination has its own codename. Here are a few:   10-8: we call it "Ten-eight-cious"…or "Tenacious" 7-7: we call it "un-cola"…get it? 7up? 10-4: "over and out" 0-0: we call it "7-2", because John is terrible at keeping score and has been know to call the score "7-2" when it’s really "0-0". Side note: I’m as bad, if not worse, at keeping score. 5-8: vivacious 9-9: nein! 4-2: fortitude 10-0: ten-o-cious (a very prized score) …and there are a lot more, not to mention our doubles teams’ names (The Wooves, The Kings, 7 Wonders, Engine Room, etc.) So, you see the importance of pong at Rustici Software — it’s serious business here.   We used to keep track of our rankings (the Pong Ladder) on a white board. There were some specific rules, but it wasn’t too high tech. Well, when we hired TJ, he realized that the pong ladder could be better. We have a big screen in our main meeting room/pong room that displays important company stats, and TJ had a vision for a system that we could put on that screen that would include a new pong ladder. It would keep track of all of our singles & doubles matches, our rankings, and it would use the Elo ranking system. He found an open-sourced Elo ranking system on Github, but it was written in Ruby, a language that he hadn’t used before. TJ did exactly what any of our developers would have done. He took a little time to learn Ruby so he could implement the Ruby Elo ranking system for our company. Voila! We had a new pong ladder on the big dashboard in our main meeting/pong room. It looks like this:     It’s fancy, it stores all of our game results, and it even sends Tin Can statements to our public LRS when a pong match is done. What does all of this have to do with hiring the right people?   Whenever we tell people that we’re looking for good software developers (which is all the time,) the first question we get is "what language?" We give the same answer every time. "If he/she is good enough to work here, then their familiarity with certain programming languages doesn’t matter." The story of TJ and the pong ladder is a perfect example of this, but it’s not just TJ. This is how all of our developers are. So, now it’s time for me to be a marketer: if you know somebody that fits our definition of a good developer, let us know. We want to have a conversation with him/her. The post How do you know you’ve hired the right person? appeared first on SCORM - .

I like to take care of people. It’s in my blood. I like to think that being "southern" has a lot to do with it, but most likely it comes from watching my mom take care of everyone I knew growing up. It just comes naturally to me, I guess. A few months ago, Mike and Tim (the owners of Rustici Software) asked me to head up a new project that would change the ways in which we cared for our employees. They wanted to launch a new program that would amp up our existing employee benefits package, allowing us to be able to recruit more amazing talent and give them (and existing Rusticians) an even more awesome place to work. Thus, "Jenafits" was born. You might have even seen our new #Jenafits shirts here and here… pretty cool, huh?! Jenafits is our new employee benefits program that goes way beyond the normal health, vision, and dental insurance. We want our employees to do awesome work while they are here, and lead exciting lives — free from some of the everyday stresses of life — when they aren’t. We believe in the power of a happy, less-distracted workplace and I’m here to make sure our employees stay that way. With Jenafits, our employees have access to twice-monthly house cleaning (yes, the employee’s house or apartment), a pretty cool wellness program, lawn care, and a bunch of other pretty sweet services. Rustici Software pays for these things, for our employees. They also get Jenafits on-demand, which covers everything from picking up cat food for Little Guy, to dropping a package at the post office, to planning a birthday party for our employee’s children, and everything in between. There are some companies, not many, but a few, that offer things that are similar to Jenafits (although without that awesome of a name — am I right?) Most of them have a catch — you’re expected to put in more hours at the office, since the company is taking care of so many "personal life hassles." Not here. We still work 40 hours a week; the only difference is we’re all a lot happier now. Oh, and your friend that’s the best software developer that you know…you should tell him/her about Jenafits, and send them our way. The post It’s official…Jenafits are here. appeared first on SCORM - .

The Jenafits that you pick at Rustici Software can be pretty telling. My Jenafits profile is "Wellness + Internet." It’s no secret that I like to run, bike and swim — A LOT. So, when I heard that there was a Wellness Jenafit that can help offset the costs for my gym membership, coaching fees, race entries etc., I was super-psyched. Triathlon training can get expensive! My other Jenafit, the high speed Internet + Amazon Prime membership, feeds my guilty pleasures. I call this one the "instant gratification package". Some might love this for the streaming videos etc, but not me. Now I can surf and shop at lightning speed, without leaving the living room. Many folks at Rustici will tell you that I’m a bit of a Groupon hoarder (I’m a sucker for those deals). So, a faster way to buy the latest massage deal is right up my alley. But, my online shopping habits aren’t just limited to Groupons. If I can buy it online rather than go to the store, I’m all for it. That’s where Amazon Prime comes in — free 2-day shipping? Dog food delivered to your door? All for it. So there you have it — the Jenafits that I chose. Want to learn more about any of us here at Rustici? Just ask us which Jenafits we picked. The post Our Jenafits say a lot about us appeared first on SCORM - .

If you’ve been keeping up with us over the years, you know we don’t take ourselves too seriously. For example, we have a running contest I’ll call "who can spit this (insert fruit pit/seed) the farthest". Yep, we do a lot of silly things around here. But, there are many things that we take very seriously, and one of those things is our customer support. If you’ve ever worked with our support team, you know how insanely awesome they are. If you haven’t experienced our customer support team, get ready to have your face melted off by their awesomeness. Joe, TJ, Freddie, Brian Miller, Brian Rogers, Tammy, Tim Edwards and Nathan all handle support, and together they form the mythical "Team Delight". In my humble opinion, these are some of the best support people in the world. And you know what? Our customers agree. See, we have this thing called the "Delight-O-Meter." Whenever a customer support ticket is closed out, our customers get automatically asked to let us know if they had a delightful support experience, or if they didn’t. The Delight-O-Meter keeps track of our customers’ reactions to the 100 most recently closed support tickets. Recently, there were two months in a row where the Delight-O-Meter held steady at 100%. That means that for 60 days, we delighted every…single…customer! This is a HUGE deal to us! These are the kinds of things we’re hearing from our customers — the kinds of things that make the work that we do a delight: "I was very impressed with the support I received. In fact, I was blown away as he offered to speak with me BY PHONE!" "Anyone I work with always goes above and beyond. Thank you!" "Efficient, no blabla, and quick. That’s how I like it. Thanks guys!" If you haven’t already, check out our Delight-O-Meter. We’re really proud of the work that Team Delight does — it’s amazing to see how hard they work to keep our customers happy. Doesn’t a page filled with tiny Jena smiley faces illustrate that just perfectly?! The post My love letter to our support team… appeared first on SCORM - .