Delegate, Delegate, Delegate…

At the start of the year I wrote about 5 Things I Will Change in 2013. One of them concerned the delegation of more Management 3.0 courses to co-trainers. Since that post I co-trained with Mads Troels Hansen (in Denmark), Kai Simons (in Poland), and Mischa Ramseyer (in Italy), and next week it will be with Jason Little and François Beauregard (in Canada). I am so pleased with the outcome (more free time, richer discussions, less stress) that the courses in Singapore, Sydney and Auckland (end of June/early July) will be the last courses I will do by myself. I will practice what I preach by delegating almost everything to the 50+ licensed facilitators.

I also wrote I would be delegating more creative work to more people, by “growing a business network, a community of entrepreneurs working together under one name”. Well, Happy Melly was launched not long after that, and by this time already dozens of facilitators, business owners, freelancers, and other stakeholders are involved in running business experiments together in a true lean startup fashion. Work has started on a few apps, videos, books, and of course, a conference. I’m sure you will see more results soon. And if not, we’ll share stories of our inspiring failures. 🙂

All these activities have made me decide to invest in an online system for Happy Melly. It's job will be to help us keep track of entities, stakeholders, facilitators, licenses, brands, content, translations, events, courses, certificates, customers, apps, and more… Right now I have such data spread all over websites, spreadsheets, Word files, wiki pages, etc. and I'm afraid it's going to explode soon. (Or else my own head will explode!) Therefore, I am looking for a supplier to whom I can delegate the creation of such a platform. What I will be looking for in a supplier:

1. Great experience doing projects in an Agile way (Scrum, Kanban, or a similar approach);
2. Great track record building high-reliability websites and/or SaaS platforms;
3. Proven history of working with both big and small companies, with long-term relationships;
4. Public demos of earlier projects, so I can assess quality of design;
5. Active involvement and interest in Agile communities.

And just to be clear: I want the company as a whole to be qualified, not just individual people. It will become a very important piece of software for me, therefore (in this case) I require a supplier with a proven track record of working as a team. Freelancers and startups don’t need to apply for this particular project.

Your suggestions are appreciated.