I hope this blog serves as further information about WGS to anyone interested in it (prospective employees and clients and partners). And thus unlike previously, I will avoid writing anything that is not related to WGS (such as my opinions etc, which should go to my personal blog instead).
The current wgs.co.id website doesnt tell much about us. Even our own employees thought the WGS website doesnt portray an IT company. It doesnt try to sell anything but career to prospective employees! I totally agree, but even as I have known this for a long time, there is no one to work on updating the website! Updating the website (and internet marketing in general) has become an afterthought, as even without it, we keep growing to a current headcount of 90 employees.
However we realize the bigger we are, the more necessary is a strong sales & marketing team. Be paranoid: imagine not only we cannot grow anymore, but the scary thought of having a lot of idle engineers! So in the past couple of months we have hired another salesperson for our overseas SMB division, KiranaTama, a new salesperson for our venture in domestic enterprise market as an Oracle Gold partner, a three-person internet marketing team, and two salespeople for our government division, Qorser.
We also face an at best linear growth: if we grow, we have to hire more people. Low productivity is also shadowing our company. We cannot increase prices and yet we have to keep increasing salaries to keep our best talents! To grow exponentially, and to increase productivity per employee, and to transform ourselves from a mere workshop, we have to have a product. So we assign a team currently building an SaaS product for the Indonesian SMB market – to be launched early 2011.
In the Engineering division, we are introducing a new position, VP of Project Management, who’s taking the responsibility of overseeing our Project Managers. Thus I hope our CTO have more time to pursue our longer-term vision – that is to achieve CMMI.
In Indonesia there are reportedly only two companies with CMMI level 3. We want to be the third by 2013!
In Human Resources, it seems that the bigger we are, the easier it is to find and retain good talents. Two years ago, very few employees think of working at WGS long term. Many see our company as merely a stepping stone – and those who doesnt, gets bored in less than 1 year and similarly left. We have now found many ways to keeping good talents, among them are: we need to provide fresh challenges all the time, we need to have employees in control of their own career, we need them working for a purpose. Now the people who want to leave WGS is the tiny minority.
The biggest (and most expensive) problem is now office space. We have to operate our two old offices as the current office can no longer hold everyone in, and yet the lease contract is still one year away to end. But I shouldnt grumble about it – it is a blessing that so far we can still grow, and thus contribute more IT to the world.
That’s all the updates for now, happy Idul Fitri and happy holidays!