Jiva Technology

What does Jiva stand for?

by Jon Ellis

At Jiva we pride ourselves on producing great web-based solutions — this is only possible because we work effectively as a team and our focus is entirely on the needs of our customers.

As a start-up we have been able to develop our own unique culture. We have learned from our years in large and small organisations — being great is not achieved by high degrees of bureaucracy and empire-building. We have each seen great cultures and know that these create a fantastic place to work and great business results.

So how would I describe the way that we work?

Commitment — everyone understands our objectives and their role in delivering them. We are all committed to making Jiva a success — this goes beyond our personal goals. We don’t set much store by job titles, as we are a low ego and not a status-orientated business; we don’t need big job titles to know that we are great at what we do and know that we make a difference.

Trust — we are honest and have faith in each other to honour our commitments, we are supportive, and behave with complete openness and honesty.

Communication — is at the centre of all that we do. Our Scrum development techniques involve us communicating daily with each other — checking progress, committing to delivery and supporting each other. We are not proud, we are all able to take and receive feedback and handle disagreements

Involvement — we all have a role. Despite this we have a sense of partnership with each other. Contributions are respected and expected.

Engineering — we have a number of processes that we use to solve problems, plan, commit and deal with problems. We are not bureaucratic however, it’s about doing things right first time.

Continuous Improvement — we are focused on improving our own skills and knowledge. As a company we dedicate 10% of our time to focus on our personal development and come up with great ideas for developing our business in new directions.

Improving performance is something that we are always focusing on. We are developing a 360 degree review process along with extending our mentoring programme.

Jiva is a great place to work — we are looking to recruit top quality developers, call us for a chat if you like what you read.

Mentoring

I’ve been at Jiva for a month now and it’s time to pull myself away from the code. For the last 4 weeks Jon’s been mentoring me, which outwardly looks like an excuse to pop down to Baristas (never a bad thing), but it’s really to help me along with my personal development. We both come from different backgrounds, but Jon is the voice of experience, which works out brilliantly for me. After going through Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody“, we’ve been looking at everything from Porter’s framework through to the more embarrassingly obvious, organisation techniques.

The aim is to hone my current geek skill set, but also develop the business side as well. This means I get to apply it all on my own website idea during 10% time. So far my quest to get down to the syrupy essence of it has seen me fighting with the five forces, and poking PEST, which is rather reminiscent of Uni. On the techie end I’m working on the presentation side of things by improving my CSS starting with the Blueprint project and then I shall investigate unobstrusive Javascript.

Jiva on Wikipedia..

So I typed Jiva into the all knowing Google and lo and behold there was a Wikipedia entry so I thought I would have a look.

Apparently Jiva in Hinduism and Jainism is a ‘living being’. Now that makes us ‘Living Being Technology’ which given our focus on the concept of People Search with Beanbag and Advisr I think its a nice fit.  Kevin and or Jon are probably going to tell me this was always the plan but I’m going to take a bit of convincing!

Welcome to the shiny new Jiva website..

As you can see we have given the Jiva website an extreme makeover and very happy we are with it to! The site continues to run on the wonderful WordPress but thanks to the stirling efforts of Chris Berridge and Juan Kennaugh it now has a wonderful new design that fits better with our ambitions as a company.

Feel free to let us know what you think..