Pay attention!

A while ago I read a post by Seth Godin on how to be a great audience. I thought it was a great post and provided some very good tips on what to do and how to listen and be (as the post says) a great audience. The context was a presentation to a group of eighth graders and how he could see who would be the good audience and who would not. The students who leaned forward, engaged and asked questions and drew out a better presentation.

Over the following months I have seen this over and over again in meetings. It's amazing the number of people who don't pay attention in a meeting. They drift off to their blackberry (assuming that the network is still working) while someone else is making a point. People bring laptops to meetings and proceed to answer email, read news (and if it's not an RSS feed of my blog that's just rude) or otherwise ignore why they are there in the first place.

Now I will admit that many meetings that get called seem to be meetings for the sake of meetings rather than meetings with a mission. This can be addressed separately. Be direct in meetings and don't be shy about making sure that there is a focused purpose and when that purpose has been achieved... don't feel that the meeting needs to go on just because it has been scheduled for an hour and fifteen minutes of discussion handled it. Give people the gift of time.

So, in your next meeting, make an effort to pay attention. Listen, lean in, ask questions, be a good audience and for goodness sakes PAY ATTENTION!!

Rails Envy: Hi, I'm Ruby on Rails...

Rails Envy: Hi, I'm Ruby on Rails...

Click here to view on YouTube

I laughed until I stopped.

Friday Link Day - Microsoft to buy Yahoo!?

News has started to come out that Microsoft is looking to resume talks to buy Yahoo! I think someone has Google envy.

Along the lines of the silicon related post from earlier this week... IBM announced that they have devised a way to create vacuum spaces in chips that will allow them to use less power and run faster. The chips even "assemble themselves" to a certain degree.

Getting tired of the laws of physics holding them back with silicon Intel is working on Laser chips now. NEC is saying that laser chips could power petaflop-class chips. Optical chips may still be a few years away but the idea sure is fun.

SUN gets a new spark

I recently had the opportunity to go out to California and visit SUN. It was just a short period of time but it was an information packed couple days. We discussed topics ranging from Sun GridEngine to strategic direction, from Developer Tools to hardware threading.

I was particularly happy to see that SUN appears to have obtained a dose of humility. Where their previous corporate strategy seemed for a while to be "ABM" (Anything But Microsoft) they are now focusing on understanding their spot in commodity markets and differentiating based on service. The previous approach and Scott McNeely's top 10 lists was certainly entertaining it didn't do much to further the companies goals.

SUN has now taken a page out of the RedHat handbook on making money with Open Source and are trying to make money with service differentiation. I had written off the initiative to Open Source Solaris as the dieing throws of a declining giant. But listening to the vision that they have and what innovation Sun is now building into Solaris 10 with things such as ZFS and Virtualization such as Zones.

Their approaches with Silicon and drive to innovate there was also interesting. They now sell Sun boxes with AMD and Intel processors. Talk about Cats and Dogs living together. We even discussed a current effort sun is working on with Microsoft for a large system provider where they are serving real time video off of Sun hardware running Windows. ... Let that sink in for a minute...

Another interesting point that was brought up was how Moore's Law and fitting more onto the same bit of silicon applies to RISC chips as well as CISC chips. Since RISC is smaller (Reduced Instruction Set) they can then fit more processors on the wafer. So they are legitimately talking 32 and 64 core processors. Talk about the need to thread your application. Initiatives such as Niagara and Victoria Falls also provide low energy approaches.

Just read some of the press of the days for a glimpse of some of what they have been up to.

Friday Link Day 2007-04-27

My favorite link of the week is the discovery of a new "potentially inhabitable" planet. It is believed to have water! If you start now by the time that your children's, children's... heck a lot of them are born, its just shy of 21 light years away, you can have an address that ends in Planet 581c!

Software Engineers can go to space too. I wonder if they ran any parts of flight control and operations on the Excel or Word... and if he knew they were if he still would have gone.

Do you hate putting your phone or iPod on the ground. Then you need the Electronics Hammock... yes, it's really a product.

If you hate your BlackBerry (like me) but enjoy the abuse and want to put the interface on a Windows Mobile 6.0 phone BlackBerry would like to help you out. They are apparently releasing BlackBerry functionality on Windows Mobile with ATT first and moving from there.

How do you get work life balance?

I was reading through some blog posts and stumbled onto a presentation I wanted to share. Stuart Levine, author of "Cut to the Chase," provides a downloadable PDF manifesto entitled Reclaim Your Life: A Two-Week Challenge to Help You Regain Time It has 11 great tips on how to get to the point, and get the time you need to really make a difference. He starts with a quick review of work life balance and how it's easy to say and not so easy to do. Check it out... make the time.

Nothing gets done till nothing gets done - Woehlke's Law

What a provocative thought... nothing gets done till nothing gets done. This law is really more of a postulate or a theory then an actual scientific law as I don't believe any mathematical proof has ever been done. That said, it is one that has a lot of circumstantial and experiential evidence piled up towards it being the truth.

We have all been on projects where we know going in that the right [Resources, Timeline, Staffing, Education, ...] is not in place for the project to be successful. But we march on and because we all want to do a great job we try our hardest and keep the worst from happening for a long time, sometimes succeeding despite the obstacles and sometimes not failing until very late. What Woehlke is stating in this is that in order to get management attention and get the resources that are truly needed to be successful a problem needs to be evident.

A few quick reads on Woehlke's law -

• The Nimble PM has a nice article on Woehlkes law starting with the quote "Project managers will not get the staff they need so long as they muddle through with overtime, ulcers, and super-human effort. Only when deadlines are missed will senior management approve the staff who, had they been available at the outset, would have prevented the missed deadlines"
• Cutter had an advisor article in 2005 where Donna Fitzgerald made some great points about how to avoid getting caught in the trap and how hard it is for most of us over achievers to really understand what this law means.

What do I think this law means? If you look at a project and know that it can't be successful you need to prove it. Not with whining and bellyaching. If you go to management with a story of how "this will be really hard" you will get a reaction of "well duh, that's why we have you, our gifted team on this project". Rather you need to have "Data in fact". Set up tests to show where performance is and what would be needed to mitigate it. Set up early aggressive iterations to show a realistic rate of development. It's all about risk mitigation... if you can show where the real true risk is then you will get help. If all you have is an intuitive "this is hard" you will be patted on the head and told to go try hard.

Friday Link Day - 2007-04-20

Does Apple + Google = Love? It is a high interest geek story and makes for attractive rumors. The enemies err... competitors for both are often the same. My personal thoughts are that there will be much collaboration but no marriage. The Forbes article brought to you in pictures certainly is a fun read no matter what the eventual outcome.

Speaking of a marriage... Like the MAC? Or at least the UI? Check out this Blog post with a style sheet that allows you to put a MAC interface on Google Reader. (If you are looking for an RSS Reader I recommend the Google Reader BTW.)

Then to keep the Google theme for the day Google shows us the first tenet of innovation in action. The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. Apparently Froogle didn't fall in the good category so Froogle is dead... long live Google Product Search.

A quick snip on testing

I have recently had two different offline topics end up with the same point so I figured I would pass it on here as well. Testing and why it is important to test to failure and not just test. To stick to the intuitive reason, it is because then you know when your system will break and what will happen when it does. It is naive to believe that your system will be 100% problem free, it is a far more realistic expectation to accept that you just don't know when.

One of the fundamental race conditions of the universe is that as soon as you build a better, more idiot-proof system, the world will build a better idiot. Similarly in a system which is successful and experiencing growth, you will eventually hit a point that exposes problems that didn't show themselves under lesser pressure or lesser load. In aircraft they X-Ray and image things like propellers not because they want to ensure that it is perfect, but so that they know what quality it is. Under the right conditions a very tiny bubble can cause a propeller to literally fly apart. Better to know these things up front.

My Jana RSS feed recently (inside joke) recently came across with these two links, one for example, one for humor that are relevant to this topic. Check out this Ultimate Failure test... and fly with a little better feeling in your heart because you know that they care enough to do this. Then check out Monkey Testing at it's best. (I am trying very hard to resist the 1000 monkeys and Shakespeare sonnet reference... darn... I failed.)

In conclusion remember, it's ALWAYS better that you know where things will blow up than for someone else to tell you.

Go get an MBA?

I recently read a fabulous post by Seth Godin on NOBS, the end of the MBA. In between bouts of laughter I thought immediately of post material and here we find ourselves.

Not that there is no value in an MBA. Certainly there is and depending upon the program, classes and approach to teaching lots of value can be garnered. But it is not the be all and end all that it is often made out to be. For many people a real world education and a desire to learn are what is needed to be successful. Through books, such as those written by Seth Godin are great sources of knowledge, the catch is that you need to make the time and spend the effort to learn from them.

Another important point is to consider what your focus is. MBAs focus on business administration and financials in most cases. If your passion and skills are around technology and development then it may not be the best suited thing for you to change that focus. Focus on what you do well, not what you think others want and you will go further and faster.

Stephen Covey often uses the term circle of influence to describe what you control and what you do not. If you focus on what you influencce you can expand that influence, knowledge and experience. When you focus on things outside of your circle of influence or beyond your control you only end up getting frustrated and end up with less time and less energy to focus on the things that can help you and expand your circle of influence.

You have a limited amount of time and a limited amount of energy and spirit... use them for something that gives you more, not less.

Innovation in automobiles

Looking at the automotive industry, it seems as though innovation, real innovation hasn't happened in a long time. Sure there has been incremental improvements and there has been many great additions that have made our lives easier or better. (Try and tell a Mom who drives her kids for any distance that you are taking the DVD player out of her vehicle and you are going to face some serious wrath.) But next generation types of things seem to be a long time in coming.

I encountered an interesting one while channel surfing for cool HD content and it got me thinking about what stories are out there so here is my quick list.

• We have all heard the stories of the self driving cars using approaches like that from GM is neat idea but one that people who love to turn the twisties view with some amount of horror.
• Alternative fuels show promise and may help with future energy problems.
• Keyless cars and other innovations that are cool... but differentiating?
• Reinventing the wheel? Michelin is trying with the new tweel.
• Even cars that can go 235 miles per gallon of gas!

The thing that gone me thinking about the whole topic though was the idea of thin cars. Two people cars that lean to corner faster. One example is the Carver. Another example is the Naro. The thought of twisting and turning but taking up less space and energy could be fun. Of course in my case, my immediate reaction was "will the power to turn the tires be enough?"

I have posted before about how globalization and other changes to the world business environment have driven a need to develop and use our whole minds. This in turn is also driving what I believe is a need to address school systems to adjust to these needs. I recently read an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal on how Pain Free Trade Spurs Second Thoughts. The article is an interesting piece on how Alan Blinder, economist, Princeton teacher and one time advisor to the Federal Reserve has changed his mind about the impact of globalization and offshoring to American jobs.

It is easy to jump to the protectionist approach (especially for politicians) but really this just delays an inevitability. What, in my opinion, is the more correct response is to adjust our understanding and focus on what will be staying put. High touch areas and things that instantaneous technical bandwidth won't address will always be in demand. As a recent quote from Texas State Representative Rob Eissler, on the importance of arts education states "Left brain is logic, right brain is creativity. We don't want our kids to compete internationally with half of their brains tied behind their backs." (Original post from Dan Pink's blog. Dan is the author of the fabulous book A Whole New Mind that deals with many of these topics.)

It works on my machine...

It's been a while since I have done a Friday Link Day so I wanted to throw together a quick one and pop a few of my favorites out for this week.

It works on my machine. What technologist has ever existed who has not used these words? Well now you can stamp that application with all of the recognition that a single threaded one time test deserves. By following the criteria outlined in this Blog post you can use the logo below and show the quality of your app.

Next, in the news of the truly cynical at heart, check out this article on Job Cuts for Fun and Profit. Short Circuiting Circuit City decided that 3,400 of it's workers were making just over 50 cents more an hour than their own determined average acceptable salary for a sales associate... so they are laying them off to hire cheaper people. So the next time you are looking for help and wondering why you can't find anyone who knows as much as your 7 year old you can remember how saving 50 cents an hour in employee costs got you an extra 25 cents off a computer. The article, one pulled together as part of the Knowledge at Wharton effort from U Penn Wharton School of Management, actually makes many good points on a number of topics and is worth a read if you get a chance.

TPF as a SOA platform

Really... I am not kidding. For those of you who read my posts at all regularly you know that the majority of my time is spent in Open Systems. But in reality there is still a lot of data and processing that occurs on the mainframe. I caught the following press post on Information Week and simply had to read it.

IBM Opens Up System Z Mainframe To SOAs

Now, reading into the press release it's much more fluffy than the title sounds. But really, would we expect IBM marketing to not be able to do their jobs? (I think they were the original inventors of F.U.D., right?)

Still, it does make you think about what kind of data source a mainframe could be for any high volume system. The ability to handle large amounts of data and transactions in a stable manner is a consistent throttle that we encounter in the Open Systems world. Now the cost/benefit needs to also be compelling since there are many other ways to solve the problem then simply making the iron bigger.

I had an opportunity to talk to some IBMers lately and they are still big on big boxes, just now they want to slice those boxes into 100s of virtual servers and provision them dynamically. I found it ironic that when you consider the open source revolution pushing hard away from big iron, we are now pushing closer to it. The IBM Z series and the IBM P series even sit in the same "refrigerator boxes" now. (For those who are not Z or P savvy Z=Mainframe, P = Open Systems) So you could walk out on a raised floor and not even know if it's an open system or a mainframe system... now it's just a system.

But then, isn't that how a service consuming customer views it?

When you wrestle a pig you both get dirty but the pig likes it

The next in the significant Open Source events category is one that occurred with Microsoft and Novell. (Yes, that Microsoft). This deal has to do with Linux as well, but in this case its SUSE that is under discussion. Read the announcement or watch the video footage if you want more detail.

The pundits on this one are even more passionate. (As if we would expect anything else with that Microsoft being involved) Linux Journal likens the deal to Racketeering from Microsoft with FUD sowing from Novell/SUSE. Bernard Golden claims the deal just proves that Open Source is important to your future.

According to the Public Relations statements by both companies the deal is all about Virtualization, Web Services Management and Document Format Compatibility. It is also a five year patent protection agreement where Microsoft agrees not to sue users of SUSE if there is any patent infringement in the SUSE system.

My thoughts around this go immediately to other companies that have made a deal with the devil... err... I mean entered into cooperation agreements with Microsoft. (And no I am not an ABM Coalition card holder. I actually have a fascination and respect for Microsoft, .NET in particular and even SQL Server... I just think that from a business perspective you have to realize what you are dealing with) Take for example Sybase.... Somewhere around Sybase version 4.9.2 Sybase and Oracle were the big mean Relational databases competing tooth and nail with one another. Sybase was, at the time, viewed as slightly more technically advanced while Oracle had better marketing. Sybase then entered into a cooperation agreement with Microsoft to build a version of their database product specially tuned for the Microsoft Environment. A great move, they would get information from Microsoft on the particulars of the platform, build a super tuned engine and everyone would benefit... right? They were very successful, the product created is the forefather of the now nearly everywhere Microsoft SQL Server. As far as what Sybase got out of the deal... they got some short term revenue in the first few years of the agreement before it ended and Microsoft took things over. (Honest, they are still in business now) Other deals that can be pointed to include Borland... Symantec... Corel... need I say more?

Not that this will end up being an end of the world. Just like Microsoft owns the productivity suite on Apple they will likely get the information they need to build and own the productivity suite market on Linux. If .NET components run and integrate well with other platforms but work best on Windows platforms... hasn't Microsoft always been very good at Embrace, Extend, Exterminate?

Another one that will be fun to watch.

Now that I have posted about Google and praised them in several regards I will point
out how silly that is. The Halo Effect is the general belief that because a company is successful it is successful because it is brilliant, innovative, has a great culture, [insert appropriate praise here]. Conversely when that same company stumbles it is because they have "fallen away
from that brilliant, innovative, great culture, [insert appropriate praise here] that made them great. Therefore management books, methods, papers, research, Blogs (heh) are written on this company and how you can be successful like them by following "these 12 easy steps".

The reality of the situation though is rarely that either one of those items is absolutely true. Good companies can have problems, and bad companies can have success. A recent article in the McKinsey Quarterly even suggests that "Suggesting that companies can follow a blueprint to achieve lasting success may be appealing, but it’s not supported by the evidence." and "The delusion of lasting success is a serious matter because it casts building an enduringly high-performing company as an achievable objective. Yet companies that outperform the market for long periods of time are not just rare but statistical anomalies whose apparent greatness is observable only in retrospect."

Wow.

This effect is referred to in psychology as the Halo Effect. Just we tend to be nearly binary in how we view others attributing positive traits to those we like and negative traits to those that we don't. Rarely viewing the people with a mix of positive and negative. The book The Halo Effect: ... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers covers this topic in some detail and relates it to businesses

So what does that mean? It means that success is hard... go figure. It means that you need to constantly adjust your strategy and approach to be relevant to the times and business environment in which you find yourself. The approach that got you where you are today simply won't continue to work. It means that if you stand still, you die. From a corporate perspective and a management and directional challenge perspective this is a whopper of a concept.

A great quote on this topic from US Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs executive Robert
E. Rubin “Once you’ve internalized the concept that you can’t prove anything in absolute terms, life becomes all the more about odds, chances, and trade-offs. In a world without provable
truths, the only way to refine the probabilities that remain is through greater knowledge and understanding.”

That's almost grounds for a philosophy debate. Up there with "Only the insane have the strength to determine that which is sane."

What if Google...

How many conversations start off with the phrase "What if Google...". When businesses try to do something different, especially something innovative or disruptive one of the quick lead in questions to that conversation starts with "What if Google were trying to do this?" or "What would we do if Google entered this market?".

It seems that Google is the fairly universally viewed as the thought leader of the current business age. There are even books available such as The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture and others. Google approaches
things differently. They give their engineers one day a week to "do whatever"... just suggesting that as a possiblity in many companies will at a minimum get you a look like you have three heads.

One of the questions that DeMarco asks in Slack is "Is Google in a Hurry?" Certainly, from an outside point of view they don't appear like they are. If they were how could they spare time to let their developers chase ideas for a full 20% of their time? Google rolls out releases on a regular basis sure, but accross a very large product line and they are small. When they do roll out new products or significant releases they roll out a beta first, let people volunteer to move, thus getting a willing guinee pig audience who will tolerate some experimentation. Once the beta is solid they start to migrate people. (With the recent Blog reader full interface change they even let people flip back to the old interface for a period of time as long as they gave feedback on why.)

All of that doesn't amount to being in a rushed state, running at 120%. But, if you ask anyone about productivity they will certainly be mentioned and there is absolutely no question they are successful.

This trend has been seen in other companies as well. Apple for some time has been viewed as a company that runs at full throttle and approaches things differently. Amazon for a long time held the distinction of being the "What if Amazon entered this market?"

Not dead yet...

Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Ok. So maybe there weren't really rumors of death. I did hear from enough of my regular readers though that I wanted to pop a quick post out to declare that I am still alive just HORRIBLY busy at the moment. I normally write my blogs at night and post when I get a chance but of late I have been working regular work during that time. Rude isn't it?

Rather than simply declare that I am alive (and whine that I am busy) I will share a bit of scalability learning as well. I was recently sent a link to a wonderful article on the stability journey of MySpace.com (if you don't know what MySpace is you probabl live under an internet rock) in Baseline Magazine. It's a fairly quick read and it discusses many of the standard things you learn with scale. (Partitioning, Virtualization, Simplicity, Segmentation etc.)

The PM who cried Urgency

Have you ever been working on a project that you have been told over and over is urgent the date that was initially given to the customer has to hold? The urgency from that initial swag date builds from a normal project to a high effort project, on to a difficult project and on to
a death march?

A critical learning that needs to be accepted is that the purpose of a schedule is planning, not goal setting. A common problem is the initial SWAG (or ROM) becomes the cast in stone plan when the only thing that everyone agreed to at the SWAG was that it was wrong.

A general rule of thumb that I have found to hold true when estimating a project with initial information is that it is good to a rough magnitude of +200% to -50%. (and how often it actually goes to -50% is... let's just say infrequent.) This really means that the estimate is really intended for planning purposes to allow budgets to be roughly planned and dates for initial thoughts to be formed for go/no go decisions.

The unfortunate reality though is that in many cases the initial SWAGs are taken as gold. Plans and dates are communicated around them and then, in order to make the dates that have been "communicated to the customer" the development team is forced to become a team of super-heroes running a death march to meet the date on something that may not have real value in the long term. One of the ironies that I recently read about is that in many cases the death march project is one that has little to no value to the business overall and it seems that the only way the project was worth doing was if it met the impossible schedule.

All of this doesn't change the fact that if a plan missed the date, it was a bad plan. In many cases we try to blame the performance of the team, environment, technical difficulties or other things but the fact remains the plan is what was incorrect. It doesn't really matter why the plan was incorrect, it was. This means that we need to run performance checks earlier in the cycle. A post-project review is always a good thing but what if we did what needs to be done
up front?

While reading through various articles for this topic I ran across one on the Best Practice for Voluntary Overtime. It shows the correlation between an increase in pressure and productivity and then the corresponding decline in actual productivity when pressure is increased too high.
People are more productive and more creative and quality is higher when regular schedules are kept, planned and executed.

My Recent Reading List

Over Christmas as well as the last little while I have read several books that will undoubtedly have an impact on my blogs over the next little while. So in the spirit of sharing (and encouragement of cheating) here is a quick list. If you are interested in reading them and taking
guesses on which posts entered the list of "I should post on that" feel free to send me email and I will confirm or deny. Of course I try to attribute anything that is direct quotes or go with a theme for a week so you will likely see these mentioned again.

Siddhartha - This is a book by Hermann Hesse about the journey of a man through his life. It is one filled with many levels of meaning and one of those books that you read and learn more about yourself than you expected.

Slack - Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency this book by Tom
Demarco focuses on many of the challenges that face companies and leaders in the post-downsize, post-bubble work world. This book is a very easy read, fit for a two-three hour flight depending upon your reading rate. It tries to not just preach but also provide real world tools to fix concerns.

The 8th Habit - I have mentioned this book before and in fairness I have to say that
I am taking a while to go through it but it is not the fault of the book. The style is easy to read and the content is great. I have just had a lot going on and have taken breaks to read other books, read blogs, and play Fantasy Hockey. Being the latest in the series from Stephen
F. Covey and the gang at Franklin Covey crew you know that it is good stuff. This book
comes from the experience that the team there has had in teaching the The 7 Habits
to companies and individuals across the globe.

Along with these I have been reading lots of Blogs.