Vacation

Out until the 15th, see ya!

What happened to Tuesday....

Yep, I slipped up. No post yesterday. Crazy busy day and went to see Spamalot. Good show. So, in apology for my omission, I present you with this for today:

What does God need with a space ship?

Monday

So you all (Ruben) thought I forgot to post today because it was Monday. Well, it's 10:50 PM Pacific which still means it's Monday!

I love gems. All kinds of gems. My favorite is the Spinel. Why? It's kind of boring, I guess. There's nothing really special about it. It comes in all colors. The "Black Prince's Ruby" in the Crown Jewels is actually a giant red spinel - not a ruby.

I like sapphires, too. And peridots. They're all pretty unique. I have a mini gem collection that I've kind of put together over the years. There's a nice big pink sapphire, a black star diopside, a little peridot, a couple of crushed rubies that a jeweler gave me for free, and a blue spinel. There may be one or two more, but that's all I remember for now.

Bartering

So I've been watching Six Feet Under lately and it's a pretty good show - has some interesting moments and seems to generally put some tough issues on the table.

One of the episodes showed that the old funeral director would offer funerals in exchange for other goods. You know - good old fashioned bartering.

So that got me thinking. We all do stuff for payment. If you're looking to get a service, most of the time it's a little complicated dance around the fact of "how much are you going to pay me" and "is that enough for me to do what you require."

It seems to boil down to the fact that we're all just prostitutes. Prostitutes for a paycheck. At what extent does it stop, you know? Someone I used to work with said that his boss used to have his employees wash his cars for them - they're hourly, and getting paid, so what makes the difference - right?

Whenever I trade a good for a good, a service for a good, or a service for a service, there is some kind fo unquantifiable mental satisfaction that arises from the transaction. Getting money from doing something is temporary - it lasts for a little while until you spend it on something stupid. But providing a service and getting something in return seems like a much healthier way of doing things. You forge relationships with people, you develop honesty, and overall you feel much more valuable.

The Sale

Sales is an incredibly interesting career path. You get the opportunity to be someone's worst enemy, someone's best friend, a living saint, or even the biggest dick in the world.

It's all about charisma - the ability to make people realize they have a need, and that need can only be solved by you. Is it deception? Or is it just a clever way of breaking through someone's psychological barriers?

Well, I don't think it's deception if you're selling them a legitimate service that will actually save them money. If you're a slimeball and are getting the check and running, then yeah, it is deception. Maybe that's why people hate salespeople - because they view them all as deceptive.

Or is it just because they view them as mental ninjas that are able to quickly analyze and pierce barriers that have been erected for self-defense? I imagine there is a lot of psychology to be learned when in sales - and not just smooth talking and dinner buying.

Technology

My phone talks to me

It has really odd voices

Can't sleep clown'll eat me

Stability

I wonder if stability is just an illusion that suppresses real urges inside people. Cookie cutter suburbs, the fear of change, a specific car, specific house with a certain square footage, a certain job, a certain title, a specific income.

Is it all really healthy to suppress your natural urges? Or is civilization just a method of control? Should you be happy sitting in a cubicle from 9 to 5, commuting to work every day?

It's a very Generation Y kind of thing to have a need for connection and/or purpose in the workplace. The feeling of changing an organization and having a say in the way things are done is unparalleled - but it certainly isn't something that is new. Maybe it has just been suppressed for so long.

Commencement

So, I sent this e-mail to my coworkers today, and I'd like to share it here:

Hi all,

Last Friday I participated in my commencement down in Southern California to officially receive my Bachelor’s degree.

It was a long and interesting road – originally I had moved up here for college at Sonoma State University in the far North Bay, and soon after that it hit home that a History major had nothing to do with my true passion – being a professional computer nerd. The college only offered programming classes and I never felt a calling to actually do programming. Really – how was it possible to get a degree in something as fast-paced and changing as the type of IT I was interested in?

So, I ended up dropping out of college to get hired full-time by the college working in their IT department. I took classes for free and continued my general credit requirements, but that slowly tapered off and I dedicated myself to my career.

It always bugged me that I never finished my degree. It was one of those things I knew I had to do, but never thought I would actually do. One night a few years later I filled out an online survey about college education and was matched up with “DeVry University.” I thought the place was a joke and it just existed to take money and pass all its students as long as they paid the ridiculous tuition. I was definitely wrong about that.

One of the admissions advisors, Tiffany Garcia, called me a few days later. She spoke to me for hours, addressing what happened in my quest, what I wanted to do, how I felt about my degree, etc. She told me about the Technical Management program they had – which was a mix of Business and Information Systems, and she told me I could do it completely online or go to one of their many campuses around the Bay Area. She also told me it was a fully accredited university and that it was a true Bachelor’s degree, much to my doubt. I let that sit for about a year and she called me once a month, and eventually asked me to come down to her office in San Francisco and enroll. I thought about it and then went ahead and did it, enrolling for my first class in January of 2007. All 30 of the credits I had from my time at SSU transferred.

Since January of 2007 I have been taking two classes every 8 weeks online full time with no breaks, and as of two weeks ago, finally completed my 125^th credit for graduation for a Bachelor’s of Science in Technical Management with a Project Management concentration. The education was top notch – the professors were 90% of the time still employed in their respective fields (project managers, business analysts, information security analysts) and taught their courses. They were always available by phone and e-mail and were very dedicated to their jobs.

To this day my family doesn’t quite understand what sort of degree it is because it isn’t from a traditional state school or in one of the more normal sciences or arts, and I think that is going to be one of the challenges for any of us in these types of IT careers. It was never something you could go to school to really learn up until now – and the type of school you do learn it from is so radically different than tradition that oftentimes the quality of the education can get overshadowed by the perceived lack of establishment.

I promised Tiffany I would try to do good where I could in return for how much she twisted my arm, so if any of you ever encounter a DeVry graduate on a job interview, please know that it was truly a challenging yet rewarding curriculum and the things they learned apply to everyday life in the corporate IT world that oftentimes people have to discover on their own, outside of the nurturing environment of a classroom.

Mike

Vacation

Hello friends - I have not abandoned you merely 2 days after saying I would write every day. I'm actually on vacation, having a graduation, birthday, etc. etc.

So, I'll be back Monday, the 22nd. Here is a haiku to tide you over detailing my current stomach issues:

Do prunes really work?

A magical fruit it is

If it makes me go

The Path Well-Traveled

It amazes me that there is this "path" through corporate America that somehow gets ingrained in our heads. Especially in IT, it's "do what you like doing for a while, then forget all of it to become a manager because managers aren't technical - as that is the only way to make money."

I've been thinking about that "path" a lot because I had admitted to myself that I was on it - but I think it's a bunch of crap. I don't know why it is such a mental obstacle for people to believe that they'll get paid good money to do what they love doing. I don't necessarily think its a bad thing to be on Desktop Support if you're happy doing it, have the appropriate amount of responsibility, and are getting paid well.

I think what makes people miserable is the people who get fast-tracked out of doing what they like in to Manager roles, and then when they become a manager and they suck, they make everyone else's life horrible for whoever works for them - completely demotivating a group of people that had the same responsibilities that manager actually enjoyed. And of course, you can never demote a Manager. Right?

Anyway - by popular request, here's a limerick:

The most beautiful thing I have seen,

Even grander than a great royal queen,

Is the warm and juicy taste,

Of the many-a-meat-based,

Hot dogs with piles of relish green.

Preventing Death

In an effort to prevent the death of my creative instincts due to the brown/gray cubewalls that surround me on an 8+ hour a day basis, I'm going to start writing blog entries every morning in order to exercise the part of my brain that usually lays dormant during that time. There seems to be a direct correlation with my passion for work proportionate to how much I get to creatively express in general.

So anyway - some of these entries might make sense, some of them might not. Some days might just be a haiku. Some days they might be about IT and some days they might just be about something completely random. I figure if I blog about work all the time I'll slowly go insane.

Today's Haiku:

Deli meat is here

Fell on the floor by mistake

Whipped cream can't fix it

Requirements

Why do companies continue to implement software solutions just for the sake of the technology? Is it a testament to the effectiveness of a good sales pitch, or are IT departments really getting weaker? Why do you need to have something as an Amazon Virtual Machine in a cloud? As an amazing mentor said to me once, "Cloud is just a business model. Figure out what you really want to be able to do." And it's true - it's a business model surrounded by hype.

With a floundering economy, you'd think that there would be a focus on "doing more with what you have" and utilizing the technology you already own to perform cost and time saving miracles. The biggest buzzphrase of the millenium - "ROI" - is all about this. Yet users continue to drive technology requirements, and not actual user requirements.

A user should never say we need to implement Sharepoint. A user should say, "this is my set of requirements, this particular set of requirements really means a lot to me." And IT should then guide them toward an acceptable solution.

Going further, this illuminates another potential area of why IT tends to fail - no communication with the user. There's no analysis performed, no actual "so what do you do exactly?" questions being asked. If a user is using a single table in Access to store static text values, why would you embark on a multi-thousand dollar project to upgrade your entire infrastructure to be able to handle a newer version of Access when it comes out? Why not find out what they are using it for, and offer a simpler, more elegant solution.

The Best Way

The best way to do something is honestly the way that makes you the laziest.

Think about a tweak you have to do to a server, or something that is a registry key entry. Why do it on each server? You'll have to ensure that every time a new server is deployed, or if something happens to that server, that that configuration is present on everything from that point forward.

Good documentation can take the place of that - but come on, we're all in IT. Who actually reads documentation?

The best way to get something out there is to do it once and just forget about it. Write a custom group policy that applies the setting to a bunch of servers in a specific OU. Add something to the logon script. Become a scion of laziness, and you will succeed in ultimate efficiency. As ironic as it is, it's the best way to go.

This applies to making images, too. Don't put things on images that can be done with policy. Honestly, the only thing you should ever have installed on an image is security updates. Keep the rest as a deployment package template on a per-group or per-department basis. You don't have to have SMS to do it - batch files are still good. VBScripts are even better.

Some people argue that when you do these kinds of things you threaten your own job. I tell you, negative nancys - if you can never be replaced, how will you ever move up?

Losing your Humanity

Fear is one of those things that cripples people from being effective. Fear of losing a job, of being wrong, and even of going out on a limb and taking a risk. Fear sickens me because it drives people to be less than human - to be sheep, to be ant drones that only exist to serve the whims of the queen.

Risk, as Sir Anthony Hopkins said in the film masterpiece "The World's Fastest Indian," is the spice of life.

I've seen fear cripple people into making horrible decisions that do nothing but promulgate stagnation. I've seen people in authority breed a culture of fear which actually causes the effectiveness of their subordinates to enter into negative territory. Yes, actually making people devolve into something stupid. Devolve into "resources" without independent thought. Sickening. A human is not a resource. A human is a human.

Fear is the literal Flowers for Algernon. It makes you stupid. And, it makes everyone around you stupid.

If you never admit that you are at fault or at wrong, you are not human. The only way you can never be wrong is if you are a tool - an insignificant unimportant piece of a machine. A gear, designed only for one purpose - to turn, and to turn only when the gears around it turn. You serve only one purpose - the whims of your watchmaker.

And all the watchmaker cares about is what time it is.

The Aversion to Risk

Risk is one of those weird things that people tend to isolate on one end of the benefit/detriment scale. In my opinion, it's kind of like a lot of people's understanding of 21 CFR Part 11 and SOX requirements - unclear, paranoid-driven, and overzealous to provide complicated processes due to a fundamental lack of understanding.

Risk is defined as "uncertainty" in whatever you're looking at - projects, process, etc. But it's the uncertainty of something that could cause harm (via cost overrun, schedule delay, etc.) as well as the uncertainty that it could cause extreme benefit (cost savings, ahead-of-time implementation, etc.)

What if you could cheat with risk? What if you knew the worst possible outcome and mitigation possibilities of each decision, and as such, every risk was just suddenly a scale on the amount of positive it brought? It's true that - yeah - it's kind of like betting black when you see 5 red rolls on a roulette table in a row, but wouldn't that make life a lot easier?

The whole PMBOK project management philosophy is providing tools for planning, as opposed to reaction. The more you plan for risk - the more you embrace it, and the more you see that all plans are malleable and are subject to alteration, meaning that in the end, it's all about the positive.

Shining lights in dark places is scary, but it's a lot better than getting your head bitten off when you don't turn on the flashlight by something that was afraid of light to begin with.

Standardization

Chaos breeds growth, resistance, and advancement. Always improving and always being able to destroy that which you have built can be an extremely nourishing environment.

But, chaos can not exist without order - especially in the IT industry. Standardization is good, stability is even better - but only if it allows for chaos. A stable hardware platform with a stable operating system environment is one of the most coveted things any company can achieve. It's like one of those "congratulations on passing the white belt course in karate" gold trophies made out of fake plastic.

But, what's even better, is having such a robust imaging and deployment system in place that your users can do whatever the hell they want and understand that going back to the corporate standard is an incredibly easy and pain free process.

If you could jump out of a plane all day every day and never worry about hitting the ground, wouldn't you try to fly at least once?

Floating to the Top

It's interesting to think about what you say when you meet up with relatives, or you are trying to make a first impression on someone at work. There's always the inevitable "What have you been up to?" or "Tell me about yourself" kind of deal.

More often than not I tend to blurt out something that is somewhat of a new development in my life, or is something that I think is very important to me - even if I haven't necessarily put enough mental capital into it to actually rank it as a priority. Those little side-projects that you're completely psyched about, or even something you read that very same day that got you excited.

Why do these things tend to float to the top? Well, I think it's because they stimulate your natural motivation. They are things that you, at your core, find completely interesting and are willing to spend time on with the sole reward of satisfying your own curiosity. It's these kinds of things that drive people to excel and venture to places thought impossible.

Good managers pick up on things that motivate their employees and do everything in the world to cater to that. Even if it doesn't fit their immediate agenda.

Employee Feedback

It's always tough to tell someone they need to improve or that they're doing something wrong. But, it's tricky. How do you know that they're wrong and you're right? Is it arrogance that drives you or is there something that is generally being done wrong? As Vice President Daniels said at the end of Season 6 of 24, "You think you have all the right answers when you aren't sitting in this chair. You have all of the answers and none of the responsibility."

I think that's one of the traps in giving people feedback. You don't give someone feedback unless they've specifically asked for it, or something in your gut tells you that something needs to be said or done.

The "gut" factor, I suppose, is a mixture of your logical and emotional conscience - more or less. Most people out there in the workforce are smart. They wouldn't have the jobs they have if they weren't smart, honestly. The problem comes about when it is the norm to behave a certain way - or to respond to situations in a certain way. This is, again, defined as the company's culture. The problems come about when you introduce new people into the culture. They have a completely different viewpoint based on experience within a different culture, and that period where adjustment has to happen where one culture has to clash and integrate with another can be very turbuluent.

A company's culture is more powerful than doing the right thing. A culture of lax acceptance of standards, slow execution of processes, shift of blame, or even vulgarity in the workplace will overpower any law or right way of doing things. Among other reasons, this is why you can't introduce a quality / six sigma program into the workplace the day you arrive. To implement quality, you need to have a culture that believes in quality.

Anyhow - feedback is delicate. I believe that all feedback needs to be constructive and focused on the business. Feedback needs to never incriminate, point fingers, or name names. The positions, the entities, the dimensions and the processes need to be exposed. Weaknesses in these are what the business can change. You accomplish nothing if you insult your boss. The second he reads that you have just submarined your argument and eradicated any respect you may have gained.

But, why come to the point where you have to "formally" give feedback? Why is it such a process filled with trepidation? Well, honestly, I think it's because the person asking for the feedback has to establish a relationship with you - one of two-way communication that proves they are willing to do two-way conversation. You can not simply tell your employee your door is always open and they're always willing to talk.

Part of being a manager is playing the games out there, and giving things to your employees. Shoot the shit with them. Give them dirt. Talk a little harmless trash about something. Show them you're a little frustrated with your boss. Stick up for them in a meeting or take the blame for something they know you don't have to. They will open up to you in a heartbeat and you will have a very healthy relationship. Every boss that has done this with me I am happy to say has always been informed about my frustrations the second they happen. Once you reveal yourself to your employees and show them that you work for them as much as they work for you, you will have a much easier time managing them, and the business will benefit. Feedback won't be so scary.

Cutting Costs

I'm in the midst of doing some homework for my Advanced Cost Accounting class. One of the questions is - how would you cut costs while avoiding employee layoffs?

Well, that's an interesting question - especially with all of what's going on right now with the general dimension of the economy and the job markets. In the IT industry, there are a lot of contractors who are very specifically trained and have an expertise in a very specific technology. I find these contractors/outsourced IT agencies to be the equivalent of a "technological SWAT team." They are able to understand a specific technology and get it implemented because of their extremely focused skills.

This becomes interesting in a heterogeneous environment that is very common in IT departments - the mixed contractor/FTE phenomenon. You have contractors that are doing the equivalent of full time position the company could never afford in a full time position.

When it's time to cut costs and introduce layoffs, why cut these people first? Their contracts are time-bound as-is, and, without their specific knowledge the technology the company is trying to introduce is at best going to be in a stalemate. Why not, as a cost-cutting measure, turn these people around and focus them on areas of the company that need improvement in line with their expertise? Instead of cutting out the project they're working on, why not shift their focus toward optimization of the environment as opposed to introduction of new technology?

Seems like this would benefit both sides - a contractor gets to keep a job, and a company gets to benefit on costs already spent. The company gets to become leaner and more optimized. It sets a good framework for future implementations, too.

Motivation

I read a book a while back that said something pretty profound. It went something along the lines of:

"No boss will ever be able to create motivation in his employees - the best he/she can do is recognize it and nurture it."

I find this to be an incredibly accurate statement. There was no reason for me to gravitate toward building Windows and Mac images at my first job - I just really, really felt motivated to do it - and my managers saw that and made sure I was on the project. That motivation stuck with me into the off hours of my job and they really benefitted from my natural tenacity. The same thing happened with SMS/ConfigMgr application deployment and update patching - I was really interested in the technology and naturally gravitated toward it, and my managers allowed me to be immersed. That immersion benefited the company and again, it went into the off hours and I spent a lot of time on those things.

So, a coworker found this article. I thought I'd share it since it's an amazing text on motivation and how you can use it, especially for IT employees. I took it from a site that also reposted it (citation at bottom:)

"Recently, a couple of intended compliments threw me for a loop. Two people called me in the same week and wanted me to present keynote speeches at their conferences. Of course, that was the flattering part, but what got to me was that they both referred to me as a "motivational speaker."

Since I'm a typical geek, the phrase motivational speaker immediately sets off alarm bells in my mind. It conjures up an image of some tall, tanned, large-toothed, smiling charisma machine expertly manipulating the emotions of a crowd, whipping up a frenzy at one moment and bringing forth tears of sadness and joy the next.

"Well, I suppose that many people find what I have to say motivating," I suggested, "but I don't try to make people cry or tell stories about overcoming cancer."

"Oh, that's fine," they both said.

Whew!

But the invitations got me thinking about all the things managers do to try to motivate their staffs: giving inspirational speeches, handing out bonuses, making up awards, inviting everyone out for drinks, hosting family picnics or sending staffers to training on cool new technology that they may never get to use.

I admire the sentiment of those active managers, trying to motivate their teams. But when I reflect on the most engaged groups I have worked with, it's not clear that managers who explicitly try to light a fire under their teams are any more successful than those who are less attentive.

True motivation in technical teams tends to grow organically. Individuals find their own motivation in many sources. For some, it's the opportunity for learning and advancement. For others, the broad and perhaps even global results of their work are very engaging. Some are just excited to work with the group of peers they are currently engaged with.

But the one thing that most of the managers with motivated groups do have in common is that they all avoid demotivating their teams.

Although the motivation of teams grows organically, often out of the control of managers, demotivation and dejection usually start at the top. Internally generated motivation tends to be a relatively fragile state. While a manager may not be able to create a motivated team, he often has the power to kill whatever motivation grows.

So, what sorts of things do managers do that demotivate their teams?

Excluding technicians from decision-making. Technical people's distress at being left out of major decisions is about more than just feeling out of the loop. They often sense that their talents have been disregarded. They have been insulted. And, since many decisions are influenced by technical considerations, they also feel that the decisions themselves could be suspect, since managers' technical knowledge is rarely respected. Any of these interpretations would qualify as demotivating.

Inconsistency. People who are drawn to careers in technology typically have a strong need for consistency and predictability. Early interactions with computers are quite comforting for them. As youngsters, they draw conclusions about computers, their parents and themselves. "If I type in this command, the computer always does the same thing. That's cool. I wish my mom was that predictable."

Next thing you know, they're programmers. When managers are inconsistent, at best they create distractions, and at worst they encourage their people to feel insecure. Neither result is particularly motivating.

Excessive monitoring. Among technical groups, there are few bigger insults than to call someone a micromanager. The feeling of being micromanaged is profoundly demotivating. Monitoring someone excessively, intentionally or not, communicates distrust for the person being overseen. And in many kinds of technical work, it can also serve as an impediment to progress. In intellectually demanding, creative work, interruptions can disrupt thinking for long periods of time. A manager's one-minute drop-by can result in hours of lost productivity regaining the concentration lost.

So if you want a truly motivated team, one of the best things you can do is to make sure that you're not a demotivational leader. As it turns out, not having a negative effect on your team can be a huge positive."

Paul Glen is the author of the award-winning book "Leading Geeks: How to Manage and Lead People Who Deliver Technology" (Jossey Bass Pfeiffer, 2003) and Principal of C2 Consulting. C2 Consulting helps IT management solve people problems. Paul Glen regularly speaks for corporations and national associations across North America. For more information go to www.c2-consulting.com. He can be reached at info@c2-consulting.com.

The "Right" Solution

What makes something the "right" solution?

It's not the mathematically best way to do something.
It's not the most logical way to do something.
It's not the way that the instruction manual says to do something.
It's not the way that gets you the most results directly correlated to time and money invested.
It's not even the thing that makes the most sense.

Surprise - it's what the business owner defines as being right for them.

So, pissing on a lemon tree every day to make it grow as opposed to watering it is a perfectly acceptable solution to a business owner. Chastizing them for not watering it and using the perfect type of fertilizer is not.

However, educating the business owner, working with them, and giving them the pros and cons of each situation from your perspective and working with them to see theirs is. Them coming to their conclusions - with both IT and themselves involved is the ultimate victory.

Upper Management

Upper management that is out of touch with its own department is a cancer in the organization.

Think about it as a metaphor - a giant slinging flaming boulders down from a mountain while people try to bring up food so it can eat. How could that not be bad? How will the giant get food?

Having to present a solution and sell it to different managers over, and over, and over, and over again kills an employees motivation and harms the efficiency of the company. As a coworker put it, the manager's job is to shield his or her employees from bullshit so they have as much of an open field as possible. It's a bad sign when you get directly involved with the bullshit and are doing no work because of it.

I think American upper management should take the Japanese lead and move their desks to the manufacturing floor. Meet with employees a step over your own direct reports. Encourage open communication. Most employees I'm sure love figuring things out and doing things. But, doing them just to do them, or because they have had unclear goals communicated to them as to why they are doing it is a waste of time and breeds frustration.

Job Satisfaction

With the onslaught of technology, instant gratification, a younger workforce generation (Gen Y), and a bunch of other factors hitting the traditional workplace - there's something nontraditional that I think people need to embrace.

It seems to me that people are switching jobs on average every 2 to 4 years. Is it true - you have to leave to get something better? These days I think - yes, it is. Statistically, you can look at the data points of where you are at now. It's very easy to change yourself, but it's harder to change your company. More pay, a better title and other tangible assets that have been denied year after year - what makes one think that there will suddenly be a change of heart?

I think the days of "growing" at a company have since past. Starting at the bottom in a company and working your way up in the same company does not seem feasible at all anymore. For everyone who is still there, you will have the association of where you came from and where you started. For me, it was being a Desktop Support technician. Because that's where I started, it's how people knew me - and first impressions really do matter to most people. With new people coming in at higher pay, higher title, and more responsibility on a very regular basis - why waste the time to develop and guide talent when you can get it at a good price knowing that they're just going to leave in a few years anyway?

All recruiting and hiring is, is serving the organization. It's feeding the company talent and using the talent for as long as it can. It's not a charity. And neither is your work.

I think people need to shed thinking about where they're going to go and that they'll be happy there. People need to be happy where they are at right now, and if they aren't, then move or change it. Stop trusting your career and ultimately your personal happiness to empty promises based on budget and ego.

Challenge or Dead End?

I think it's one of the hardest things in the world to differentiate a challenge from a dead end. I guess what I'm really trying to articulate is that dead ends aren't necessarily always dead ends. I think there's something to learn in every situation.

Being assigned a mundane project or having to do something you don't quite agree with can be classified as a waste of time very easily. But, examine it deeper - why are you thinking it's a waste of time? How did you end up in the situation that is apparently a dead end? What can you learn from the people around (or above you) that have facilitated this dead end? Maybe you can learn to not be like them.

Is it truly a place where you can't learn? Are you really just on an assembly line snapping caps on to bottles? Those hard and useless challenges I think are moments where you can really learn. If you end up learning that you have to leave, then you just picked up the knowledge and the skill of having to toss aside the familiar for something better. That's still learning.

An Agile IT Department?

The "Agile" craze hit a few years back, and it really was an excellent idea. While I was never formally exposed to any projects or development/design scenarios specific to the agile movement, I understood the basic premise. The adoption of short term easy to quantify goals as fast and as clear as possible. I've been reading up on it lately, and I really agree with the approach.

I think that we should have Agile IT Departments. I mean, it makes sense. I think too much responsibility and accountability has been centered on those in the managerial role. Managers in an IT department are often technical in nature, but have gotten to the point in their career where they have been "promoted" into management by sheer seniority/pay raises. They lose touch with the technical aspect of the field, but they are responsible for now managing a team of technical staff who are in touch with the field every day as part of their jobs. This presents us with two problems:

1. You have managers who are not as technical as their direct reports often interjecting outdated technical assumptions about projects (and, they are often clever or come up with scenarios that are hard to 100% answer), and
2. You have neutered technical staff members, accountable for as much as their manager gives them according to their own comfort level of that individual making them look good.

Therefore you have extremely protected technical folks, with unbelievably accountable managers. It's a bit lopsided. I think it comes down to trust.

More trust should be given to the technical person. This will in turn allow that person to execute in an Agile methodology. This person may see an immediate fix to a problem, however, through normal processes the red tape and bureaucracy of a corporate IT department may string it out - or, in some cases, shoot it down and ask for a more detailed analysis of a "root cause." That person needs to be able to implement a fix or an optimization as they see are qualified to perform.

I really think that if you've invested the time and money to hire someone to perform the job of a specific position, you need to give them the trust to perform that position. You need to give them accountability, and trust that the inputs you give them will produce a unique output according to that person's ability to solve the problem.

So, what happens now, then? You end up with half-assed implementations that are built on band-aids that these technical people sneak in because they can't go through the official process of implementing clear-as-day solutions to problems. If the IT Department was Agile, then these implementations would go in legitimately and quickly. It's like penalizing people for buying music with horrible DRM technology - people will download illegal versions of the music they bought just to be able to listen to it how they want.

Development Plans

I had a former coworker ask me what career path he should put down in one of those development plan type documents that was required for work. He mentioned a few titles such as systems engineer, project manager, analyst, etc.

It kind of dawned on me at that moment that it's extremely easy for people in the IT industry to attach themselves to a title and think that the world will come with it. Five years ago all I wanted to be was a Network Administrator. As I gained experience, I realized that was exactly what I didn't want to be.

The only reason I thought I wanted to be a net admin was because I thought that's where the money was and it was the only place for someone with my skillset to develop toward. A few years later, I know from experience that while the Network Administrator track is a perfectly viable career path, it's not for me. It's a position that rarely integrates with the business and really performs the same function no matter the company. In other words - it's technically challenging as it mostly requires updated skillsets and technology, but it is extremely easy to outsource. On the other hand, it's very easy to find consulting jobs for as well.

Anyhow - the best thing that you can do in my opinion when looking at your career path is not looking at other people and what they do. Sure, they may be making a certain amount of money equivalent to what you want to make in the future, but they aren't you. Critically think about what you like doing now, and imagine how that can develop. Imagine how that aspect of your job now that you like can turn into all you do. That's what you need to develop toward. Be it writing user guides, fixing AV equipment, talking to cell phone companies or even just teaching people about technology. Each of those has a very lucrative career path. Maybe not necessarily where you're at - but think big picture and long term.

Lost in the Details

I think that getting lost in the details is one of the easiest things for people in the IT industry to do.

There's so many strange and weird technical implementations out there. If everyone used off-the-shelf technology and configurations, then a lot of us technical professionals would be out of a job. Implementing technology is an art form, really. Each individual - be it an analyst, a programmer, a designer or even a project manager is going to leave their unique signature on an implementation.

The good artists make themselves timeless. They provide open documentation, transparent implementations, and a paper trail of explanation.

The bad artists "get it to work" and then jump on to the next thing. They leave a tangled mess held together by essentially rusting metal and hamster wheels.

I prefer to think of my line of work as a professional puzzle solver. Not all puzzles are business process related. Sometimes, they're peer related, and involve a forensics case of trying to understand the mind and methods of those who have preceded me. It's never bad - it just takes time, and sometimes, inspires me to think differently.

The Rant

My first supervisor probably taught me one of the most important lessons that would stay with me through my career. Going through a technical career right now, it's interesting to say that the most important lesson wasn't something technical.

I remember that he told me when someone is speaking to you that is agitated about an issue, or is otherwise in a bad mood about something that happened, they've thought about it immensely. They have worked up to the moment. An anger-fueled engine is running in their minds to develop a script of what they're going to say to the first person who might be able to do something about the issue.

He told me the best thing you can do is let them get through that script. Let them unleash it in its full glory and let them be done with it. You won't be able to talk to them until they've broken through that milestone. Finally, once they've said what they wanted to, is when you can lower the blast shield doors and then begin to talk to them in a sane fashion.

Perspective

Change is good. A change in one's perspective is even better.

It's scary to take that leap into the unknown - to cast aside the warmth of the comfortable and predictable and wear the shackles of doubt and uncertainty. It's hard for people to change. It's certainly possible, but it's just hard to do. It's hard to change yourself. However, you can change your surroundings. You can change your environment a little easier than you can change yourself.

When you change your surroundings and your environment, you open up to new things. You see things from a different perspective. Your past experiences are now an alloy made in combination with your present and future experiences. It solidifies character - and in my experience, makes the overall sum of your experiences a much more valuable asset.

Original ideas are hard to come by. Ripping off observed successful ones from a myriad of perspectives and experiences and being able to modify them to fit into whatever environment you enter, on the other hand, is a true talent.

The Buzz

One of the issues with being in the IT industry as a career is the monumental amount of effort required to stay "up-to-date" with technology. Microsoft's products alone seem to be on a ridiculous release schedule, with Windows 7 just around the corner when it seems like Vista was released.

Personally, I tend to get a little anxiety filled when I see a new technology like that. A new version of perhaps some kind of server operating system or server-based management application. It triggers something inside me that says "Great, now I have to learn something from the beginning all over again."

Well, I've found in my experience that it's all pretty much buzzwords and inflation. Technology really doesn't change that much to the point where you have to learn it all over again. The concepts stay the same - the issue is that more features are added. More right-click contextual menus and perhaps some additional log files to look at. Once you machete past the mystical forest of marketing and buzzwords new product releases are typically bug and feature fixes, new versions of a couple things, and a couple new functions.

I find certifications to be a good way to keep "up to date" on the technology, but I don't find them a good measure to show industry expertise. I think the litmus of a certification is excellent for ensuring that you are familiar with the product. The reason I don't think it's a good measure for industry expertise is that they are very easy to pass and really are not a substitute for experience. They are internal measures that are necessary for keeping up to date on the industry.

The User Experience

The only thing that really matters is the user experience.

Why? Because the customer is always right. Why is the customer always right? Because they're handing you money. They're investing mental and physical capital into something you pulled out of thin air - a service, a product, an idea, entertainment or whatever.

When you work for a company, you're like a maid on retainer. You clean up whatever mess comes along. It's your job. You ensure that the living beast entity of a company has enough food to eat and keeps chugging along and conquering the industry it is in. It's like one of those photos of the Mona Lisa made from millions of individual faces/still shots. That's what you are. Miniature in the grand scheme of things, but essential to the system.

IT isn't about glory. It's about making sure the messes are cleaned up, the batteries are fully charged, and there's an umbrella in the trunk of the car when it starts to rain. It's the sunscreen on a sunny day and the first-aid kit in the glovebox. It's the gum on The Rocketeer's jetpack and should never be the focus, ever. When IT gets the spotlight, you know you're in bad times.

Change Management

I think change control/management is one of the most important things an IT department can implement in order to provide a stable operating platform for its users.

The problem with change management, though, is that it can be incredibly burdensome. Not only from a "how much do we capture" approach, but a "how easy is it to capture" dimension.

If your change management system is an Excel document on a fileshare, you run into the problem of consistency, versioning, and no real way of consolidating changes. If anything, a change management system should be incorporated into an incident tracking system in order to correlate changes with specific incidents or events. A ticket system that can intelligently search and apply metadata about changes to each entered incident is something I'd use in a heartbeat.

The system should be able to produce easy to read and useful reports as well. The easier the system is to use, the more changes will be captured, and the more adoption within your department.

Walls Within

Corporate America is an interesting place. An organization can have a goal - a mission statement, a "vision." This is defined as "strategy." This strategy defines the organization to outsiders, shareholders, and basically the general public.

In theory, every element within that organization is contributing to that vision. It's easier for people actually in-line with the industry of that organization (engineers for an engineering firm, or perhaps scientists for a life sciences company) to quantify their contributions to that strategy. But what about those of us in the service sector?

Analysts link technology to business. They link IT, Quality, and Development together. Once those links have been formed, engineers, technicians and support specialists keep them maintained. It is the burden of the analysts to ensure that the needs of the business are met by the capabilities of technology.

What technology do you choose? How is it applicable? Does it fit in with the organization's current infrastructure? Overwhelming questions, perhaps, but sound more complicated than they truly are. The key to solving all of these is communication. Communication, most of all, with the people who are ultimately going to be using the technology. It's one thing to pitch the technology to an audience who is administering it - but it's absolutely a different beast to pitch the technology to someone who will be using it every day. It's never an all or nothing and it should never be a mystic process.

IT is never the only stakeholder in a technology implementation. It is the death of an IT organization when it begins to have its own agenda in a company that can easily outsource those services. As such, an IT organization that builds walls around itself and within itself to its own functional areas is doomed to fail.

I often wonder what phenomenon brings about these walls - is it management, is it culture, or is it simply something wild allowed to grow if not cut down every now and then. Regardless, I think it's very common - especially in the IT field - to have these walls for the sake of job security and knowledge hoarding.

Cash

I look at the Yahoo! Finance homepage and see in a giant "breaking news" box about the DJIA dropping 500 points and the Lehman Brothers going bankrupt. Every contextual ad is about the safety of FDIC insurance, banks, blah blah. It's as if the nation is in a bank-running panic.

Following daily financial news is pretty stupid. You'll end up with gray hair after a week. It's a good time right now to invest in broadly diversified index funds with low management costs. If I had more liquid cash I'd invest it all right now.

Nowhere to go but up, Vanguard.

Vocations

I went to Catholic school my whole life, up until college. Preschool, gradeschool, junior high, and high school.

St. Peter and St. Paul, Sacred Heart, and eventually Damien High School.

Around 6th grade this term started to be thrown around. It was the term "Vocation." I really had no idea what it meant and at first I thought it was a way for my teachers to recruit young children into promising that they'd be priests when they got older - or some other manner of employee within the church. It was mainly focused around the religious vocations, but eventually they started opening up to other "careers."

The synonymous theme between "careers" and "vocation" appeared to be, as defined by my schools, a calling by God to do something. Most of the time this meant to be a good Christian and go to church and perhaps volunteer or even take up the cloth and all that stuff. But I slowly learned that it really meant to do what you love doing. If that's the higher power's way of calling to you to do something, then I'll definitely agree with that statement.

When you absolutely love doing something, it guides your life. I loved sitting in front of my TV and playing Nintendo games for hours straight. This was my vocation when I was younger. I was a child born of the electronic age with short attention spans and expensive hobbies. I craved stories, puzzles, adventures, and worlds bigger and much more fascinating than my own. This insatiable hunger for entertainment transcended most of the equipment I used to get it - from the Nintendo, Genesis, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Gamecube, Game Boy, Game Gear, etc. Eventually, it settled on to the most malleable of all of them - the computer.

I started playing around on computers when I was about 10 years old. The "pay by the hour" AOL days. My first real computer that I could call my own I received as a Christmas gift at the age of 12. I loved that thing, and did everything I could to make sure it played games in the best and fastest possible way without me having to worry about money or asking my parents for anything.

Little did I know at the time, playing video games turned out to be my vocation. Through the acts of wanting to make my computer better and faster, I learned how to do everything I do now as a career. Analysis, design, engineering, troubleshooting, making the best out of minimal resources - it all came about from a young age of wide-eyed awe and mystery at games.

Hindsight is interesting, is it not?

"The Effective Executive" by Peter Drucker

Well, I may as well do a book review.

This review is for The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker. Amazing book. If you ever wanted a book chock full of real-life examples of effective and not-so-effective time management, I would recommend reading this book.

It is full of stories from Peter Drucker's bloody journey as an executive coach through the cutthroat corporations of America. It has enough anecdotal stories to compete with the density of a neutron star, and is a very easy read. It will make you question your business, your general outlook on things, how to run meetings, and your overall efficiency.

Power

I honestly believe that power and strength in an organization does not reside in its main functional parts, but rather in the skeleton of technology and support that hold it together.

The skeleton is always around and often neglected, but when it is broken, pain is felt with a task-stopping urgency that affects every function.

This is why being in a position that is responsible for operations - both IT and otherwise - is an amazing responsibility.

Specialization, or Jack-of-all-trades?

Usually when I sit down and start typing I have somewhat of an idea of what I'm going to say for the blog entry. This time I really didn't know, so I decided to write about something that I don't think I've touched on before.

You can't really go to school for a career in IT. I really won't concede that one to anything. You can't go to school and know you're going to be a Network Administrator or a System Engineer.

You go to school for the framework, the base skills, and the contacts. All learning in IT is done on the job, and honestly, takes a lot of personal investment. The person who works in IT that hasn't dedicated off hours to learning or advancing themselves is someone I would absolutely never hire. You just can't do IT without accepting the fact that: yes, it's a crazy world that will touch and intrude on your life in every aspect.

So, what do you do? Some people jump in and learn everything they can and become masters of nothing. Sorry, you just can't be the best at everything. If you're one of those people that are never wrong - then please, find a new career. Too many of these people exist in IT already. The profession is a black hole for people with asinine personalities simply because there is a lot of knowledge hoarding and opportunity to make entire systems or processes dependent on whatever mood you are in for the day. Not the way to go.

Other people tend to specialize, and only excel in a single skill. Ok - you can become the master of your skill, but it is going to be really hard to find places that hire you for that one skill if you end up needing to change careers or are no longer needed / replaced. Someone in this situation needs to be ready to be able to move vast distances and make sacrifices. Just make sure that maintaining the knowledge in your skill is worth the tradeoffs in convenience and being able to find jobs easily.

So, I guess I've just said that both paths aren't really that great. That's right - neither of them really matter, honestly. What does matter is these basic facts: you're easy to work with, have an open mind, aren't afraid to be wrong, and knows how to ask questions. Master those four skills and you'll only have problems sorting out the vast opportunities always available to you.

Greed is Good

I'm a strong believer in the invisible hand of capitalism.

Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" and all that stuff. More importantly, I strongly believe in the fact that most (if not all) humans are absolutely selfish and are looking out for their own interests before the interests of others. You will not find complete altruism in any real human. Perhaps mythological figures or stories - but those only exist as a method of control. A fantasy, one could say, a story about how things will never be in order to dangle that wide-eyed hope of something too good to be true just outside your field of vision.

However, this isn't to say that the world is full of selfish self-serving people that won't lift a finger to help you. Quite the opposite. Humans are social creatures and need each other to survive. One human trying to better themselves will, by default, need the services and/or byproducts of other humans to succeed. In so doing, this person or entity may benefit others or even society as well in their pursuit for wealth or recognition.

In real terms, think of it this way. You have three men who want to make money:

• The first man robs a bank and gets rich. He goes to jail shortly thereafter and loses it all.
• The second man leads a life of frugality and saves his money, making an average income doing a relatively unskilled job.
• The third man puts himself through school and researches a cure for a rare disease, ends up marketing it as a drug, and becomes unbelievably rich while at the same time providing jobs for hundreds of people and saving the lives of thousands of patients.

All three of them are driven by the universal litmus of success and/or happiness: Money.

The first one took away from society. The second lived within society's rules and was neither a positive or a negative. And the third ended up benefiting society. Sure, the third man did a lot of good. But would he really have dedicated decades of his life if deep down inside he didn't think he'd make a hell of a lot of money someday?

The Business

An IT department that eschews the business for its own benefit is a doomed and inefficient entity. It's a ticking time bomb of resentment, and will spur the facets of the business to hire their own miniature siloed IT specialists as opposed to using what the company has provided.

A decentralized IT department is a very dangerous thing. It can work in some cases, perhaps organizations with vastly different components (different industries, for example) - and perhaps with some kind of logical separation that makes sense (student support vs. faculty support, for instance) - but if your IT department DBA's are struggling to negotiate with a Finance department's DBA's, you have trouble. One should spend the time to look inward and see how the IT department can expand to fill these specialized gaps, as opposed to letting them slip through the cracks.

GAMP 5

An auditor acquaintance of mine at the MHRA clued me in to GAMP 5 being published. I have promptly ordered the guidelines and plan to heavily review and comment on them.

GAMP 5

Computer Systems Validation seems to be an extremely hot topic these days, as it is a huge "unknown and mystical" money sink a lot of companies simply outsource. As much as I am a fan of outsourcing, I think CSV should be heavily associated with at least some arm of your internal IT department. It's a giant Venn diagram.

Test Driven Design

I'm a huge fan of testing - but I'm an even bigger fan of test driven design.

Designing anything - documents, programs, methods with the assumption that someone's going to ask you about it and you need to reproduce on a basic level exactly what they're asking with no questions asked sounds easier than it is.

Let's say you're designing a system, and you say it has Symantec AntiVirus installed. Let's say you jot down that it's version 10. Is there anywhere in the program that will simply say "Version 10?" Chances are (and based on empirical data) that it'll say something like 10.1.5000. How do you justify to someone outside your own expertise that "10" is the same as "10.1.5000?" It sounds trivial - but imagine it in a bigger picture. Let's say you put down version "2" for something, and it turns out 2.1 is incredibly incompatible with your current setup. Even moreso, version "2" cant be tested anywhere, as the lowest release is "2.0.1." Make sense?

How can someone trust you if you don't design based on exactly what you can show them? The more transparent your design, the more your credibility rises.

The Calming Effect

The devil is in the details.

Some people need to know about devils. They need to know their shape, their size, their color and what they need to do in order to confront them.

Other people just want to know that they're taken care of, and aren't an issue.

One would think that the latter classification of folks would usually be members of senior management, or big "decision makers" - and the former would be those people lower on the totem pole. This could not be any further than the truth.

Effectively managing people's devils involves being able to empathetically sense their comfort levels with information. This is a basic principle of customer service. You can not ever treat everyone the exact same way in terms of language, information, inflection, and attitude. Every single person has a different level of technical (or otherwise) understanding, and has varying levels of reason to be concerned with rhyme or reason.

There's nothing wrong with people who want to know exactly why something happened, even if they have no clue what you're talking about. It's psychologically soothing for them in most cases - in the sense that they feel they're "up to par" with you, when you're likely enabling them to continue work. It's an ego issue.

Likewise, there's nothing wrong with people who don't want to know exactly why something happened. It could be that they've simply come to your for help, because you're the expert, and expect their issues to be solved. They've outsourced their problem to you.

Project Management

I'm a big fan of project management. I wouldn't have said this a few years ago, but there is extreme organizational value to having project management be a part of your processes.

There is nothing too big or too small for a project. The problem with project management is that it tends to come off as daunting, and people who are unfamiliar to the role it plays tend to squirm away from it or put a lot of blame on it that shouldn't exist. Likewise, those project managers who refuse to have their process be adaptive will burden and kill most projects and create an organizational resistance to using the process.

A good project management organization will be scalable. Like a NASA rocket, it will be able to jettison parts it doesn't need once those areas are no longer necessary. An internal project that is simply an upgrade to an existing piece of technology used only by the IT department can probably require very minimal project management overhead. But something cross-functional that counts the enterprise as its client-base likely needs a bit more due diligence.

Requirements drive projects and are the lifeblood of project management. A good use case can be your Willy Wonka golden ticket, and lead you into a wonderland of fun, danger, and adventure. Without requirements, you have no project. Without projects, you're simply putting out fires and keeping your organization in stasis.

Tools

I've seen a lot of habits concerning the way people use computers.

I've seen people with hundreds of icons on their desktop. I've seen people with all of their icons ordered in neat columns. I've seen people with minimal desktops, maybe one or two icons maximum.

I've seen people organize their files into folders by project, data, subject, and even alphabetically. I've seen people organize their folders in (what seems to be) random places on their computer. Some of the files will be in their My Documents, others directly on the C: drive, and even some within the Program Files directory of some random application.

I've seen people copy their files to multiple areas of their computer with the justification of putting it in multiple places for a backup. I've seen people e-mail themselves all of their files and then categorize those e-mails in folders.

I've seen people who organize their e-mails and setup elaborate filters based on who sent them, when they were sent, perhaps some rule as to a bit of the content, and other criteria. I've seen people who don't use folders, and every e-mail simply goes to their Inbox. I've seen people who keep their Inbox clean, and I've seen those that have 40,000 messages.

I've seen people with unbelievable MS Word setups - with elaborate toolbars, custom document templates, and all kinds of things I didn't even know were possible.

Which one is right? Well, all of them. If they work for you, more power to you and your way of getting things done.

However, if you're using a certain methodology of categorizing or putting your documents/data because "someone else did it and it looks like it would work for you" then take a step back and ask yourself, is it really working for you? I've tried elaborate setups and filters through the years, and some of them have stuck, while others haven't. I like to think of my data organization as a hybrid vehicle, optimized in some places but good-old-fashioned-gas-guzzling in others.

Do what's best for you, and don't feel you've been left behind if you see that someone has a tidy and sparse desktop or e-mail client. Chances are, it isn't working all that great for them.

Here's my work desktop:

Learning, Games, Training and Generation Y

I had an amazing opportunity to attend the "Kaplan Eduneering Knowledge Exchange" event hosted at the Grand Hyatt in San Francisco over the past 3 days.

Initially, I was attending due to my company being a customer of theirs, and in order to gain some insight into the nature of the system we use and some of the other opportunities where it could be applied in our enterprise.

The event was fantastic, Eduneering was an amazing host and everyone there was absolutely sharp as a tack and filled with insight. It was a rather small venue too, maybe 30 people max, but it was a very productive and idea-spawning event.

In addition to the standard presentations on the application of their product across a wide variety of industries, there were two guest speakers that were given the opportunity to present. I found these speakers absolutely enthralling.

The first speaker was Dr. Karl Kapp, a scholar and expert in the "convergence of learning, technology, and business operations" - as taken from his above-linked blog. He was a captivating presenter and the concepts he touched on were things that have happened in my own life that I can empirically say were true statements. He touched on the effectiveness of web-based learning, as well as learning tied to games and activities that achieve far better competency results than standard lecture-driven courses. An example from my own life that I mailed him about after the event was my heavy interest in "text-based" roleplaying games when I was younger. These games forced me to read and type very fast in order to respond to events that were happening with my character. Due to years of that at a very young age, today I read at over 650WPM and type at 120+WPM. Granted, I'm not escaping from sewer rats or going on quests - I'm actually reading and writing business documents.

The second speaker was Nadira Hira, a journalist for Fortune Magazine. She gave another absolutely invigorating presentation on the impact of Generation Y in today's workforce. Being a card-carrying member of Generation Y, her talk was very relevant to my experiences as well. She was an energetic speaker, very enthusiastic and willing to discuss her ideas. I found a lot of the things she said to be very applicable to my day-to-day experiences and actually framed some background on the general background that a lot of my older-generation coworkers originated from.

One of the main points that she spoke about was the line between work and life with Generation Y is fairly blurred, and those of us in the aforementioned generation want where we work to be synonymous with the morals and values we hold in our everyday lives. Going to work and repetitively doing something from 9 to 5 for a company that I don't even know what they do is something that rates in the "negative interest" column. I'm passionate about where I work and from this passion spawns loyalty. I could absolutely join a temp agency and make a magnitude more money than where I work now for money's sake, but my attachment to the organization outweighs this - and the feeling that I am able to impact the organization and shape ways of doing things / methodologies is a reward that can't be monetarily measured.

Anyhow, it was a great event, and like I said the Kaplan Eduneering staff were amazing hosts and very good people. I certainly got much more than I expected.

Embracing the Cage

Sometimes, some things are inevitable. There's no way to get around them. Kind of like quicksand, the more you fight, the deeper you will get sucked in.

Embracing an inevitable change doesn't betray your values or show a weakness. It shows your ability to comprehend and adapt to a dynamic world. Fighting something, that by all means is inevitable, will only alienate you and likely burn bridges. It will likely illuminate some aspects of your core being that are not all too pleasant. After all, once an animal is cornered, the fighting gets ugly and desperate.

Embracing change can often bring with it tremendous benefits. If a new law, or perhaps organizational policy is coming down the pipe - jump on it right away. Be one of the architects that shape how it works. I'm not saying this just to get in early and bend it to your will, but bend it to the concept of fairness. Shape it to how you think it should be applied to your work or industry. This not only solidifies your character, but strengthens your organization as a whole. When the organization benefits, everyone benefits.

Batman

I'm a huge comic freak - X-Men, Batman, all of those superheroes I grew up with and am still engrossed in the stories. Arkham Asylum and The Dark Knight Returns are two of the absolute best Batman graphic novels out there, and I would highly recommend them to anyone looking for a mature and dark look into the Batman universe. Not to mention, Arkham Asylum is illustrated by one of the most amazing artists in the world, Dave McKean....

Even more than the common superhero themes, I absolutely love all of Neil Gaiman's work, especially The Sandman. It is one of the most amazing stories ever told, and I'd recommend the Absolute Sandman editions that are just being released to anyone who wants to jump into the universe.

Anyhow, there was a point to all that. I've found that superheroes or literary/fantasy figures tend to embody certain characteristics and methodologies that identify them. Batman is fairly nuts - he had his parents murdered in front of him when he was a kid, and he goes around in a bat suit fighting crime. That's nuts in itself, sure - but even more so, the psychology of his character shows that he is a deeply paranoid and unsettled individual. He has contingencies for every possible situation, and even when he was a member of the Justice League, he had a plan for having to kill every single member of the team if it ever came to that junction.

One of Neil Gaiman's talents as a writer is to be able to take any kind of mythological or historical event, thing, or time and come up with his own unique perspective. I am sure he has spent countless hours, days, weeks, or even years simply researching history and mythology. This effort is then clearly displayed in his work. His novel, American Gods, (which one can read for free here: American Gods) is also another great example of this talent.

Being able to think of every contingency when making a decision, every possible outcome and every repercussion is something that should be second nature. Being aware of things that have happened before, or things other people have defined goes hand in hand with this as well. Rarely will you really invent something completely new or not seen before. You may come up with a new process or a new way of going about something, but true creation is a rare commodity and is always associated with great changes. Looking at something completely different than what you are working on can surely inspire you in ways "outside the box."

More on Outsourcing

Turning inward a bit, outsourcing can play an amazing role in your everyday work, especially if you're a knowledge/creative/systems design or development worker.

I'll be the first to admit it - I'm not really all that great in making sure every member of the team is included in a task. I tend to analyze a task to an absurd amount and formulate in my mind what is required to execute the task outside of my own responsibilities. Some people may view this thinking as me "leaving them out" of processes or knowledge, when in actuality it's my own analysis demonstrating on a cold and logical level what needs to be done to accomplish something. It may mean that this person might not be included or need to be involved, and will simply be added drag on to a process. Or it may just be that I know that it's something I can do in minutes and there's no need to involve anyone else. Sometimes, it may even include a holistic subconscious analysis of what I know of that person and their ability to perform the job, and I will gravitate toward having someone else do it because I feel they are more suited.

It's not an active thing on any means to forcefully exclude anyone, but sometimes that is how it appears. Some would say that this is a weakness - that I need to work on including more people or ensure that every one is happy or on board.

I strongly disagree. It's my motivation to get something done with the exact and best resources required. However, for situations that deem I be less cold and more empathic, there may be times where another individual is leagues better in delivering that kind of communication than I am, and that I should either consult with them or ask them to perform the task.

Basically, I'm outsourcing my weaknesses to someone else because it's their strength. That way, I pay more attention to doing what I know I'm good at without being dragged down by something I'm not comfortable doing and would not be as eager to learn, and vice versa. Not every human can be a Renaissance Man, but we can surely draw upon each other to make a Renaissance Team. (Yeah, cheesy.)

Surveys

I've been thinking a lot about surveys and their usefulness. In an industry that is primarily customer service - be it HR, IT, or perhaps some manner of Facilities - there is often a lot of opinion out there about the job you're doing.

The problem with those opinions are:

1. They're usually negative,
2. They usually only come up when something is broken, and
3. You usually have to do some kind of work once you receive that opinion to fix or make something right.

Surveys provide you with valuable insight into the day-to-day operations of your job. I think a lot of people out there misuse surveys and simply tie them to giant deployments or otherwise milestone events. I believe that a random survey, be it triggered by x number of events or not, can probably be one of the most valuable insights you can get into the efficiency and opinion of the job you're performing. People will be forced to reflect on both the good and the bad aspects of your service in an equal light - not prompted by an issue.

For example, if you trigger a survey after, say, every incident that your support staff resolves, you'll get two types of surveys:

1. The "Oh my GOD he fixed my problem he is the best! I can work now!," or
2. I can't believe that broke and it took me so long to get my issue resolved. This is horrible service.

Both are true in some ways, but they are magnified by the urgency of the now, and are quite skewed.

Time Management

I could scour the internet for links, articles, and quotes regarding the "art" of time management - but I think I'll just stick to my gut.

So, here it is: People who say they have no time or are too busy to do things just have horrible time management skills.

I'm not talking about the "four hour meeting I can't get out of" or "I have to spend two unavoidable hours" on this kind of busy. Those are good, because they're actual scheduled tasks with beginnings and endpoints. In fact, that's the kind of busy you want. You can take those blocks and usually put them wherever you want in your overall schedule. You manipulate where they are and evaluate what they cost you in the economy of your time.

It's the "I have to finish this task, so I'm just going to be busy all day" or the "I have to spend all night writing this paper" or even the "I'm so swamped" kinds of busy that are irrelevant to me. Quantify those as tasks. Split them into time blocks. 30 minutes for this task. 15 minutes for that review cycle. 45 minutes to write this paper.

If you don't do it in that time block, schedule some more time later to finish the task. As long as during that time you focus on the task and devote your concentration, you will be much better off and will suddenly discover free time you thought you never had.

Why Reinvent the Wheel?

This has got to be one of my favorite quotes. I read it a few years back and it has always stuck with me:

"Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)" - Linus Torvalds

How often must companies, or individuals, reinvent the wheel? There are companies out there that pay pennies on the dollar for the same storage you buy at a hefty premium. Given the choice of a fully redundant 24/7 datacenter that I can access from anywhere, versus a single-disk external hard drive option, I'll gladly go with the datacenter choice.

Services like Amazon S3, or one of my personal favorites, MozyPro, offer unbelievable amounts of storage for a low per-month fee. I'm paying Amazon 73 cents a month to keep 5GB of my data backed up for as long as I'll probably remember it even exists.

Companies shouldn't be reinventing the wheel when it comes to remote infrastructure. Unless you're under absolute strict privacy, security, or proprietary restrictions that you absolutely have to blow 8 grand on a server in addition to whatever management and support costs of having your own file storage in a remote location, there's no reason to not ride the coattails of someone else' specialty. In addition to the culture shock of trying to introduce your own way of business into a very foreign world, confer with the locals who have been doing the same thing you have for your career, but in their own country. They're not out to make money off of "dumb Americans" - they're out there to do a job and get paid for it. Use them and trust them. You're the foreigner to them.

Do you tailor your own clothes, hunt or farm for your own food, build your own transportation, have your own communication network, manufacture your own personal computing devices, or invent your own languages and math disciplines? If so, more power to you. But I think I'll go along with the rest of humankind and embrace the fact that were are all social creatures and know that someone else will do something better than me because it's their trade. I'll pay them for that service, have them be bound to an agreement, and be done with it. They'll expect the same from me.

Outside the Box

Technology is an interesting thing. A lot of people tend to specialize in one technology, or only understand a certain concept. The "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" philosophy comes to mind in situations like these.

Often times, thinking abstractly about a situation can lead to an elegant solution not achievable via normal means. Thinking abstractly for solutions requires a broad knowledge base of concepts, not necessarily memorizing every check box or command needed to perform an action.

I'm a fan of certifications and standardized tests due exactly to the fact that you memorize/learn an unbelievable amount of absolutely useless information. Your brain rapidly absorbs this information and then sheds it almost as quickly as you learned it. However, if you have a photographic memory, or managed to commit at least a few slices of the concepts to your long-term memory, then your brain at least knows that something could be done somewhere in that application through some means. Familiarity is an interesting human feeling and deja-vu is even better. Let Google be your repository once you know about the possibility.

Fear

So I looked up a quote on fear and found this one. It seems cool:

"The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety. ~Henry Louis Mencken"

People fear a lot of things. I've found mostly that people fear change, or fear shining a light on something that is dark and mysterious. Fearing a process is something that is all too common because most of the time, processes aren't really well laid out and are quite enigmatic to begin with.

Applying critical thought to processes can help you a great deal, no matter what the task or the industry. Dissecting something to its base components can be a rewarding task. Take something like planning for your retirement:

1. Oh god, I need to start saving for retirement. How am I going to do this.

That's a scary question prefaced by a scary assumption with some panic sprinkled onto it. Dissect it a little bit. What are some things you do know?

1. I need to start saving for retirement.
2. My paycheck is $1000 bi-weekly.

Okay, there's some facts that won't likely change in the immediate future. Let's go even further and do some internet research. Looks like there's a few options.

1. I need to start saving for retirement.
1. 401(k) and Roth 401(k) plans exist.
2. IRA or Roth IRA plans exist.
   
2. My paycheck is $1000 bi-weekly.

Through some Google searching and a little bit of persistence, we've found out that there are two types of retirement plans. Let's say we did some searching, talked to the benefits administrator where you work, and found out that your company offers a 401(k) plan with matching.

1. I need to start saving for retirement.
1. 401(k) and Roth 401(k) plans exist.
1. My employer offers a 401(k) plan.
   
2. IRA or Roth IRA plans exist.
   
2. My paycheck is $1000 bi-weekly.

This is good. Let's say you decided on going with the employer account plus free matching. Free money is good, right? Let's go further and say "Oh man, I totally don't know anything about stocks, I'm gonna call my 401(k) provider." (A lot of 401(k) plans sponsored by employers typically have some kind of advice hotline.)

1. I need to start saving for retirement.
1. 401(k) and Roth 401(k) plans exist.
1. My employer offers a 401(k) plan.
1. I just spoke to my 401(k) provider and have decided on a certain portfolio based on my age and goals.
   
2. IRA or Roth IRA plans exist.
   
2. My paycheck is $1000 bi-weekly.
1. I can afford to contribute 10% of my paycheck (roughly 200 bucks a month.)

So, now you've started saving for retirement. It's no longer a mystery. Another Google search at "retirement calculators" (because someone out there has already had this idea) and we land at dinkytown.net. Plugging in our numbers and using a rough estimate of being 23 years old with a 40k income and 50% matching of 6% of your pay, we'll have:

Approximately 2.7 Million Dollars (pre-tax) at retirement.

Amazing, right? Apply this thinking to a lot of things. It's similar to "ruling things out." As fast as this world is changing into being completely electronic, I've found the brain understands things a little differently with a straight-up pen and paper visual diagram.

Outsourcing

My thoughts tonight have been incubating from a discussion I had with a friend of mine a few months back regarding humans as services....

Outsourcing is not evil. It is a broad concept that can be applied in many ways. The best kind of outsourcing falls hand-in-hand with delegation.

If there are tasks you have - things which can be reduced down to bare labor, or have had processes created for them that reduce them as such, then you may as well have something that can bill itself as a service perform the action.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk, for example, defines this. Mindless tasks that are too complex for a computer to do, yet easy for humans to perform. A secretary or office assistant's job could also be reduced to such a prime number.

The advantages of this are that you have this task performed as a service. You can hold the service to strict accountability and garner easy metrics. You aren't banking on a human able to "fit the process into their schedule" or not being able to perform it due to personal issues. While yes, a human will most likely be performing the action while under the employ of the service, there is a clear divide in responsibility and purpose. The service only exists to perform the action.

The downside is the more you make your work process oriented and easy to perform by a service, the less valuable you become. Never rest on your laurels if you've improved something - keep finding more.

Selling Yourself

A hard concept (for some) to grasp is the fact that you are worth money, and so is your time. If you're a full-time employee somewhere - sure, you're getting a paycheck. But that doesn't mean it's a nice little package to get you to shut up and enjoy the ride.

Getting a major pay raise is always easier when switching jobs. It's the most uncomplicated method of doing things - go somewhere else where they don't know you, impress them, tell them what you want and get it. If you're young and/or single, it's even easier.

I've found it always helps to keep an open dialog with your manager about your career and your goals. If you have a good manager, you'll get the impression that they're doing everything they can to make that happen. The IT industry is a massive industry filled with many forking paths. You may be doing something completely different today than you were three years ago - unless you're a programmer or a DBA. Those tend to be linear paths that attract individuals comfortable with doing those things for long periods of time.

I'll use myself as an example. Just a few years ago, I was a bottom-rung Helpdesk tech. I was below even Level 1 support and was relegated to hardware warranty repair. Today, I'm a Business Analyst. I never thought I'd "get away" from the getting my hands dirty aspect of my job, but then again, I never really have.

Business Analysts are faced with a dizzying array of problems and unique solutions. Some of them, are not so glamorous. It might just be that you have to create a Domain Admin account and have it run NTBackup once a day on a mission critical system with data worth tens of thousands of dollars. It seems primal, and less flashy than some custom-made or crazy bought solution - but it works, and the business drives your solutions. You've been given the trust to form a risk-based analysis of the problem and weigh in factors other than the most popular consensus of software to use amongst the internet help desk nerds.

Communication becomes key in all IT career growth. Communication with your clients, with your managers, and with yourself. Yes, you are worth more than you're getting paid. That almost always happens. Learn to leverage it and negotiate, and you'll be all the more better set for the future.

Reviews

Writing things is always a hard ordeal - especially when it's something that other people will see. Even more so when it's something that will be weighed in to some kind of decision about you.

If you're nervous about other people seeing your writing, then think about this: Do you really want the second pair of eyes that aren't your own, to have ever seen your paper, to be the person that is critiquing it and deciding your fate based on its contents?

No, you really don't. Show people your work. Who cares if it sucks. Editors exist for a reason, and will help you make your paper better. You've written the content and have decided on the general tone and mood you are instilling into the reader. Have someone else who can probably remember some parts about 7th grade grammar have a look at the paper and tell you their opinion.

It'll help you take criticism for other things better, too.

Scientific Software

I work in the Pharmaceutical / Biotech industry. I often have to engineer systems that control scientific instruments that manufacture and quality check drugs. I've found one thing in common with a lot of this specialty software utilized by said systems: It sucks ass to install in any kind of managed environment.

Most of the instruments that I deal with require some kind of PC / computing infrastructure to control and analyze data. HPLC's, CE's, and other various giant instruments that do crazy things with chemicals all rely on usually some manner of serial connection to a computer. Unless, you're talking about Agilent, which usually does it over Ethernet and is so much more convenient. Anyhow, they usually ship with small form factor underpowered computers that have a default administrator account logging in automatically. (Yes, I'm looking at you Dionex, Agilent, and Beckman-Coulter.)

I've had to back-engineer a few of these systems to make them compliant with industry-standard specifications for security and reliability. One would think on an instrument running 24/7 that you'd at least ensure the computer controlling the instrument has better specifications than something you can get for $500 bucks at Best Buy.

It's always good practice to capture an image of one of these things as soon as the business end of your business starts using it. It will truly save you some disaster recovery headaches in the future when it ultimately fails and you have to rebuild it from scratch. The P2V converter from VMWare is wonderful for catching live systems and converting them to VM's, as well as the industry-standard Ghost utility - which seems to defy time and age and always seems to work no matter what. It's like Prometheus stole that one from the heavens.

Oh, and always keep a spare box of floppy disks around. I guarantee you that you will run into some kind of license that absolutely requires a floppy drive. And, it has to be the A: drive.

Internet Anonymity

I remember back in the days of when I first "joined" the internet - mainly in online text-based roleplaying games.

Hiding your real name was something that was a given. People's AIM handles and websites could not have a single shred of evidence to point anyone back to what they may be in real life.

These days, it's hard not to have your real name or associate things you do in the real world with your online persona. It's quite interesting and goes to show the cultural acceptance of the Internet in general. Kind of like the whole boom a few years back when "video games" became something "cool."

Memory Loss

Many of us in the IT industry lack a skill that we never choose develop. A skill that seems ultimately useless for being in the technical field. It is a subset of a more accepted skill: communication. Communication is useful if you're on Help desk, or perhaps have some sort of customer-facing position that may involve training or "getting your point across." But, beyond communication, there is a much more vital skill.

The skill I'm referring to is Documentation.

If there's anything that a college degree is good for, it's learning how to translate actions and spoken word into notes. You can never have enough notes that describe a process. Be it a process you are observing, a process you're performing, or something that you are planning; notes are essential to learning and having a successful technical career.

From your notes, you are able to formulate documentation. Starting slowly, you are able to document things you do for yourself so that you can reference them or perhaps repeat them in the future.

From that point on, you can then craft documentation that other people can follow. This is one of the hardest obstacles - from both a writing skill perspective and a personal acceptance perspective. While it may seem like you are divulging information that only you should know and thus making you less valuable, think about this quote from a dear friend of mine:

"You can never advance if you can't be replaced."

Get over the fact that you want to be the only one who wants to know how to do something. It will only hinder your development if you can't learn how to properly transfer knowledge. For most things in the IT field, a smart enough person can search for it and dumb their way into figuring it out. Come across as a helpful person, not an insecure jerk.

Once you're able to craft documentation that others can easily follow, start doing it for everything. Apply the style to your communications. to anything you think people will notice. It will make a huge difference.

Patterns

The hubris of youth is the insatiable urge to be at the top of every task or responsibility ever handed to you. While motivation, drive, and reliability are surely synonyms that fall into the same mindset - youth brings with it a certain blindness to the rest of the world.

The early start of my career had me taking on mountains of challenges and unbelievable problems while refusing the aid of anyone else. I would figure them out for myself, and therefore take all the credit. While this is true and is helpful in short bursts, much like vicodin + caffeine, - ultimately, it is harmful in the long term.

I quickly learned that for any problem ever conceived in this world, especially in the IT industry, there is one universal truth:

Someone else has already seen it, and likely posted it somewhere on the internet, where Google has already indexed it.

While this may not be true for in-house applications and other custom-designed solutions, it is more applicable to most things than not. Certain hardware failures, software errors, application conflicts, etc. Even beyond the umbrella of technology; financial issues and emotional issues come to mind.

The sooner I came to realize this universal truth the sooner I came to realize that patterns apply to everything. They are elegant and interwoven in all issues, and the quicker you can identify them the more effective you can be in solving them.

I strongly urge anyone who wishes to begin in the IT industry to start from the lowest base level. Be a hardware jockey - do warranty repair. It's useless and mundane knowledge, but it shapes your mind to associate certain symptoms with certain causes. It carves out the pathways for effective troubleshooting that will help carry you through Desktop Support and beyond. The quicker you are able to step back and identify the patterns that require the need of skilled triage, the sooner you begin making your own patterns for other people to figure out.