Habits are hard to break and start

Have you ever tried to break a habit? You know, quitting smoking, stop chewing your fingernails, things like that. Or how about trying to gain a new habit? Do you take your multivitamins every day? (I know all about the controversy about multivitamins, I'm just using this as an example.) Are you trying to start a writing habit? A reading habit?

Sometimes you need a little bit of a kick in the butt. Lift.do is such a website/application that will help you do that by providing you with reminders that you need to follow up with this habit or that process. For example, I have three habits currently in Lift.do:

• Taking a daily multivitamin. Yes, multivitamins for the sake of trying to prevent Alzheimers or to reduce the risk of heart disease is probably not a good thing to do. However, the multivitamin I am taking has the same amount of Vitamin D that my doctor recommended. The fact that I get other items such as potassium and folic acid provide me with a buffer when my diet is not as good as it should be.
• Becoming a better blogger. This is a course/habit that is trying to help people become a better blogger by understanding who they want to target as an audience and what that target audience wants/needs to hear.
• Meditation. Each day is an audio file that goes through and helps you relax. Literally, that's all it is, but it does have a very calming effect. I remember going through this process with my Gym teacher in Grade 2 and that relaxation technique came back quickly.

So, any day that I do at least 1 thing on my list Lift.do is happy, but gently prods me into doing more. The messages aren't demanding, but very gentle and just subtle reminders that you need to do something.

 

New plans keep being added to the list of things that you can learn and some of them are very well thought out and very helpful. Others, not so much, but you can decide for yourself what you do or do not want to learn.

 

Penmanship

When I was growing up I used an HB pencil.  A yellow Staedtler HB pencil.  I bought a pack at the beginning of the school year and, if I was lucky, a had a couple left by the end of the school year.  (Although in Grade 2 a girl sitting behind me in math class was so mad at me for not letting her cheat that she stabbed me in the arm with her pencil and broke off the lead.  It's still inside my left arm as I write this so technically I had a little bit of pencil left at the end of every school year.  It was just embedded in my arm.)  When I got a little older I discover the mechanical pencil.  A very simple, black, Pentel mechanical pencil.  I fell in love with that mechanical pencil.  It was precise, it was lightweight and it was expensive to keep buying it new leads because those itty bitty pencil leads kept breaking, gosh darn it.  We were also allowed to use pens.  Not just any pens, but Bic pens.  You had to be careful, however, because you couldn't just erase pen, you had to use Liquid Paper to cover up the pen marks so that you could put the correct words in place.  And in high school I took Typing 10.  You had to stay in the class until at least the midterm exam and, if you exceeded 30 words a minute you could pass the course.  (In NAIT they made us take a typing course as well.  As soon as you hit 30 words a minute you could leave.  Ten minutes later I was out the door.  Thank goodness for high school.)

Putting words on paper was an art.  It was something special.

Then came technology and, in some cases things changed, but in other ways they have stayed the same.  My daughters still used HB pencils in school.  They migrated to mechanical pencils and Bic pens as well.  Liquid Paper?  Not so much because any long document was done on the computer, printed and then handed in.  Or it is done through Google docs and submitted to an email address.  The desire to write, the desire to see the words come out of the tip of the pen has gone.  Indeed, cursive writing is no longer being taught and my girls?  Well, to be honest I print/write neater than all of them.  Penmanship is not something that is taught nor desired.  The only time my girls use cursive writing is to sign their names to Christmas cards, birthday cards or the backs of cheques.  They text on their phones and type on a keyboard.

Penmanship does not fit into people's lifestyle these days.  Well, let me rephrase that, for many people penmanship does not fit into their lifestyle.  For others, however, a fine writing instrument is actually something sought and desired.  (Please note that expensive and fine are not synonymous.)  I discovered a site called JetPens a number of years ago.  Much of their stock is actually imported from Japan and Germany where great care is taken in the creation of high quality writing instruments.  I started buying Japanese pens with different tips and different widths and different types of ink.  I discovered that I prefer pens in the 0.4 mm to 0.5 mm range.  Smoothly flowing ink with excellent control.  My current favourite is the Uniball Vision Needle which you can actually pick up at Staples.  My middle daughter, the one that wants to be an animator, prefers Copic markers in all of their 214 different colours (are there really that many colours?).  At $6.15 a marker (on sale) she doesn't have most of the colours.

Some people can't see the difference or don't care about the difference.  Others look at the quality of the ink, the richness of the colour and realize that there is a difference.  While you can get a lot of pens that dribble out black ink on a piece of paper, the difference in the smoothness of the ink, the sharpness of the lines and the overall quality of the result is phenomenal between a cheap ($0.25) and and inexpensive ($1.99) pen.  The same goes with markers.  More important with markers as the richness in the colour and the vibrancy of the end result can significantly alter the emotional impact of a work of art.

This is very synonymous with developing applications.  Two people can each independently build a system that meets all of the requirements and yet the applications will look and behave so radically different.  We all have areas of expertise and those come out in the design of our apps, which is why a well rounded team is required to build a well rounded application.  But it is more than just a team effort, it is about caring about the end product.  When writing it is penmanship, but when building applications it is craftsmanship and shouldn't we all want to be craftsmen?

Time for some controversy

I haven't written anything controversial in a long time.   (OK, long time to me means a couple of weeks.)  Shall we see how controversial the following topic is?

Your disaster recovery plan is not finished.  Indeed, it is never complete.

Whether you are looking at a disaster recovery plan for a department, the IT shop, the ministry or even the city, your disaster recovery plan (DRP) is probably incomplete or missing huge chunks of material.  I mean, let's face it, the DRP is based on a couple of assumptions (maybe a dozen or more) that need to line up perfectly in order for the plan to work.  It is far, far easier to put a plan in place to deal with a complete disaster than it is to deal with  a minor disaster.  And, as our environments are constantly changing and our processes constantly evolving, the DRP may be out of date by the time the last person has reviewed it.  Everything done is based on a point in time.  Is that mentioned in the DRP?

While people concentrate on what steps need to be accomplished to restore services, I'm wondering if we are approaching this whole idea from the wrong direction.  While knowing that to restore service to application xxx it is important that server yyy be recovered as well as database zzz is important, perhaps the most important piece is how the organization continues to function in the event that certain people in certain roles are lost.  You could spend a lot of time getting application xxx up and running, but if there are no users of the application then what is the point? 

If your organization is set up so that all decisions go through one or two people, what if those people aren't there?  If a sinkhole opened up and swallowed <insert building of your choice here> would you be able to function?  In the event of a disaster what additional authority is suddenly pushed down/up in order for thing to continue to function?  Sure, a Business Continuity Plan has some of this in it, but is there enough?

To be honest, even if there were no disaster recovery plans in place for any of our applications, we could get things up and running.  The DRP documents for the applications allow us to do it faster, but still depend on the structure of the organization to exist.  If that structure did not exist?  Well, if the people still existed then we could still bring all of the applications back.

How do people learn?

There seems to be a lot of confusion in the world about human memory.  To be more precise short term versus long term memory.  I read one article that said short tem memory was only good for about 10 seconds and then it went into long term memory.  Another article said that short term memory was good for about 45 minutes and then it went into long term memory.  They all seemed to agree on the fact that for the vast majority of people, what goes into long term memory is only a subset of what goes into short term memory.  But what subset?

Do you know why phone numbers are seven digits long?  Well, they did studies to determine memory limits and discovered that seven digits seemed to be the sweet spot.  If you added a word it lowered it to the word and five digits.  (Ex. 555-1212 vs."Pennsylvania  6-5000")  To me this isn't short term memory, more of a memory cache.

I'm thinking there are really three types of memory:  short term cache, short term memory and long term memory.  (Hey, if you get a PhD out of this let me know.)  The cache memory we use for really, really short term things, like someone telling us a phone number that we need in order to dial.  It stays in memory long enough for us to dial it but then disappears.  Short term memory is what you need when you get a phone call on the way home from work and someone tells you to pick up dinner on the way home or perhaps milk and bread.  You know, the usual stuff.  Long term memory is the stuff that you need to remember for longer periods of time, things like your phone number, your address and where you work.  Memory is also affected by how often it is accessed.  The more often we repeat something the more likely it is to go into short term memory from the cache and long term memory from short term memory.  Have you noticed that if someone gives you a phone number and you repeat it over and over again you are more likely to remember it?  Same concept.  By repeating the phone number you are reinforcing temporary neural pathways thus allowing the neurons to more easily from permanent pathways.  This in turn shifts that neural pathway from being cached to short term to long term.  (No idea if that is right, but it sure sounded like I knew what I was talking about.)
So how does this affect you?

When you are designing a web application you need to be able to present people with familiar patterns so that they can more easily memorize complex routes.  If your application uses a familiar metaphor it is exponentially easier to use because many of the "memories" needed to access and use the application are already burned into the brain.  It is a matter of creating a clone of an existing memory and making a small change.  That small change is easier to memorize than an entirely new path.  That is why applications that use familiar metaphors are easier to user, easier to follow and easier to learn, because the memories are already built in.  People are quite familiar with folders, so the folder metaphor works well for many people.

Here is the scary part, however, the metaphor needs to constantly evolve.  When I said that the folder metaphor works for many people, the younger you are the less likely you are to understand the folder metaphor because you are less likely to have encountered folders.  The Save icon for many applications is a floppy disk.  How many of you have floppy disks at home?  How many of you have a computer that can use a floppy disk?  The WIMP interface, popular for so many years, is being replaced, but I'm not 100% sure with what.  I do know, however, that it needs to be simple, easy to use and it needs to be built on existing memory patterns.  Whether it is the memory patterns of old people like me or young people like my daughter, that is yet to be decided.

The things you find

Oh, the things that you find when you click on links.  For instance:

• LD50 - The dose of a toxin required to kill 50 percent of a tested population.  How did I find this out?  Well, the new Fiesta Chicken Wraps from McDonalds have an ingredient I had never seen before:  Natamycin.  This ingredient is the fermented result of bacteria normally found in soil and is used as an anti-fungal agent in foods.  This anti-fungal agent has an LD50 of 450 mg/kg in animal studies.
• Bacon Number - The number of degrees of separation between Kevin Bacon and the person in question.  The idea is that Kevin Bacon has worked with so many actors that if no actor in the business is more than six acquaintances away from Kevin Bacon.  Google can help you out if you add "bacon number" in front of the actors name, but it doesn't always have a number for you.  For example, one of the leads in the television show "Beauty and the Beast" (2012) is Jay Ryan whose Bacon Number is 3:
  1. Jay Ryan worked with Kristen Kreuk in Beauty and the Beast
  2. Kristen Kreuk worked with Neve Campbell in Partition
  3. Neve Campbell worked with Kevin Bacon in Wild Things
• A zarf is a holder for a coffee cup with a handle.  While everyone is familiar with these, it originally meant these.  (Yes, you have to click the links to figure out what I am saying.)
• The other day my wife was talking about virga when I came across petrichor.  Yes, apparently the English language has a word that describes the scent of rain on dry earth.
• Lacrimal canaliculi are those little pink nodules in the corner of your eye.
• Wikipedia has a "Random Article" feature that takes you to a random page within their site.  Accessing the link a few times I got:
• List of Butterflies of Malawi
• The Old Wailuku Inn at Ulupono
• Sher-e-Bangla Cricket Stadium
• 2775 Odishaw
• Nobel Ice

Sometimes it can be quite relaxing just to click on links and see where you end up.

Ohana

Last year my family went on a cruise of the Eastern Caribbean.  Since we were already in Florida we thought we would spend a week at DisneyWorld as well.  While we we there my oldest daughter bought a large Stitch plush.  It was so large that in order to bring it back with us she had to stuff it in a large carry on bag.  Needless to say, Homeland Security had a good time searching the bag for other contraband.

Why does she like Stitch so much?  I'm not sure.  The thing that really sticks out for me, however, is the following quote from the Lilo and Stitch movie:

Ohana means family, family means nobody gets left behind. Or forgotten.

In one quote the writers managed to sum up part of what it means to be human.  Collectively we are all part of a giant tribe of people.  When someone goes missing there are people out searching for that individual and even though they don't know them they feel compelled to help search.  When a building collapses there is a tremendous amount of effort into searching for survivors and then recovering the bodies.  There is a "Tomb of the Unknown Soldier" located in many countries around the world.  There is an interconnectedness between people that extends beyond familial, cultural or national boundaries.  We cheer on our heroes because they are an extension of ourselves.  Their success is our success.  Their failures are ours. We encourage those who reach for the stars because we know that we ourselves would like to be doing just that.

There is a dark side, however, in that this same attitude can be twisted for harm.  While the vision of angry villagers swarming Dr. Frankensteins castle in order to kill the monster seem laughable, they are not far from the truth.  The same desire to help can be twisted into the desire for vengeance.  The passion for helping can easily be turned into a passion for revenge.

But that is what it means to be human:  we experience the ups and downs of life and move through them.  Sometimes we do it alone, but often we do it in the company of others.

I am very happy and proud to say that the group of people that I am moving through life with are a great group of people:  my family, my friends, my co-workers.  You are all part of my tribe and I thank you.

Ohana.

Justin Bieber

Wow, I never thought I would write a daily note about Justin Bieber, but here it is.   First off, let me state that I do not like Justin Bieber's music.  Never have been a fan and will probably never be a fan.  None of my daughters (ages 11, 16, 18) like him either.

OK, with that out of the way, why do I want to talk about him?  Well, I'm using him as an example of the dichotomy present not only in public figures, but, in many respects, in all of us.  There are two versions of each of us, our inner "real" person and the outer "public" person.  Celebrities like Justin Bieber are under a lot more scrutiny than the average person.  They are photographed continually and every word they say is somehow broadcast to the world at large.  As our world has become increasing mobile and digital these photos and words are almost instantly available around the world.  Justin Bieber currently has the most Twitter follows (39,444,187 at last count) and has submitted over 22,200 updates.  What he says, in jest or anger, is read around the world.  Because of this close attention he has very little time to be the "real" Justin Bieber and as a result the pressure sometimes spills over into the public Justin and he does some really stupid things.

For most of us, however, the dichotomy is not as severe, nor do we need to maintain that "public" persona for as long.  We don't have people listening to everything we do, nor do we have people being killed while trying to take our picture.  We can easily switch into and out of our public persona with little effort and many people do not even notice.  (For the record, if you ever see me start talking fast and acting like I've taken too much caffeine, that means I am nervous as heck and my public persona - the care free gregarious Don - has come out to play.)

The vast majority of us have that switching between real and public personas down to a fine art.  So much so that many of us do not even know that we are doing it.  My father was a very quiet, introverted individual, who could walk into a room and make friends with everyone there.  It seemed "natural", but having grown up with him I realized that this was a major hurdle for him.  My Dad only needed to be that public persona for short periods of time so it had little to no effect on the real person behind the façade.  But in the case of those who live in the public spotlight the pressure must be a lot higher and a lot more prevalent as they are forced to subvert their own life in favour of the persona that everyone expects.

So, how many of you are "real" with your friends and how many of you just project a new persona and keep the real you inside?

A hill worth dying on.

I'm sure you've all heard it before, but there is a phrase that goes something like this:

Is this a hill worth dying on?

While I have been hard pressed to find a definite origin of the phrase everyone seems to believe that it embodies the question of whether or not "something" is worth committing all of your resource towards.  In military terms it denotes a spot (a hill) that you believe you need to continue your offensive.  In humanistic terms it means something that you believe in so strongly you are willing to fight to keep or gain.

It is an interesting question in that if you sit back and really think about it you eventually end up going through your list of priorities and determining whether or not this particular item deserves to be in the top rank with your other priorities.  You need to evaluate the effort to attain that goal or objective versus the effort to go around and try alternative approaches.  You need to objectively differentiate between "wants" and "needs".  You need to be able to think about long term goals and whether or not your effort should be expended now or saved for later.

Sometimes it doesn't matter.

Every so often you come across something which deserves to have a line drawn in the sand.  Something happens and suddenly this is a hill worth dying on.  Whether it is the 17th similar event that has occurred or whether it is the 5th different event but on the same day, every so often the switch flips and you rise up, ramrod straight, hold your head high and say "no".

A leader will find a hill worth dying on because it is the right thing to do.  A manager will find a hill worth dying on because you are violating policy 62A, Section 2, paragraph 3a) and 3b).

No matter what, however, it is your choice. 

Combining Analog and Digital

There is a gentleman by the name of Steven Johnson.  He is the author multiple books, the creator of multiple companies and the father of multiple kids.  (Seriously, that is how he describes himself.)  He wrote on a website called Medium about something called a Spark File.  Created by one of the originators of the Blogger platform, Ev Williams thought that there had to be a better way to communicate and share ideas than Blogger, so he created Medium.

When Steven gets an idea about something, he jots it down in his Spark file.  Every few months he goes through every single entry in his Spark File and sees if there are additional connections or additional information that has subsequently come to light to make the ideas more full bodied.  While the idea of a Spark File is important to understand, I immediately gravitated towards the tools that he talked about:  Evernote and Moleskine.

For those that aren't aware, Evernote is a tool that allows you to share "notes" amongst the various platforms you may be using.  For instance, I have it running on my Windows machine at home, my Mac machine at home, my iPhone and my iPad.  All of these are kept in sync so that a note that I create on one platform is available on all of my devices. The other tool is, quite simply, nothing more than a notebook:  Moleskine.  It is one of the more popular notebooks because of the high quality binding, the elastic to make sure the book stays closed and the cloth bookmark built in.  People use them to jot down ideas and collect their thoughts.  Combined they make a tremendous tool to help prevent you from losing ideas.  (P.S. Never pay retail for the Evernot Smart Notebook by Moleskine.  Buy it from Amazon.)

The idea that really seems to work for me is actually the combination of analog and digital.  Yes, we live in a digital world but many of us are more comfortable writing a couple of lines in a notebook than bringing out the phone/tablet, bringing up the correct app and then typing in the idea.  For those old timers out there, did you ever wonder why your teacher wrote chalkboard (yes, I am that old) after chalkboard of notes and had you copy them down?  Study after study has shown that if you are forced to write something down the effort of memorizing, even just for a few seconds, and transcribing that information is more likely to make you remember it than just reading the information.  (That is why us old people have minds filled with useless information, like the different speeds of a record player and heck, even what a record player is.)

The combination of analog and digital, notebook and virtual notebook, is what is appealing to me.  Human beings are not digital by nature as we have fingers and toes instead of USB keys and HDMI ports, so, to me at least, that blend of old and new is where I think some of the best ideas will come from.  So, when we think of solutions for our clients, don't necessarily think of analog or digital, think of combing them to see what sort of solutions you can come up with.

Sometimes taking time is actually a shortcut

"Sometimes taking time is actually a shortcut" - Haruki Murakami from the book "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running"

He made this quote when he was talking about learning to swim for a Triathlon, but the concepts are the same regardless of what you are talking about.  People, by their very nature want to reach the end as fast as possible.  They want to learn to play a new video game properly, but they want to get to the end boss as fast as possible.  They want to learn a new computer language, but use the same constructs that they used in the old languages.  They want to learn to play the violin but try to start with Ode to Joy by Beethoven.

When I was younger I really wanted to learn to play "Smoke on the Water" by Deep Purple.  That little guitar riff had me mesmerized. I set out to learn how to play it.  A friend of mine was a guitarist so he taught me the song.  Not how to play a guitar, but how to play the first couple of minutes of the song.  That is all I learned.  I didn't learn the intricacies of how to play a guitar, I learned a single song.  ( I replicated that experience thirty five years later with Rock Band.  Ah, the memories.)

If you want to be really good at something you need to take your time.  You need to practice the little things before tackling the big things.  You need to know the basics and build on those basics to create more complex and more creative solutions or you may end up like this person.

Why aren't people creative?

The room was deathly quiet.  The tapping of the pens on the polished table top stopped just after the question was asked and now all that could be heard was the soft squeaking of chairs as people nervously looked at each other.  Beads of sweat spontaneously appeared on various foreheads and mouths dried out as a silent prayer of "don't ask me" was repeated by almost everyone in the room.  The silence stretched until it seemed like hours had passed and deodorant was pushed to its limits.  Suddenly a chair creaked as someone leaned forward and said "Well, how about this for an idea …?"

We've all seen this scenario in countless meetings.  Everything is there to discuss something, perhaps not even tangentially related, when a question is asked that requires you to be "creative".  There is no easier way to get a room to quiet down than to ask people to be "creative" or "innovative" on the spot.  Why?  Why do people clam up when asked for their opinion?

In many ways it is fear, fear of being rejected, fear of being looked down upon, fear of being … wrong.

We've all had that feeling where we are in a room with our superiors or our peers and we don't want to make a mistake.  We don't want to be the person that people point to and say "Yeah, they actually said that."  People want to be accepted.  They want to fit in.  They want to be "comfortable" in their interactions with people but when they are asked to be think quickly about a problem they freeze up not knowing how they should answer the question.

To be honest, meetings are probably the least likely place to be creative and innovative.  Yes, some people do feed off of the energy in the room and do come up with creative ideas.  For most people, however, the feeling that they exhibit is fear.

Susan Cain wrote a book called "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking" in which she talks about how various studies show that "… one out of every two or three people you know …" are introverts.  People who don't like speaking up.  People who prefer solitude to group discussions.  Within various industries and market segments the percentage is higher or lower.  In Sales, Marketing, Retail and Advertising you will find more extroverts than introverts.  In IT, Library Sciences, Research and Development you will find more introverts than extroverts. 

Putting a bunch of people in a room and asking for ideas is fundamentally not a good way of doing things.  The introverts don't want to speak up because that his not their personality.  The people who are extroverts, but are scared of being wrong, aren't going to speak up.  That leaves a small portion of any room being dominated by the extroverts who are confident in their idea or themselves.  Susan Cain mentions this in her book:

Talkative people, for example, are rated as smarter, better-looking, more interesting, and more desirable as friends.  Velocity of speech counts as well as volume:  we rank fast talkers as more competent and likable than slow ones.  The same dynamics apply in groups, where research shows that the voluble are considered smarter than the reticent - even though there's zero correlation between the gift of gab and good ideas.

So, in a group the only people that seem to be listened to are those that talk fast, talk loud and, to put it simply, just talk.  This doesn't mean that you are getting the best ideas, you're just getting ideas from a small percentage of the group.

"But Don, don't collaborative forums allow you to expand the reach beyond just the meeting so that those introverts can also participate?"  Not always.  The deep rooted problems (fear of exposure, fear of being wrong) are still there, but maybe not as strong.  There is still a large percentage of the group that will not respond, that will not give feedback, that will just sit back, watch things happen and then realize, way too late, that they could have made a difference.

We need to embrace the introvert in all of us.  We need to stop stigmatizing being "wrong", which is, in many respects, just someone's opinion.  We need to foster a culture where everything we do is just another opportunity for learning and where we are given the time and opportunity to express ourselves without the fear that most of us experience.

Democracy doesn't work

Democracy is an interesting concept, but in the workplace democracy doesn't get the job done.  There needs to be a boss.  There needs to be someone who sets direction.  There needs to be someone to whom people can look to resolve issues.

Many of you are thinking of your Project Managers right now and I would just like to make a moment and say that you are completely … wrong.  I have been on a number of successful projects where the Project Manager, while technically "running the project", was not actually the boss.  He/she was not the person to whom people went to solve problems.  They went to the Project Manager to get roadblocks removed, but the "architect" or the "team lead" or the "senior developer" was the person who had the vision to which everyone was working.  You could call them the"true" leader.

It is not a bad thing to have someone other than the Project Manager as the leader of the project.  For the most part Project Managers are in their role because they organize things well, make small talk with the business clients, can buy lunch for a group without needing to get approval and generally try to make life easier for the project teams.  Many Project Managers, however, are not technically adept enough to discuss the differences/similarities between WCF and RESTful services, much less provide solutions for the successful support of both types with a single code base.  Some Project Managers do not even understand the technology at all, but they can sure whip up a nice Excel spreadsheet demonstrating that they are within 3.2% of their projected expenditures with only a minor (<5%) chance of their exceeding their allotted budget as long as change requests 123, 124 and 141 are approved within the ten day period as agreed to in the original proposal.

Every project is different.  Every project requires a different type of leadership.  Where you have strong technical skills on the team there is a need for someone who can do business client liaising, someone to do the reporting and project plan coordination.  If you are lacking that deep technical knowledge then you need a Project Manager who is more technical and can tell his C# from his F#.  Someone who is able to discuss the relative merits of different types of transactional encapsulation across multiple non-distributed transactions.  Some projects require a Boss while others require someone who can assist the real boss.

Just as an organization must be careful as to how they organize and deploy High Performance Teams, however, there is also a need to understand what sort of Project Manager is required.  Placing a Project Manager who is very "hands on" and very opinionated about the technological decisions being made into a project that already has a de facto boss is going to be a great bone of contention that may never be able to be worked around.  Likewise, a PM that has little technical background will offer very little to a team that is adrift due to the lack of leadership.

You need a boss, but you have to make sure you don't have two.

Myths of Innovation

We are all told to be "innovative", that we need an "innovative" solution to a problem.  We are then locked in a room and told that we have fifteen minutes to come up with this innovative solution because in thirty minutes the project is starting up and by the way here are the people working on the project and their skills so the innovative approach has to be able to be done by this group of individuals.

By the third Tuesday of next month.

OK, time to turn the subtlety off and talk about reality.  People don't think of innovative ideas on a scheduled basis.  Particularly not in a meeting room with other people.  Sure, you can brainstorm in a room with other people, but don't necessarily expect innovative ideas to come out of that session.

Too often people are told to come up with innovative solutions to problems to which they have just been introduced. Innovation requires work. Innovation requires a deep understanding of the problem. I am not saying that you will never get an innovative idea with this approach, but the odds of it happening are rather slim.  Getting a group of people together and telling them "We're going to create an innovative solution to problem X in the next 60 minutes or we're all fired", is probably not the way to go about getting a truly innovative solution.  Sure, you may come up with something that satisfies your immediate needs, but is it innovative or just copying something else?

Scott Berkun, author of Myths of Innovation has a summary of the 177 myths of innovation that he has uncovered in his own work and work done by others.  What I notice when reading the myths is that there is no single solution.  Innovation is a bolt of lightning out of the blue.  What works for one industry may not work for another.  What works for one problem may not work for the next even if the identical group of people is trying to solve both.

We also need to step back and realize that an innovative solution may not actually be leading edge technology, it may just be using what you already have in a different way.  The Apple iPod was not the most innovative MP3 player on the market.  It was innovative in how the iPod ecosystem supported all of the pieces and made the experience pleasurable.  It was not the first, but for its time it was the best.

There are so many variables that we best we can do is give people the time, space and opportunity to think.  After all, isn't thinking the start of any innovative idea?

High Performance Teams

What is a "High Performance Team" (HPT)?  At what point does a team become one?  Can a team change?  Do all the members of the team need to be "superstars"?

According to Wikipedia, high performance teams are groups that are "highly focused on their goals and that achieve superior business results.  High-performance teams outperform all other similar teams and they outperform expectations given their composition".  That last part is probably the most important and it is the part that is hardest for organizations to understand.

In a traditional organization staff are known as "resources", hence the term Human Resources for the department that deals with staff.  Within many organizations staff (aka resources) are interchangeable.  If you have an SA3 on your project and they won the lottery you get another SA3 to replace them.  Most project managers think this way as well.  In many respects human resources are thought of as interchangeable Lego pieces.  If, according to the plan, you need a 4x2 full height brick, you look for a 4x2 full height brick.  This makes a single assumption that is at the root of the problem:  people are interchangeable like Lego bricks.

People aren't interchangeable, however.  Lego bricks are, on the other hand, because the manufacturing process has extremely tight tolerances for deviations from the standard. (Up to a 0.02 millimeter variation is allowed)  People?  Well, as they say, no two people are alike.  That individualization is what makes substituting one person for another not as simple as what you might expect.

An HPT needs to fit together like Lego bricks.  If one member of the team leaves, their replacement may not fit properly.  Conversely, if you don't have an HPT and you replace someone on the team you may end up with one in the long run.  Is there a science involved in creating an HPT?  People have tried for years and have been completely unsuccessful.  What they have been successful at doing, however, is identifying when a team has become an HPT.  Once you have such a team you need to do what you can to keep that team together.  Their success as a team can have an impact on the success of the organization. 

This doesn't mean that you let them run wild.  Every team needs guidance, but instead of putting a chain around their neck and leading them where you want them to go, you point in the direction of where you want them to go and work with them so that they not only understand where you want to go and why you want to go there, but the benefits of going there.  An HPT requires more openness than other teams because that is part of why they are as effective as they are:  open and honest communication.

One of the biggest fallacies, however, is the idea that if you break up the team then each member can start their own HPT and you will have even more teams.  It doesn't work that way.  Some of the reasons for the team to be so good at what they do includes the fact that they trust each other, they respect each other and they are all aligned with regard to their work goals.  Putting five people together in a room does not make people trust each other.  It does not make people respect each other.  It does not align their work goals. 

An HPT is an organic process that cannot be predicted nor can it be forced.  It can, however, be nurtured and sustained.  If you want to be successful, just step out of the way and grab on to the coat tails of an HPT because the ride is going to be fast and frightening, but you're going to go places.

Fitting in

Have you ever written a complaint letter to an organization?  I have.  Yes, I know that may surprise you, but I have done so on a number of occasions.  I have complained about poor service (and I mean really poor service not just bad).  I have complained about getting a "deal" from the salesperson when that "deal" ended up costing me almost 20% more than the advertised price on the flyer right in front of his face.  I have complained about paying for something but never receiving it.

On the other side of the coin, however, have you ever sent a letter to an organization complimenting them on their service of product?  Not a lot of people do that.  It may surprise you to know that I have done that a number of times in the past as well.  I have complimented an organization on how the sales person / service desk handled a complaint.  I have complimented an organization on the excellent service I have received from their staff.  I have complimented an organization on how they went out of their way to make me feel important even though, to me at least, the problem was not even worth commenting about.

Most people in this world do not complain, nor do they compliment. Why do I?  Because I want to help make a difference.  I want the organization that I dealt with to be healthier, stronger and more in tune with the needs of customers after I have interacted with them.  For complaints I want them to improve their service so that everyone they deal with feels important.  For compliments I want them to recognize that individual and help foster that same attitude amongst all of the staff.

Too often people feel disinclined to speak up.  They feel that they can have little to no impact on how (insert organization here) does its business.  As a result they behave just like ants, following the scent trail of someone who has gone before them.  They don't deviate from the path unless something prevents them from following that path.

Most people in the world are like sheep.  They go where they are told because it is easier to do that then to carve a new path.  (You can see this in Winter when someone starts a fresh path through the snow.  No matter how crooked the path, people follow it because it is easier to follow than it is to lead.)  This doesn't mean that they can't excel, just that they aren't being asked to excel.  Sure, you can tell people that you want them to think out of the box, but if you subsequently put them in a box what message are you giving them?  As a culture we foster the individuals who "conform" and "fit in" while idolizing those that "think out of the box".

Thinking independently and critically is something that we need to develop, but it requires an organizational shift that most organizations, particularly Public Sector, are not willing to experience.  "Fitting in" is still more highly praised than "standing out" as the phrase "I might get fired" brings with it a lot of fear and makes people walk that crooked line in the snow.

Changing defaults

When you lick the terminals of a brand new 9-volt battery the shock you feel is Nature's way of saying "You really shouldn't be doing this."

When you approach a bonfire and feel the heat coming off in waves and singing your eyebrows it is Nature's way of saying "You really shouldn't be doing this."

When you are timing out when running a report in SQL Server Reporting Services it is Nature's way of saying "You really shouldn't be doing this."

We have received a troubling number of requests recently to expand the timeout of SQL Server or the maximum length of a transaction or enlarge the number of connections in the connection pool.  What people are doing is trying to put "fix" their problem by pretending the problem doesn't exist.  Let's blast through a number of items really quickly.

Increasing the connections in the connection pool.  The error message that people receive is "The timeout period elapsed prior to obtaining a connection from the pool."  This is almost always an application issue as the application has most likely forgotten to clean up SQL Connection objects.  Yes, .NET does automatic garbage collection.  No, it does not clean up everything.  Resources that are managed outside of .NET (for example SQL connections) need to be cleaned up by your code as .NET will not do it for you.  As a result, if you ever receive the error message listed above, look in your code first before looking anywhere else.  In our environment a well running application will only have 5 - 10 connections in use at any one time and, by default, the connection pool has 100 connections available to be used.  We've had applications that have had hundreds of concurrent users with no issues. (In an extreme case we had over 1800 concurrent users and we still stayed within the 100 connection limit of the connection pool.)  If you get the error message there is a problem.  FIX the problem.

Increasing the transaction limit above the default.  The default transaction limit is 10 minutes.  If you are trying to exceed that it means that you have a transaction which is trying to run for more than 10 minutes without a single commit or rollback in that time.  This is way too long.  You should not be running 10 minute transactions.  In reality, if your transaction is longer than 10 seconds you have an issue.  Yes, if you are importing a lot of data you can go for longer than 10 seconds, but the longer you run in a single transaction the slower your application will respond.  Keep the transaction short and meaningful.  If you need to raise the limit above 10 minutes, rethink your architecture as there are some fundamental questions that you have not answered correctly.

Increasing the session state timeout.  This one is alterable by the application team but, in all honesty, should never be altered.  If altered it should be moved down not up.  The Microsoft default of 20 minutes, in the words of many companies, is "too long".  If you are maintaining session state and the user is not doing anything to interact with your system for 20 minutes, then you need to re-evaluate your system.  Twenty minutes is a long time.  Light has circled the earth over 10,000 times. In 2011 an average of over 65 million searches were done on Google properties worldwide in a a 20 minute period.  If your user is doing nothing on your page for 20 minutes, consider them lost.  If, for some obscure reason your clients are on a single page for 20 minutes, you need to redevelop that page as it is not in the least bit effective.

In general, if you feel that you need to alter some default setting then you should be experiencing the same feeling as licking that 9-volt battery.  Stop it and step back.