Jedi Mind Tricks

Posted on March 11, 2012 by andywarren

Here’s a story from a recent meeting. We were discussing some problems and the team was talking through some options that were very interesting, technically good, just not ones that could get done for a variety of reasons. It’s frustrating to be in that position, seeing at least a “better” solution on the good/better/best range and having to go with a hack solution due to constraints imposed by others.

I get that frustration, and I see it as part of my role to listen to it, in part because letting them vent is useful, and in part because sometimes amid the frustration is an idea that might get us closer to good than hack. Listening isn’t always easy when you know that you’re going to have to take the ugly option and you’re just spending time wishing how the world could be.

We’re going through that discussion and after a while one of the attendees realizes that no matter how well he explains all the reasons that the hack is bad and all the reasons that the other solution is better, we’re stuck with the hack (he’s not going to change my mind). This is the point when he says to me “you’re doing it again, using Jedi mind tricks”.

Thought I’d fall out of the chair laughing.

You think this post is funny. You want to go back up your databases.

Posted in Misc | Tagged Leading, Yoda | Leave a comment

Notes from the February 2012 MagicPASS Meeting

Posted on March 6, 2012 by andywarren

I was back at MagicPASS last week to do a presentation, my first time with the group at the new site (Disney Vacation Club). Great facility. Plenty of parking, accessible (at least if you live on the South side of Orlando!), good room. Actually 3 rooms. One that they used for the meeting that seats about 25 and could go higher, one next to it that has the food and round tables set up so that people can chat without interrupting the main meeting and also used for the dinner break, and one next to that with more seating capacity that was unused this time.

I arrived about 6pm for the 6:30 pm meeting, there were already a handful there listening/watching a recorded presentation from the Summit last year.  I think this is an easy value add that works well because they have two rooms – those that want to talk and step to the next room and do so. I’d like to see some kind of follow up at the end, maybe a quiz or discussion, and I’d like to see that presentation called out on the site at least afterward, let the presenter know they reached some more people.

At 6:30 Kendal  Van Dyke started things off with slides mainly focused around upcoming events, local and nationally. It was interesting to watch. He approached almost all if from the perspective that you were new to PASS, SQLRally,SQLSaturday. About the only place I thought needed just a little bit more was to show the schedules,give some sense of the breadth and depth of content at the events. His enthusiasm showed and it felt natural, not forced. The more I watched the more I liked it – we can’t assume everyone knows, understands, sees the value. We need to tell that story every time. Definitely I wish we had a brochure that captured it all too, we need something concrete to give the new people at a minimum.

About 7 pm we took a dinner break, pizza, veggie trays, cookies, water, soda, even root beer for me (chapter leaders, that’s a nice tip – ask your speaker about beverage preference, it’s a little thing, but nice!). It felt like a slower pace than we used to do in Orlando, but I think that might have just been a function of being able to sit at tables and talk, less standing and eating. Very pleasant break.

At 7:30 I started my presentation and it ran long, though I had a couple break points planned for that just in case – everyone was content to keep to going so I finished about 9:10. Lots of notes and ideas for the next time out. Good audience, and a few that were there for the first time drawn in by a topic “for developers”, something we should do more often.

Kendal did a raffle at the end, gave away a few prizes, and that was it, a solid meeting with about 20 attendees present.

Posted in SQL Community | Tagged Chapters, Presentations | Leave a comment

The Armor of Transparency

Posted on February 27, 2012 by andywarren

Yesterday I blogged about hosting a daily status meetings and some of the tricks I use to make it work. One of those that is worth extra attention is the meeting notes – at the end of each meeting I send out notes (not minutes – not that formal) that include:

  • Who attended
  • Key metrics
  • Revised schedule of key events
  • Updates from everyone that attended and/or sent me notes since the last meeting, and sometimes this will include quick post-meeting follow up discussion notes as well

I don’t spend a lot of time on formatting, it’s all bullets. If someone isn’t on the call and I think they need to read something I’ll add a note to the end of the note (Ralph – FYI). If it’s important, or I need some informal assistance from above, I’ll call it out in bold. Both of the latter tricks are important – my notes go to a lot of people that are just monitoring progress and they will typically do a very quick scan, it helps all I involved if I make it easy for them to find things that they need to see.

There are plenty of days when things go wrong, and it’s all in the notes. Sometimes we lose a day, sometimes more It’s not fun, but it’s unrealistic to expect perfection either. Showing problems in the notes is honest and powerful – stakeholders worry if they get no news, or only good news.

Think about all the things that impact a project on a daily basis. It’s easy over the course of a week or two to have it all add it up to slipping the schedule by day, or by adding some unexpected incremental cost. Imagine trying to talk about that during a weekly or bi-weekly status meeting and explain how you fell behind and what you’re trying to do to fix it (if such a thing is possible). It’s not easy, even if you have your own notes to refer to,and easy to get second guessed.

By giving a solid update every day they are on the ride with you. They see the failures,they see the causes and the attempts to fix, and if they think something isn’t right, they can engage then. Much easier and much more positive to have a talk about the one thing that went wrong yesterday than then 10 things that went wrong last week.

Transparency is easy when its good news, but it’s important when there is bad news. Rarely does someone want you to fail. Bring up bad news when it happens. Don’t let bad news “debt” build up, get it out in the open. It will make the project healthier, will keep your stress level lower (if not low), and gives the rest of the organization a chance to help you.

Transparency doesn’t have to be notes either, for example I love the concept of the burn down chart in Scrum – you can see in an instant if the team is on track or not. Think about how you might be more transparent and why you’re not doing that right now, it’s time well spent.

Posted in Misc | Tagged Meetings, Notes, Transparency | Leave a comment

The Daily Status Meeting

Posted on February 26, 2012 by andywarren

For the past six months or so I’ve hosted a daily status meeting for a large project. It started out scheduled for 15 minutes and as the team grew, I found that we often ran out of time – not due to idle chit chat, but because we spent 3 or 4 or 5 minutes to work though an issue that was a road block, and so the meeting was extended to 30 minutes. Probably many of you are already thinking that this is a meeting that has gone off the road. We’ll come back to that.

The daily status meeting is a technique I borrowed from Scrum, aka the daily stand up. No amount of email can replace the collaboration and knowledge share that happens when you put people in a room (or at least on the phone). Scrum calls for roadblocks to be identified and then taken off line, but that isn’t easy when you need time with a group to resolve it, and the next free time on the schedule for the group is a week away. We use that time as the one time each day when everyone is available.

I spend at least 30 minutes preparing for these meetings, and often closer to an hour. I review open items, things that were completed, questions I have or that others have, all compiled into a set of reminders for me to make sure those items get attention during the meeting. That’s good time for me, it forces me to think every day about where we are,what we need to do next.

On any given day half of the attendees will dial in. I’ll note their names and typically call on them early,there are quite a few that are only available for the first 15 minutes and I need to get to them first. I pick names not quite randomly and ask for status. I say not quite randomly because there are some people I have to talk to each day and I won’t put them last, but other than that I try to mix it up a little, mostly to make sure everyone is listening the entire time.

It’s always interesting to hear the things that come out in these meetings. Reminders, follow ups, clarifying questions, referrals on who to talk to about a particular issue, concerns about risks and change windows and rollback plans, budgets, and more. Could all that be done in email, or separate meetings? Some of it could, but a lot of it I think wouldn’t – they wouldn’t have known to ask.

As we go I’m taking notes and checking against my list of things to check on, for most meetings they all get covered and we’re done when we’ve gone around the table once, some days I have a few items to inquire about, and then we’re done.

Average attendance for the meeting is 12 people, lots of days when it will go up to as many as 25, and by my informal estimate we’re averaging about 20 minutes per meeting, trending down now that some of the most intense tasks are nearing completion. My goal is to be done when we’re done. No longer than 30 minutes, keep the meeting moving, and if I can give them time back, I do. Right after the meeting I type up my notes and send them out, every single day.

So back to my opening paragraph and the dangers of a 30 minute status meeting. Meetings can be expensive, but that isn’t a good reason to not have them. Meetings take time, but that isn’t a good reason to not have them. I’m not saying everyone should have a daily meeting, or that it should take more than 15 minutes if they do, but I see a lot of teams that suffer from “meeting fright” and don’t meet because it might waste time or money. Meetings can certainly be a waste – but they don’t have to be.

Here are some tricks for a good status meeting:

  • As I mentioned above, prep for the meeting – it will drive everyone else to come prepared when you push them on things they should have surfaced
  • Publish notes right after the meeting, and use it to call out problem areas for anyone that couldn’t attend. Knowing that things will be in the notes influences behavior! (I also include a list of who attended and key project metrics)
  • Keep it moving, but don’t be afraid to drill down for a minute or two on a hot issue
  • Don’t put all the weight on yourself to ask all the questions, let the team interact and drive the discussion some

Finally, remember that as the work changes the meetings may need to change. As this project nears completion there will be fewer people needed on the call, and once it ends there won’t be a need for the meeting at all.

Posted in Misc | Tagged Meetings | 3 Comments

First Impressions

Posted on February 21, 2012 by andywarren

I was chatting with a friend recently who had been in turn chatting with a colleague about first impressions. The colleague had gone to the lobby to meet a candidate and escort them to the interviewer, and during the walk had tried to make small talk, offered them some water, and didn’t get much interaction. This resulted in the first impression of someone being serious, or perhaps distant, or worse. More, she was thinking – could I do this better? Did I do something wrong?

My friend had remarked that she had gone through something similar when I came in for a visit with my current client/boss. Interesting to hear. I always try to be polite, but going into an interview I’m focused, and by nature when in new territory I’m serious. But I also know the importance of the ‘gatekeepers’ (assistants, receptionists, etc) that often provide a different perspective to the interview post-interview. I tried to think back, it was less than 5 minutes total,most of it walking – what to do better?

We discussed it for a minute or two. One of the items was being offered water and not accepting. That one was easy for me; two reasons not to drink sitting outside the interviewers office – no reason to risk spilling something on me or the furniture,and I don’t want wet hands from condensation going into an interview. I didn’t see the offer as an obligation or signal, but it had been seen as one – maybe next time I’ll take the water and just not open it! The small talk is harder. It carries its risks and while I’m willing to bet on a most days I can carry on minor small talk without putting my foot in my mouth, it just seems simpler to say less. Be polite, do more than nod, but stay focused.

It was a good exchange, lessons learned on both sides. My lesson is to try harder, to understand the stress that the other person is under – after all, impressions matter. The lesson for my friend was that it’s easy to forget that they are in their comfort zone, the candidate is not, and she has to – to some degree – adjust her expectations based on that.

That’s the challenge of first impressions, especially on interviews, you’re seeing a best behavior filtered view of someone, interviewer and interviewee. No way around it, that is what is required.

Lots of lessons and thinking from one five minute conversation about another five minute conversation. If only I could have five minutes that good ever day!

Posted in Misc | Tagged First Impression, Interview | 1 Comment

Selected to Speak at SQLRally 2012

Posted on February 20, 2012 by andywarren

I was excited to receive the email on Friday that I’d been selected to present at SQLRally #2 in Dallas this year, doing my presentation Building Your Professional Development Plan. Always nice to get some good news on a Friday!

Posted in SQL Community | Tagged PASS, Presentations, SQLRally | Leave a comment

Speaking at MagicPASS on February 22, 2012

Posted on February 17, 2012 by andywarren

Next Wednesday I’ll be returning to MagicPASS to do a presentation on SQL security for developers. It’s an interesting topic, with the trick – in my view – to focus on things that developers care about or need to know, and not load them up on things that only a DBA would love. It’s a new presentation that pulls together various notes I’ve accrued over the last few years of teaching and consulting. That means that I’ll be spending more time on in this weekend, getting ready for Wednesday.

I’m looking forward to seeing the group again and chatting afterward with new PASS Board member Kendal Van Dyke.

Posted in SQL Community | Tagged MagicPASS, Presentations | 1 Comment

Sarasota IT Pro Camp

Posted on February 13, 2012 by andywarren

The first Sarasota IT Pro Camp is being held on Saturday, February 18th 2012 from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm at Keiser University, 6151 Lake Osprey Drive, Sarasota, FL 34240. I won’t be attending this one, wishing the team a great event!

Here’s the current schedule:

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Posted in SQL Community | Tagged IT Pro Camp, Sarasota | Leave a comment

Battery Life–The Hidden Cost of Keeping a Laptop

Posted on February 13, 2012 by andywarren

I’ve had my Dell E6500 for about 3-1/2 years now. I’ve recently upgraded the original (back when a SSD was a new thing) 64G drive to a 128G SSD, but otherwise spent no money on it. Good machine. Over the last couple months battery life has seemed to drop off, a 100% charge seems like it’s good for an hour at most. Can’t complain, that battery has seen plenty of charge cycles.

Or at least I wouldn’t complain if replacing it was a little less pricy. List price at Dell is about $140. Maybe it just seems expensive? $50 a year, maybe I shouldn’t complain. Still, seemed worth a quick search to see what non-Dell prices would be. Lots of hits, but reading the reviews on Amazon there are a lot – LOT – of cases where the battery failed after a week, or failed on install. It seems Dell only wants Dell batteries to work.

Can’t say I like that. With SSD’s, hard drives, memory, it’s a free market, I can buy wherever and have a reasonable chance it will work. With batteries,not so much. I found one on Amazon for $80 that looked like an original battery,no bad comments so far. Worth $60 to take the chance of having to return it? Yes, if for no other reason than being stubborn! It arrived today and so far works fine. Looks like the old one, no glitches – and really, why should there be? We’ll see.

Back to the cost. My view is that it is expensive. I’ll probably buy a new machine this year, Mac Air or an Ultrabook, and figure that it will be around $1000. Hard not to think about just applying that $140 (and maybe the $200 I spent on the SSD) towards the new one. The SSD I can move around and reuse. The battery? Nope!

I haven’t dug deeply, but I suspect it isn’t just Dell. All those devices with the non-removable batteries, you pay a premium there too. Probably other laptop manufacturers are similar. Do the batteries really need to be that custom? Why isn’t there a common battery standard like we have for flashlights and kids toys? Much like phone vendors profited from custom chargers, this too seems like a profit center.

Posted in Hardware | Tagged Battery, Dell, laptop | 1 Comment

PASS Chapter Tools–My Wish List

Posted on February 11, 2012 by andywarren

I’m hoping this year will be the year that PASS makes a substantial investment in tools – the online kind – for chapters. Just providing DNN hosting is not enough, and while I like having that option for the group or person that wants to be a power user, for most of us we’d do better with something closer to a vertical application that does a few things very very well. We’ve proven the value of that approach with SQLSaturday (if it needs proving!) and it’s maybe the most effective way to make an investment that scales. At the same time I think that for chapters they need the option to have more control over their sites – their own logo, their own layout.

I’m going to start with some features I’ve long wanted, then loop back to what the tool model looks like:

  1. Effective emailing. I want the ability to quickly and easily send a logo’d message with an unsubscribe link to various portions of the chapter list. That’s base functionality and we could copy the idea from how SQLSaturday mailings work.
  2. Bounce management. Member addresses go stale. Cleaning the list is busy work, work that tools can do for us.
  3. RSVP. I like Eventbrite. Maybe we could do an API level integration to continue that, but I think there is more value in building a simple RSVP system.
  4. Event calendaring and reminders. I want the ability to describe an event (date, speaker, etc) and then schedule a series of reminders based on that, all including automatic links to the RSVP page and an iCal attachment. Ideally it would post the event to LinkedIn and include that link too, and of course announcements on Twitter.
  5. A blog that supports LiveWriter. Most of the “content” on a chapter web site would fit will into the blog format.
  6. Sponsor management. Two parts here. One is an easy way to schedule and assign various ads to appear on the site and in emails, with click tracking,to various ad locations. The other is capturing funds. This might be similar to SQLSaturday where they pick from a list of sponsor levels,but more likely would be picking from a list of dates (with the cost attached).
  7. Speaker management. Make it easy for a speaker to submit a presentation once the scheduling has been figured out (and it needs to be a standard format to make the message building easier).

I could go on, but if we had those capabilities, what a time savings! I see all of those as things that are implemented as ‘back office’ functionality and accessed through something like opass.org/tools. If we build that on a layer of services, we get lots of presentation layer options.

For the presentation layer I don’t think DNN as it’s offered to chapters is good enough. Let’s look as some ideas:

  1. Continue to offer DNN. It’s a powerful platform and for those that take time to learn can do big things, and it’s skinnable. Add tools/widgets to support the ideas above, and come up with some smoother layouts by default. Not my favorite option, but not in favor of rip and replace at the expense of those who have invested time in their site already.
  2. Add an option to support WordPress. Tradeoffs here. Great tools for blogging, tons of plug-ins to do lots of stuff (like post to Twitter), not so good at member management (though there are some plugs-in that support that, like BuddyPress).
  3. Build a true vertical. Spend some money on making it look good (see SQLSaturday, SQLRally, but clearly NOT the  PASS site) and make it first class.

In terms of time to market, WordPress wins, and it has a multi-site hosting model. It’s probably “good enough” and there is that huge market of themes and plug-ins. I think that is the starting place and then we can look to see if we need the vertical – or if we just need to write a few PASS specific plug-ins.

I think the Year of the Chapter has been too long in coming – will it be this year? Post your own ideas about what PASS can do to better support Chapters, or send new Chapter Director Allen Kinsel (LinkedIn, Twitter) a note supporting mine, either way – let’s challenge him to post a strategy and execute on it so that when he runs for re-election this fall we’ll have something to base our vote on.

Posted in SQL Community | Tagged Chapters, PASS, WordPress | Leave a comment