Adventures in home working

If you are looking for a book to take your mind of something, or to make a long train journey seem to fly by.  This is the book for you.  Take care though, once you start reading you won’t want to stop so make sure you have 5-10 hours free during the week you start reading it! 

I loved it and it made a few difficult days for me really quite enjoyable.  There are plenty of twists and turns, you feel for the characters and the action never ends. 

Yet again Jonathan Scwartz continues his policy of openly and very clearly describing Sun’s strategy for all to see.  I have never seen the like of it before, although I can only commend him for it.   As always I strongly recommend that you read his blog regularly, but here are a few snipits from his latest post which I liked:

On his positioning of the role of Linux today:

But let’s be clear. Do I expect an investment banker at Goldman, Sachs to pick up the Java Desktop System? No. No way. He’s not our target demographic, not a route to make 120 million into 1.2 billion. A call center in Bangalore, a factory in Tennessee, a generation of kids that care more about ringtones than Win32 legacy? Dedicated internet terminals in shopping malls, touch screens in phone booths, the world’s academic environments? There’s a market calling.

Which I found interesting because many of these applications are best served by embedded or thin client approaches rather than a full Linux distro.

Why is music download on phones measured in the billions of dollars (vs. the paltry music download business on PCs, even with iTunes)? Because phones are authenticated (with a JavaCard SIM, I’d add). Authentication and convenience fuel commerce.

I liked this because the idea is simillar to a key issue for enterprises, how to turn the debate from cost to value, in my view you do this by making it very easy to provision services when you need them and only pay for them when you use them.  Either that or make provisioning so low cost that the volume rises to the point where convenience makes it worthwhile having continuous access.

the growth of a cross platform Java, Firefox and OpenOffice are a leveling force, driving the affordability, security and portability of internet access.

Driving up the common denominator that people can assume to be on everyones desk.  Jonathan describes it as a levelling force, but the key thing is the the level is rising!

Of course at the end of the day he needs to make money:

Monetize the resulting demand for infrastucture software, service and hardware. What’s making the net work behind all those connected cell phones, set top boxes, automobiles, airplanes, medical devices, PCs and game machines (I could go on)? The very secure network infrastructure at the core of Sun’s business. Who demands infrastructure of that scale? The network operators (the world’s communications companies – satellite, wireline, mobile, you name it), and the leading services run through those networks (financial services being the most obvious, along with entertainment, media, and every other web service the world’s contemplating for internet deployment, in-house or otherwise).

How big is that infrastructure market? Huge. And it isn’t shrinking. We do billions of dollars in business with those companies, serving the very consumers described above – and our bet is they’ll continue to grow. If you’re going to bet on the value of the network, who better to partner with – rather than compete against – than the network operators and service providers.

I recently had the opportunity to try out a new way to manage and a record a meeting using my Tablet and OneNote, here is how it went:

1. First I created a main page for the meeting, where I recorded the location, attendees, objectives etc
2. The I created sub pages with all of the material that I had been sent about the meeting, embedded as background images, (drag and drop word documents onto OneNote and it provides this as an option).  I was then able to quickly jump to these and mark them up if I needed to
3. Then I created a sub page to keep my hand written notes
4. Finally, I plugged in a $10 microphone on an 8’ lead, put it in the middle of the room, and recorded the whole meeting. As the recording proceeded, I made short handwritten notes when key points were made.  The key thing is that I did not try to take thorough notes, just jot down a memory clue that I could use later.
5. Because I did not take extensive notes, I could remain focussed on the discussion, which is a major benefit
6. On the way home (I travelled in the by Train in the first class “quiet zone”, which by the way is really cheap if you book 7 or 14 days in advance) I listened to the whole meeting again and made more thorough notes, jotted down action points etc. The great thing was I could pause the replay of the meeting at any time if I wanted to make some detailed note, or to think something through.

Now maybe you don’t always have the luxury of sitting in first class (although second class probably makes headphones even more attractiveJ) and replaying the meeting. (for important meetings it maybe a very useful technique to remember). However, the fact that you have a full record of the meeting and all those memory clues that let you jump straight to the point in the audio record where the key point was being discussed is a major innovation.

In case you are interested, the 2.5 hour meeting was only about 8MB in size!  The only downside to the whole thing – I realised just how often I say “you know” in conversation!!

I have yet to try the same idea with video.

This is a great book to read in the bath just before you go to sleep, very thought provoking but with each thought served up in bite sized chunks.

The book is essentially 50 or so extracts from other books, papers or speeches on the subject of money.  It really is a facinating, if disturbing, read. 

It covers the following topics:

Metal money – all about the origins of money

Money information – all about the virtualisation of money

Measuring money – probably the best chapter – all about the lack of a link between money and happiness and value

Dept money – all about the scary levels of debt in the world

Mad money – stories of the ‘great’ crashes and why/how they happened

DIY money – money alternatives

Spiritual money – other ways to think about money.

I ordered this book from the library, but ended up buying myself a copy it was that good.

This is the first in a series of articles about Programme Management.  Many of the things I am going to say apply to project management and to management in general but Programme Management is my focus.  I need to start by setting the scene. 

My experience is enterprise IT infrastructure programmes, so that’s what I will be talking about.  By Programme I mean a collection of projects with many dependencies between them.  By IT Infrastructure I mean all the common IT services that a business needs, desktops, portables, file, print, directory services, communication, collaboration and coordination services, systems management etc, you get the idea.  On my biggest programme, we had approaching 90 different server types so I won’t list them all.

Anyway onto the first topic:

“What does he do? The importance of top down Journal keeping to programme communication, coordination and team spirit”.  

Why you may ask did I pick this topic first?

·        because almost no one does it

·        because it can make a huge difference for very little cost

·        because communication and collaboration and coordination are key to any programme and journals help with all three

·        because I happen to like blogs and think they make a great tool for journal keeping

Lets look at a some of the characteristics of programmes and leadership and how journals help:

• Programmes have lots of people on them, and many more people who will be impacted by the programme.  It’s difficult to know who to communicate to and what to communicate and when, to keep everyone happy.  Blog like journals are great for this.  The more senior the person the more important so as a minimum I recommend journals for Programme Managers and Solution Architects as these are the team members responsible for stitching the whole programme together.  However, the idea cascades down the hierarchy very well.  In my model I recommend that the doer’s blog what they are doing and link to the background material that has influenced what they do, and any decisions they have taken or are trying to take.  Project managers blog the changes, status and deliverables of the project as they are produced, architects blog like a doer, but also blog change and technical debates that the rest of the team contribute to.  They link to key issues that doer’s blog about, that may affect other people in other hierarchies.
• Programmes are constantly changing, and it’s difficult to keep track of the changes, the rationale behind them and the impact of them.  Formal change logs solve these problems in a dry way but they rarely capture the background and impact in the same way as a journal does.  For example they don’t talk about the impact on morale, resources and cascade changes – especially those that come to light after a change has been approved.
• Team members rarely understand what their leaders and peers are up to, the higher up you go in the hierarchy the more confusing it is for the people below.  Too often if you ask an engineer what’s drawing on his programme managers time the answer will be “lots of meetings”.  How would the answer change if the team read the programme managers blog: “he is focussing on locking down the release schedule with the customer and reviewing the overspend on project X, and preparing for the programme review next week.  It’s been a tough week because he has to do a Customer Care course for two days and his wife is ill so he had to get home by 5:00 to look after the kids this week.  The customer is however unhappy because the they want 2 releases rather than 3, but our current position is that this is too risky and he want’s input from the team on whether we could mitigate that risk in any other way”

So you get the idea, lets be more specific about the benefits of a journal, delivered as a blog:

• Writing helps you get your thoughts straight
• You control the message, this can be very important at all levels in the hierarchy.  Often guys at the bottom rarely get to communicate with guys at the top except in 20 minute “team meetings” which are often conference calls and very much one way channels for 5 minute sanitised summaries
• You can get feedback directly and interactively
• Your audience decides how much information they want, depending on which categories they subscribe to
• The team start to pull together because when implemented top down, everyone’s understanding of each others problems and successes, constraints, frustrations etc is greatly improved
• It provides a mechanism for everyone to demonstrate their contribution/value to the programme
• It helps with the management of and identification of dependencies and change
• It’s less likely that myths – my projects “green” – will propagate up to the top without someone questioning it
• It makes it much easier to add resources to the team, or replace existing resources – they just need to read the blogs for a day to get up to speed
• You can add system generated blogs for example document check-ins. changes log updates, risk log updates.

Microsoft have finally decided to take the Windows Command shell seriously, or at least Jeffrey Snover – the lead architect did.  They are creating a next generation sell that is built on top of .NET, called Monad.  John Udell does a great job of describing it so please read his article, it will blow you away and don’t for get to watch the video as well.

MSH is quirky, complex, delightful, and utterly addictive. You can, for example, convert objects to and from XML so that programs that don’t natively speak .Net can have a crack at them. There’s SQL-like sorting and grouping. You write ad hoc extensions in a built-in scripting language that feels vaguely Perlish. For more permanent extensions, called cmdlets, you use .Net languages. With MSH, Windows system administration manages to be both fun and productive. And the story will only improve as the .Net Framework continues to enfold Windows’ management APIs. Competitors take note: Windows is about to convert one of its great weaknesses into a strength. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

I have been frustrated since the beginning of the Internet at the difficulty of collaborating inter enterprise.  The current techniques don’t work for me.  They frequently depend on too much inter-enterprise coorperation, expensive client software, too many firewall ports opened etc.  Well it seems that a mainstream solution is finally on the horizon with Microsoft’s LCS 2005 product.  Here are a few snipits to get you started:

The product, formerly code-named “Vienna,” is expected to be available in beta sometime in June or July. Microsoft is looking for customers to test the product in beta, leading to a general availability release of LCS 2005 by the fourth quarter.

and it allows inter-enterprise connections:

Chief among the new features in this version will be support for federation of IM and presence so that customers can extend the technology to their partners, suppliers and customers. This will allow users to see presence information across, not just within, enterprises, from other applications such as Microsoft Outlook, Excel and SharePoint Services.

fairly firewall friendly:

Users from outside the network will use the Windows Messenger client and tunnel into the network using Session Initiation Protocol over firewall port 5061, Microsoft officials said. Full encryption and authentication is supported, officials said.

and for a bit more money, will allow integration with mainstream internet services:

Microsoft on Thursday is announcing a deal with America Online Inc. and Yahoo Inc. to allow its enterprise IM server to interconnect with the companies’ IM services.

The capability will be available in Live Communications Server 2005 for an additional license fee, which has not yet been set, said Dennis Karlinsky, lead product manager for Live Communications Server. LCS 2005, which is in beta, is due out in the fourth quarter of this year.