Adventures in home working

I thought I would take the opportunity to look back on my year (and a funny old year it’s been) before looking forward to the new year in a few days.  It’s nice and quiet in the house and after such a lovely time (Christmas Morning) it’s left me in an appropriately reflective mood, so here goes:

Health

What a year it’s been, around the middle of January 2004 I started with another flare of Adult Onset Still’s Disease, which had been in remission for about 8 months.  This time no remission has occurred and one year on I am still suffering. However I have come to terms with it well and am approaching the point after many experiments (often painful) and lots of record keeping, research and analysis I think I am on the brink of getting things under control.  My Specialists now think as well as AOSD I have two other secondary auto-immune disorders Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia.

The conditions are very unpredictable resulting in a great difficulty in planning things, so living in the moment has become the order of the day.

Also for all of the conditions exercise and variety of movement and activity are essential which means that although I work from home my days have a lot of variety with (when I can manage it) lots of beach walking, swimming, walking to the shops, trampolining in the garden, reading in the garden, working on the beach or beach side Cafes, as well as working in my very well equipped home office.

Happiness

I decided to start the review with Health because its pretty negative, which makes this section all the more amazing.  I am in fact much happier this year than last year. Although I live with daily pain and frustration there are many positives I have managed to build into my life, here is a sampler:

1. My work and family life are seamlessly integrated, by this I mean that whenever the opportunity arises to spend time with my family I am able to take that time and fit work around that primary commitment.  This means I often find myself working at odd times but that’s no hassle as I have trained myself to work within my health limitations.
2. When I am tired, in pain, finding it difficult to concentrate I just do something else and being at home there’s plenty to do
3. I can take advantage of good weather, and where I live we have a very positive micro-climate that means we get much better weather than the poor folks in Preston just 20 miles inland!
4. I have trained myself to avoid frustration, this works most of the time, one of the most frustrating things for me was that my company would not invest in my productivity.  I decided as soon as I became ill that I earned enough money to invest in my own productivity so I now have a superb working environment and IT facilities, (some paid for by the company but a lot of it a personal commitment to my well being).  I also invest quite a lot in my own comfort, expensive walking gear, swimming gear, bike etc – I still save quite a lot but within limits I now feel little or no guilt about spending the money I save by working from home on MYSELF.
5. I have re-discovered reading, I used to read a lot but then lapsed into business reading/reviewing dominating most of my available reading time.  Largely because of AOSD and the need to take lots of rest and hot baths (I read in the bath) I have started reading for 1 or 2 hours a day, I joined a reading group which has exposed me to all types of books I would never have come across and the monthly discussions have been very stimulating.  We had a Christmas party this year which was great fun with everyone talking about their favourite books and it’s becoming quite a social event.
6. I am getting loads of exercise, which probably sounds strange when you have a condition that gives you systemic/chronic muscle and joint pain and fatigue, however within limits the more you do with these conditions the better you feel.  I love walking, swimming and cycling and live just by the sea and within a few minutes of a great health club.  I usually have the pool to myself!  On some bad days I live for the exercise; when the endorphins get flowing I feel so much better than suffering in a chair trying to type with painful fingers, wrists, neck, back, ankles …
7. Although I work from home I don’t feel isolated, in fact I probably spend more time on social interaction than I did in a business oriented office environment.  The combination of lots of eating out, reading groups, family life, social get togethers for lunch with friends, instant messenger and phone chats and the odd visit to the office are quite enough for a mild Asbergers Syndrome sufferer like myself.
8. I have discovered RSS feeds, which provide me with a constant stream of interesting reading material on all sorts of topics, (many work related), but lots on broader topics as well.
9. I have trained myself to live more in the moment, to save less and spend more on experience than things, this particularly applies to the kids who soak up a lot of money in a whole variety of music, drama and sports lessons but to see them develop is a real joy, especially for Debbie who dreams of all of them playing together.  Debbie plays Violin and Cello, Stephie: keyboard and Viola, Jenny: Clarinet and Flute, Anna: Flute and Recorder, Tessa: Bugle and Trumpet.  All of the girls are great singers and love drama; Stephie is also quite the academic.
10.  I eat out a lot, it’s one of my real joys to eat breakfast every morning in one of our beach side Cafes,  I know all of the staff and after a morning walk I tend to spend an hour working there and preparing for the day.  It’s the best start I can imagine.  We also regularly eat out as a family, generally in places where we are well known, and any family with four lovely girls like ours quickly gets well known!
11. Work no longer dominates my life, see later …

Family

Although it was a bit of a struggle for Debbie to suddenly have me interrupting her daily routine and having to learn to get used to not having the house to herself all day, I think she has adjusted well.  She now has so much more freedom, gets out a lot more and has time to indulge her creativity by supporting the Church in general and the kids club she runs in particular.   I am a fully integrated member of the family now, not just a weekend Dad and the kids seem to really enjoy that, although it does mean there is a bit more structure and discipline!

In general though I think we have done really well as a family:

1. Debbie has had time to develop as her own person at last after years dominated by looking after the house and kids
2. The girls have all developed tremendously becoming much more balanced individuals, and all picking up some great life skills as well as working hard at school
3. We have managed quite a lot of holidays, thanks to Debbie’s fantastic organising, and although we have had to take the risk that I will be ok, we managed three holidays (North Wales, West Wales and Scotland) and I managed to largely keep up each time

Work

Of course work has changed dramatically for me, but in many ways the change has been positive.  I have had to reduce my hours and work from home.  I do less time sensitive stressful customer facing work, and concentrate on longer term internal research and strategy.  There is a bit more of a story to tell:

1. I was getting very frustrated by the degree to which politics and administration were dominating my days, requiring me to do actual creative work during the evenings – long days – this has changed completely now.  I only work 5-6 hours a day but of that probably 5 hours a day is either research or creative activity or constructive communication, much more enjoyable
2. I was very frustrated by the poor quality of my office environment and tools – I now work at home in an office that I have designed and optimised to meet my needs.  I share the Office with my wife which is nice (most of the time) and have spared little expense in getting things the way I want them (eBay has helped again here in making this affordable)
3. I work mainly on global projects, most of my interactions are using Instant Messenger, Conference Calls (I have a Polycom conference phone), or Email so it doesn’t matter much where I work.  I just wish I had a Blackberry or GPRS/Wireless access from my Tablet PC but that will almost certainly be resolved next year.   I would love seamless/easy to use Voice/Video and application sharing with my main contacts but again it’s not too far away.
4. I bought myself a Tablet PC which has transformed the way in which I read and review, particularly because I no longer do that sitting at my desk, I now do it by the side of the swimming pool, in a deck chair in my garden, sitting in a café watching the sunrise/sunset etc etc.  Much better for my physical health (I need to move around a lot) and much more fun!
5. I am still trying to get my new work role fully established, I have it clear in my mind,  its just a the small step of getting people to agree to pay me to do it that remains, but I am confident that January will see that bought to conclusion
6. I have noticed that by being available to consult on lots of projects I am adding a surprising amount of value, every month I manage to provide advice to someone that saves £50-£200K, not a bad return on investment.
7. I have been disappointed to see some of my friends leave my company, but pleased to see them making a new life for themselves.  Hopefully a few will stay as it’s nice to have a network of friends that you know you can rely on.  I am pleased to say though that so far the people who leave still keep in touch and we are establishing quite a little community of people working for all of the major IT service Providers in the UK!
8. My company has been very good to me in all sorts of ways, primarily people who I know and who care about me have been great, people who’s job it is to care (but don’t know me) have not been so good and the bureaucracy has been pretty abysmal – but that’s to be expected in a large company – but not forgiven!

Summary

I was sort of inspired to write this by Graham, when I read his review I thought – where’s the summary – he later wrote one.  Anyway here’s mine.

1. A very challenging year
2. A year filled with physical pain and frustration
3. A year of successful reinvention
4. Perhaps not my best year ever but certainly better than the previous two years
5. A year of considerable reflection and preparation for an even better year next year, hopefully my best ever

It’s Christmas day today and the girls have had a fantastic time opening and enjoying their presents.  It started like this:

1. On Christmas Eve the girls were allowed to choose one present to open, inevitably they chose ones that looked most like clothes so that they could where them on Christmas morning!
2. They all went to bed nice and early without a peep (very unusual) as they all understand that Father Christmas misses any houses where children are awake J
3. Debbie and I acting as Father Christmas’ helpers then packed up 4 gift bags that Father Christmas was to deliver that night to their bedrooms, one of the nice touches is that during holidays the Twins sleep in bunk beds with their older sisters instead of together.
4. On Christmas morning we let the kids open their presents from Santa at 7:00AM (and the rest after breakfast) although they often hold one or two back to open on boxing day; which is my Birthday.
5. This morning Debbie crept into their rooms just after 6:00AM and found them sitting on their beds surrounded by unopened gifts patiently waiting for 7:00 to arrive (bless) I think she let them sneak a few open early although I was fast asleep so the details are none too clear.
6. Just after 7:00 though they all paraded into our bedroom with their presents and to our relief could not have been happier, Santa had been very busy on eBay this year and so Christmas was not as expensive as usual but the quality of the presents, especially the array of musical instruments and accessories was amazing!
7. A very nice touch this year was that Father Christmas wrote each of the girls a lovely letter bound with ribbon that looked back on their year and what he had been most impressed with and explained why he had chosen the presents he had and what he was looking forward to them achieving next year (just the sort of thing my wife would have thought of had she been seconded to the North Pole this year J)
8. Their present lust slated for a while, we managed a very leisurely breakfast before letting the girls loose on taking all the presents from under our giant tree in the hall into piles (per person) in the living room.  
9. Then another hour of present opening frenzy (my least favourite part of Christmas I am afraid) followed by tidying and filtering out the presents that would form the centre of the days activities.
10. The at 10:00 Debbie and Two of the girls went off to Church and Me and the remaining two kids went for a nice walk along the beach, we dropped in on our friends at the Café/restaurants who were preparing for their Christmas customers and then rushed home to make some fresh bread for our buffet lunch.
11. Debbie made a fantastic buffet (I contributed the hot bread) which incredibly was all eaten and the girls went out to play in the ‘snow’ (we had a 10 minute hail storm)
12. Everyone has just finished a biscuit snack now and are settling down to some good traditional Christmas TV, while Debbie prepares our roast dinner!
13. I might just go out for another walk though and try and walk off those biscuits and ease up my aching muscles.

All in all the best Christmas so far I think – and a great meal and quiet TV night tonight and it’s my birthday tomorrow so it’s not over yet.

Quite a few of my friends now have Windows Media Centre 2005.  I got a Tivo about 3 years ago so I haven’t been too jealous but the Tivo is showing its age, it’s a bit slow it’s hard disk is small and its lack of easy expandability and integration into my home network are gradually frustrating me.  Here is one of many examples of the media experience integration that caught my eye:

Described in its full glory here.  I won’t be investing until the  middle of next year at the earliest but I am starting to eagerly anticipate the upgrade.

I have evalgalised for a while the innovation that is unleashed in clients and servers when a standard format exists for passing information beteen them.  RSS is a great example of this, and Dare makes the point strongly in this article, a snipit from which reads:

RSS is a wonderful example of the higher level of interoperability that can be built upon XML formats. Instead of information sources using various incompatible mechanisms for providing information to end users such as NOAA’s SOAP web service and the Microsoft.com web services which each require a separate custom application to consume them, sites can all standardize on RSS. This standardization creates an ecosystem of applications that produce and consume RSS feeds which is a lot larger than what would exist for each site specific web services or market specific XML syndication formats.  Specifically, it allows for the evolution of the digital information hub where users can view data from the various information sources they care about (blogs, news, weather reports, etc) in their choice of applications

He goes on to point out that RSS goes one better by allowing domain specific extensibility whilist still allowing standards based readers to consume feeds:

Additionally, RSS is extensible. This means that even if the core elements and attributes do not satisfy all the requirements of a particular problem domain, then domain-specific information can be added to the feed. This allows for regular consumers of RSS to still be able to consume the content while domain specific applications can give users a richer experience. This is a much better solution for both content producers and consumers than coming up with domain specific applications.

I suffer from mild Asbergers Syndrome so I approached this book with unusual interest.  I learnt two things, first how mild my Asbergers is by contrast with the main characters and second how shockingly brilliant the book was in the way it allowed us to get inside the head of a person with this condition. 

I would recommend everyone to read this book, not only will it delight on many levels, but you will never look at a shy and retiring person the same way ever again!

A lovingly crafted book, that on one level deals with obvious tragedy of loss but in the end shows that the real tragidy lay in misunderstandings and negative attitudes.  I really enjoyed the book, a slow read but one to be savoured and remembered.  I read the Da Vinci code immediately after this one as was shocked at its poor quality of writing compared to Crow Lake, but equally suprised at how it made up for it in pace.  Two very contrasting books equally enjoyable in their own way.

Not quite as good as the Da Vinci Code, bit still a good read.  Took me about 4 days to get through.  Many of the same themes as his other books and the writing is just as bad, but the facinating story line makes up for it.  I think its worth reading but only if the Da Vinci code appealed to you.

Not very well written, but a great thriller none the less.  facinating subject matter - early Christianity and the catholic Church - and many plot twists.  I read it in two days, my eldest Daughter is reading it now.  Highly recommended provided you are not too much of a fan of elegant prose.  Oh and bear in mind that having read it you are almost certainly going to want to do some further research into the subject!!

This is the second in a series of articles that look at It Infrastructure Programme Management from an Architects perspective.

I often see programmes fall into the trap of over reliance on certain individuals.  Unfortunately the more effective and useful a person is the more that person seems to be branded “Super Man” and burdened with commitments that make it ever more difficult for them to do the things they were valued for in the first place.

When I started thinking about this short article I had in mind a few examples:

The Programme Director who takes on too much Programme Management because the customer and account teams except him to have programme management detail at his fnger-tips.  Solved by a combination of excellent management information, setting expectations and not being afaid to re-inforce those expectations.  Fall into the programme management trap and you won’t be there for the team when they need you, won’t have time to manage the key relationships and won’t be able to see the wood for the trees, the classic “programme is red - suprise!”.

The Chief Architect who forgets that his job is to preserve the conceptual integrity of the solution and to nurture its evolution through logical and physical development stages.  Solved by having a very good definition of the concept initially, making sure that the architecture leads responsible for the logical solution definition have a clear understanding of the whole concept and making sure that as the solution definition progresses it is regularly cross checked against the conceptual definition and either the concept changed or the logical/physical definition bought back on track.

However there’s more to this team idea than that.  First we need to make sure that the programme has a team structure that allows all views to be well represented, ideally I like a model that does not create conflicts of interest, and provides people with sufficient time to support their teams.  There are some of the key roles I like to see.

A Programme Director - note the emphasis in this role on directing.  I never like it when I have a programme director who is too BUSY, ideally they get home by 6:00PM.  They need to be their for their team, and to manage key relationships and to see the big picture and resolve the big issues.  A programme director who is working more than 48 hours is managing, not directing.  Personality wise they need to be very approachable, not afraid of bad news and always happy to talk, at the same time they need to give key stakeholders confidence that they have a good team and good processes and that these are well executed.

A Chief Architect - resonsible for ensuring the the solution that is delivered meets the objectives that it is designed to meet.  He achieves this by ensuring that the solution has conceptual integrity, and achieves this by designing the way the solution will be described and verified.  Most of the points made about the Programme Director apply to the Chief Architect as well.  Its also worth remembering that on many infrastructure programmes, users don’t know what they want!

A Programme Office Manager - primarily responsible for ensuring that the programme management team receive the information they need to direct and manage the execution of the programme.  This primary role is one of supplier to the programme management team.  If this information provision role fails, the programme usually fails.  The secondary role of the programme office is to ensure that the programme level processes, (those followed by every project), are executed correctly, (evidence of this should be part of the management information).  In my view the Programme Office manager’s role in the Programme Team is not as a contributer to the management of the programme, but as a supplier of information, so he needs to be in the meetings, so he knows what information is needed first hand.

Development Manager - responsible for executing the projects that develop the solution. The emphasis is on execution, not definition.  The project content should have been defined conceptually at the programme level, it is refined by the projects as the logical and physical level definiton is created.  Individual projects should not be allowed to change their scope, project scope is owned at programme level.  What do I mean by scope:

The conceptual architecture, the functional service definition, key volumetrics, budget, major milestones and dependancies, principles, assumptions, issues and risks.

Customer Experience Manager - there are two issues that generally fail to to be managed well on large programmes.  The first is the user community is rarely well prepared for the change that is about to hit them, and certainly ill prepared to exploit it once it has arrived.  The second is that the disparate deliverables from the programme do often not integrate very well from the perspective of the end user.  This role is designed to solve this problem through ownership of a variety of elements, including, end-user communication, end-user organisation and roles, solution integration testing, dog-food testing and piloting, user acceptance testing, end-user training and documentation, the end users deployment experience, the end-users post deployment experience, customer surveys and other end-user focussed programme success metrics, exploitation.  Ultimately this person is the users advocate, an interesting video that illustrates some of these points is available here. 

Service Transition Manager - Each project that is delivering services that need to be operated and managed needs to take ownership of ensuring that these service elements integrate into the management infrastructure and have processes that have been developed, accepted and implemented by the lines of service responsible.  The role of the Service Transition Manager is to ensure that the lines of service are ready to accept the services and processes that have been developed.  This means ensuring that they have the right level of resources, budgets, trained/skilled staff, that they understand the processes have metrics in place and management processes in place etc.  In many ways this person acts as the Programmes agent within the operational organisation working to ensure that the delivered services are success.

Deployment Manager - responsible for execting the deployment activities on the programme.  It depends on the programme the degree to which deployment processes/tools are developed by deployment/development and its largely an issue of skills, for complex deployment activities that are executed a small number of times, my preference is for the development team to do the development of the deployment process/tools, (and sometimes even do the deployment).  For processes with less technical complexity it’s often better to develop them within the deployment programme to increase ownership.

The programme management team should not be afraid to create additional programme level roles, to reduce the burden on them, for example roles focussed on communcating with business stakeholders.  However these should report to one of the team identified above.  This group should be selected to work as a team, and motivated to do so.  Ideally they should be colocated and should be encouraged to meet ad-hoc and not just at formal risk/issue/change/status meetings.

I have mentioned the topic of groups a few times,  let me elaborate.  Maxthon (used to be called MyIE2) is a shell around IE.  You can open a whole load of web pages as tabs (no suprises there).  As I go through my RSS feeds I click away on links of interest and probably end up with 20-30 articles I want to read, I then Click GROUPS - SAVE AS GROUP, and it generates a file of links. 

I then either wait for a robocopy autosync to my tablet or click a shortcut and the group file gets copied to my Tablet within seconds.  I Open the group on the tablet (two clicks) and all the files are downloaded and ready to browse offline (one tab each). 

Tonight I took my eldest out for Tea and we watched the sunset over the sea, I read my web pages and she read a novel as we snacked.  I ended up with 3 web sites I wanted to blog about and a few others I wanted to research so I saved these as Net Snippets.  I also clicked on maybe 10 other follow up links which created tabs but obviously didn’t resolve because I had no network.  I saved these as a group, (called tablet).  When I got back home my Tablet and desktop just sync in the background and I have all my net snippets on both machines (effectively my research archive).  I then have the option of opening the Group of web pages I saved as tablet on either my tablet or my Desktop (because the group has synced), and this time (I am on the net now) they will resolve and be ready for my next reading session.  Of course I can keep adding additional web sites to these groups, create new groups, create groups on particular topics like special offers from shops or ebay searches and use the same technique.

In summary - Tabs and groups, thats why I use Maxthon and not IE and also why I don’t use Firefox which is nearly as good but not quite at the same working practice.

If I had an always on network things would be even slicker.  By the way lots of the same ideas work with movies, music, ebooks, pdf files etc.