The shortage of skilled employees, are we making it worse?

We still have a serious problem in ICT. Even in this second decade of the 21st century. While the entire industry has been buzzing with IT-Business alignment for many, many years now, I often notice that we have not gotten very far. For one the divide between business & IT is an artificial disconnect. This artifact does exist, but we’ve created it, and all we need to do is stop doing that. No one is giving this much attention to the struggling relations of business with the HRM or the finance departments.

In contradiction of what we might expect, while this artifact is detrimental to the success & profitability of IT, it is not taken seriously enough. Sure the business absolutely needs to define what they need. But in an ever more rapidly changing technology world they do not have the knowledge needed to do that. So we need bridge builders, people with the skills to translate technology used in IT into competitive solutions and highly efficient & profitable systems. It takes a special breed & some serious skills to act on opportunities and see them materialize with the help of IT solutions. It also takes a whole lot of common sense. The latter often seems to be lacking. Why does this happen?

This is not just about business and not just about technology. It’s something in between. As a result it’s often seen as not that critical and this leads to staffing these functions with the wrong skillsets. At best they are populated by people who want to get into the IT sector but don’t like technology that much. This is enforced by all those campaigns to make IT more sexy and attractive to the new generations who associate IT with nerds. It’s beyond me why we’d want to attract people who think so superficially but hey, that’s just me. But aren’t we building our own future nightmare this way? At worst it is used to get people in better pay grades. The functions might very well mandate better pay due to its complexity and the required skill set but this only holds true if you get the right people in those functions. Whatever the reason, this is a major pain point. Why?

The neglect of these bridging functions lets people without the necessary skillsets take responsibility for decisions they are incapable of making. Their knowledge of the technical matters is not up to that task and business wise they’re often in the same boat. So now we have a bunch of people who have way too little understanding of what IT and business is and what they themselves should achieve in that bridging role. Oh great, so fundamentally critical decisions are being made by the unqualified. People who lack skills, experience and context will fall back to methodologies & theories. They use them as cook books. Unfortunately reading and using a cookbook doesn’t make any one a chef. And these are the roles where we need chefs’ people. In reality there is a giant gap between reality and all the theories, methodologies & real or perceived knowledge on how IT can be better aligned with the business and be run more successfully and profitably.

I can only conclude that allowing this to happen means that the functions that are supposed to be bridge that cap is not taken seriously enough. For all the lip service to these efforts it cannot be for lack of acknowledgement of the pain points. But the solution often seems more of what doesn’t work, thereby eroding any credibility of the bridging functions. This is costing us dearly and it will only get worse if we don’t stop this madness. There is of cause the fact that projects become more and more expensive with all the * architects, * analysts & * officers. On top of that the complexity keeps rising and we don’t seem to be very good at managing that. Ask any engineer what the worst enemy in any project is and you’ll get uncontrolled and unmanageable complexity as an answer. But even worse, you are faced with the fact that best people in the business, bridge and technical positions eventually leave. Tired & worn out by the environment that doesn’t value them as they don’t understand their true contribution and skill set.

This means that even today IT retreats into its technical areas of expertise and the business doesn’t learn what IT is & can do. If we don’t get better at bridging that gap we are doomed to keep failing at ever higher costs and you’ll lose ever more valuable employees. The only difference will be we’ll have more parties than IT and business to point our fingers at as the ones to blame.

I’m an MVP–What a Great Start Of 2012

Microsoft presented me with the 2012 Microsoft® MVP Award under the Virtual Machine expertise. If you’d like to know a bit more about the MVP Program and the Award you can take a look here http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/gp/aboutmvp

This is special to me, and I’m honored by it. It’s very nice to get such recognition both from your peers in the community and from Microsoft for sharing your experiences and knowledge for the better good. This doesn’t mean I’m an "know all, end all" guru, far from it. No one knows everything or never makes mistakes. To me it does mean my peers think highly enough of me so that they are willing to nominate me and serve as a reference for my skill set and contributions. That by itself is a huge compliment but I’m grateful to have the opportunities to learn a lot and for that I owe some thanks. I learn a lot from participating in a world wide community that shares experiences & knowledge. The amount of skills that these people bring to the table and the wealth of information that is shared by all is enormous. ”The community” is a varied group of experts in their own areas of excellence.

• Some are (sometimes long time) MVPs like Aidan Finn, Hans Vredevoort, Jaap Wesselius, Jetze Mellema, Kurt Roggen, Mike Resseler, Kristian Nese, Carsten Rachfahl.
• Naturally there are the Microsoft employees, both locally and abroad, with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working on support & business cases and who’ve probably vouched for me when asked to do so.
• Then there is the interaction with community members like Ronnie Isherwood, Jeff Wouters, Dave Stork, Peter Noorderijk, Maarten Wijsman, Rick Slager and my blog readers , and a lot of the  people who follow me on twitter (Ronny Pot, J. Wolfgang Goerlich, Kevin Ball, Kenneth, …) and so many other I’m probably forgetting to mention . Some of these I’ve had the privilege of meeting in real life and those occasions have always been both educational & fun. Sometimes these meetings turned into an international distributed testing/troubleshooting effort where we all learn something like at TEC 2011.
• On top of that I have the luck to work with some really nice people both colleagues (Tom, Peter, Karel, Ivan, Sabrina, Jeff – you rock – and thanks for sticking with us through all the sometimes challenging projects). Some are consultants and people I know at other companies that work for or with us.

Together we learn a lot through the need to answer sometimes complex questions and find solutions for the problems at hand. This makes for a great learning school and ongoing education until that day arrives you’re recognized as an expert while you realize more and more how much there is to learn.

A Festive End Of 2011 & A Great 2012 To All

Well the end of 2011 is getting closer and 2012 is about to knock at my door. 2011 was a very busy year and 2012 show no signs of being different, quite the opposite actually. We’re going to be deploying the System Center 2012 Suite, diving in to Windows 8 Server and I’m doing some storage projects in the  >200TB usable storage space range. Getting our feet wet with the private cloud concept in production etc. On top of that I’m planning to attend some conferences and might be speaking at some of those again on Hyper-V, Clustering, Storage and Windows 8 Server.

I’d like to thank all my readers and let you know I appreciate the feedback and your words of thanks when you’ve found my posts helpful or funny.

To all my IT buddies I’ve been lucky enough to have met up with in 2011 I hope to see you all again in 2012 for some more fun and educational conferences and dinners. There is a very helpful and smart bunch of people out there and I enjoy talking with them.

To those of you who are changing employers, jobs, starting your own companies or going freelance, I wish you all the best. It’s reassuring that in these day of constant economic doom & gloom we see people moving ahead full steam and with confidence.

I have a great small team of great IT Pros & Developers working with in the trenches and hope they continue to have fun and keep finding positive challenges in their jobs. They have “the right stuff” and we couldn’t get things done without their skillsets. The challenge for management is to help ‘m get the job done nothing more or less than that, to take away obstacles and let ‘m be the best they can be.

This year was also the first time I presented to a very stimulating, knowledgeable and communicative technical audience. There is room for improvement in my presenting skills but I enjoyed it and it was very good learning experience for me. It’s not easy to deliver good content, and share knowledge. I thank all of you who make an effort to do so and I wish you all a happy, prosperous, carefree and healthy 2012!

A Fool With A Tool Is Still A Fool

Aidan Finn started this cool blog post visually explaining how cool Hyper-V engineers are. This prompted a funny a response by Marcel van den Berg concerning the technology used. Well those blog post inspired me to demonstrate an issue popping up in certain ICT projects to our business audience with the help of some visual aids. That public might not always be IT savvy, but I think we can show them what goes wrong in the ICT world every now and then. Especially if experience, context and realism are missing in a team. For this purpose I’ll use technology everyone knows from TV, the movies & the news. That way even the technically uninitiated (management) will get the drift.

So what goes wrong with a certain percentage of IT implementations today?  Well they tend to look like this:

Over the top deployments, using every option & technology known to man that become unmanageable to the “ridiculous” level and end up reducing operational capabilities and reliability. These projects cost vast amounts of money and are very costly in time / billable hours.

Look, we have a lot of features at our disposal. That’s great, as this gives us options to build the best solution, in a cost effective way, for the business need that needs to be addressed. But we don’t have to use everything everywhere just because we can. Look at the monster setup above. All pretty neat tools & option in itself but it just won’t work this way. Do note that this is not just a simple case of overkill. That would be more like a tank where a rifle suffices. This is using the entire content of the  toolbox when only few tools are needed.

Constructions like this only result in final prove that TCO stands for “Totally Cost Oblivious” and ROI for ‘”Running On Instinct”. These configurations are, more often than not, bought & configured by wannabe “’professionals” who do so to in vain attempt to get some instant credibility. The “Hey, it sure does look impressive”  approach so to speak. These people can’t hack it anyway and often look like this guy.

He’s got the gear, he’s got the tools. But there is just no way poor  “bubba” can figure out what’s wrong. Really he can’t.

Now a good engineer (like the one below) knows how to use the correct technology where and when needed in a professional manner. He or she does so in the most cost & result effective way.

And it’s not only implementations where things go wrong, stuff also breaks.  That’s were a secondary (a.k.a  a backup) comes in. We all know that, no matter how charmed the lives we lead are, inevitably, luck runs out at times. Yes Murphy is out there and bad things happen to the best of us. So tell me, when that luck runs out, who do you want to come take care of business and save you?  Bubba or the guy above? In ICT that’s exactly the same question you need to answer to address the challenges your business faces. Great solutions are, even in this era of commoditization, seldom bought of the shelf as a one size fits all package, they are custom built to specs for the job at hand.

The Dilbert® Life Series: Mental Hygiene Is Counter Productive

There are times that IT people need to vent. Usually they do that amongst their peers. Sometimes they disagree with each other and they express that. Why? Well most of them are straight shooters, not politicians or diplomats.  Now don’t get me wrong. I do understand the benefits of politics & diplomacy and I most definitely see the need for it. They can achieve things more often than conflict or direct orders can. Mainly because they make the people think it was their own decision and/or choice. The drawback with politics is that it takes time and in some situations, unfortunately, you don’t have that luxury. Don’t forget IT Pros work in sometimes rather stressful crisis situations. The bad part about politics is that it can also be perceived as “shady dealings” but this is actually not true. This is a negative connotation due to the often very poor quality of politicians. But I digress. I actually love diplomacy. It’s the process that delivers me either the desired result or buys me enough time to for my sniper to get the range . Either way, politics and diplomacy gets the job done, when you fulfill one prerequisite and that is to have professional diplomats around. As you might have already guessed, that wouldn’t exactly be me . Politics however is not the same as “political correctness” run amok. Don’t be afraid of people speaking their mind. Don’t let the fear of others hearing some strong language or an unpopular issue being discussed guide you. That alone will not kill a reputation or wreck a well-oiled team.

Reputations have a major flaw. They take a life time to build and only a second to destroy. Are you telling me your approach to protecting a reputation is making sure no one ever hears a bad word out of the mouth of an employee who’s ranting to blow off steam? Guess what? You’re doomed to fail. Don’t we need to protect people from being offended? Yes, but don’t take it to far. Chances are that the offence is both ways. So don’t restrict free speech & open communication too much. But perception is reality right? Good lord, get a grip and grow a pair. People need to vent, express themselves and be allowed to do that in an not overly politically correct way amongst their peers. These people are in the trenches together, they deal with all the shit and stress. They shouldn’t be worried or stressed about using the proper diplomatic approach to everything they say. Political correctness can be taken too far. It makes for a very hypocritical, bottled up with frustration, unhealthy work environment. Amongst comrades you need not have to worry about that. And for crying out loud, I really do hope that humanities only hope for decent behavior is the fact that things are forbidden or regulated.

One shouldn’t judge IT managers or team leaders by the fact none of their team members ever curses or vents. Let alone some silly dress code. No, that T-shirts saying “You’ve read my T-shirt. That’s enough social interaction for one day” will not ruin professional relationships. Acting on those things remind me of micro managers. Meaning they focus on small issues for all kinds of reasons, non of which have anything to do with them being good managers. Do you want to know what you IT teams are worth? Look at the members. Do they stick up for each other? Are they not afraid to stand up and speak up about issues that are “threatening” one of them or their boss? Do they get the job done? No I don’t mean that they wear a tie, are in the office at 08:30 or never ever vent, I mean do they get the job done. Even at night, during those wee hours of the morning when needed or just even when is more convenient for the business? That should tell you a lot. That’s their PR without the glossy brochures.

Next to that it also has some other negatives associated with it.

• First of all you lose your eyes and ears. Trust me, your IT people are your boots on the ground. They see, hear & know a lot as they deal with the entire organization. No matter how many tests, technology and reports you got at your disposal your people are a very valuable resource of information on what’s going on in the company. IT  as an bio indicator so to speak. From problems with vendors, storage issues, dysfunctional project managers to insane analysis and architects who’ve become a bit to enamored with the esoteric part of their job. In other words, if you want to know what going on let your IT staff speak their minds without fear. Create an environment where they can do that. Otherwise they’ll shut up even when they better open their mouths.
• You’re flushing the morale of your troops down the drain. When people feel frustrated they need to vent, not be censored. That leads to unhappy employees and instead of having “undesired” verbal statements about a situation you’ll be hearing some very unsettling complaints about your stupid company. You might not like those either but you’d better listen and learn from them instead of saying that such talk “ist verboten”.
• Don’t block the vents on a steam engine. They are there for a very important reason. Their proper functioning is to assure that the pressure doesn’t build up to high, thereby preventing the engine from blowing up. Same thing here, speaking their minds relieves pressure , stress and prevents frustrations. That’s a good thing as human beings under high pressure tend not to become diamonds even if they are bio carbon life forms. Chances are they’ll explode out of proportion when it really shouldn’t happen. A bit counter productive don’t you think?

Now this doesn’t mean you should stand for an all-out negative culture where all is piss and vinegar. Some venting is good, being a full time complaining sourpuss is not. Lead by example. By all means avoid e-mailing vents and frustrations. Words are volatile and dissipate. E-mail is very persistent. Maintain professional courtesy whenever possible.  While I think that respect needs to be earned, politeness and correctness can and should indeed be given. It goes along way when dealing with people. And the beauty is that by allowing people to vent and speak their minds you help achieve this. All you have to to do is maintain balance and don’t let the morale and the culture go south. So forget about dress codes, punch clocks, “mental hygiene” measures. They indicate another much worse problem. Management failure. Sure you can blame the issues on that T-shirt or someone’s venting. Perhaps you can even fool yourself into believing it. Perhaps it even helps you sleep at night. But it sure will not help you improve your business. For that you’ll need to put the good managers, diplomats & politicians in the right place instead of trying to rely on never needing those particular skills.

Free Support Rant

<rant>

I blog and help out in news groups because I like to share ideas, solutions and help out when and where I can. I’m active on twitter because I enjoy the discussions, the out loud thinking and the reflection we all get of just throwing ideas, conclusions, opinions, experiences and knowledge in a pool of diverse but very skilled passionate IT Professionals and Developers.

It is not always easy to share information. The potential complexity of environments that may well have other issues and restrictions in combination with the vast amount of possible configurations and designs, both valid and ill advised, make it near to impossible to cover all eventualities. If one of my blog posts does not contain the answer to your specific problem or does not apply to your particular situation, do not complain & moan about it, let alone demand of me to come up with a solution. What is written here are bits and pieces of information which I choose to share because I think they have some value and can help other people out.  I do this in my own time. Really, I am not paid to blog, research technologies or build labs. I do this out of my own interest and because I enjoy it and it has value to me in my own work. I work a lot of hours “for a boss” and those are not always the most esoteric. When you read my “About” page you’ll read the following:

I’m still in the trenches with my boys and gals. Empty suits or hollow bunnies are neither wanted nor needed. In IT you live by the sword and you die by the sword. There is no hiding when you mess up, all our mistakes are in plain sight of everyone using what we build.

That is my reality and I live by it. Perhaps others should try this.  I’ve seen to many ICT “gods” come down from heaven for a short while pushing their latest religion or product. Loudly proclaiming it is the truth and the only way forward. Failure to achieve success is always due to a lack of faith with us subjects, our (at best) mediocre skills or because we have to wait and see the benefits,  much later in time, but we need to keep the faith. When the shit hits the fan those gods are back on the Olympus, pushing daggers into the back of us infidels who couldn’t make it work. No thank you. I think the people I work with know the  strengths and weaknesses of both my self or my solutions. I have however never ever left them out in the cold when something didn’t work out as planned or when things failed. Yes, eventually things, big and small, do fail. How you try and prevent that as much as possible and how you deal with it when it happens is what makes a huge difference. That’s where my professional responsibilities lie, not with some Microsoft bashing, impolite, wannabe who thinks insulting me is a good approach to getting me to solve their issues with a Microsoft product. You know the type, they open a pack of “M$ Sucks Quick Mix” to try and get some “Instant credibility” and fail miserably, they even fail at asking for help.

I am not your free support desk, your dedicated Microsoft technology research engineer or trouble shooter. I’m an IT Pro with a busy job. I think certain people out there need to learn that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Don’t be a “jerk”.

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Consumerization of IT Discussions at BriForum 2011 London

At BriForum 2001 In London I also attended a lot of talks on BYOD and the consumerization of IT. The connection with BriForum is where VDI and user virtualization fit in to facilitate this. Now talk about this subject has been going on for about 5 years now and has been brought up at many TechEd sessions for example.

If that concept works, I say bring it on. Really. I mean it holds so many promises of a better world for everyone involved that we’d be nuts not to try it. I like the concept, but will it work, is it possible? If so where, when and to what extent. Anyway it’s all good stuff until that seems to require lawyers and contracts. Ouch! We’re not too good at dealing with that and I have to say that from my experience contracts are legal documents and are very useful in that arena but it won’t stop people from doing what they can where and when they can. They don’t think about using Hotmail or drop box of being “illegal” or against policy. They just use it. Look at any other corporate security and fair use policy. They are full of holes like a giant Swiss cheese. The ones demanding the policies are the ones doing most of the drilling.

But legalities aside, will it work on a very large scale in most places? Not right now I think. The dependency of the business on the current infrastructure is so big it can’t be replaced yet. So you need a transition and that means adding stuff & new possibilities and facilitating them. So initially it will only add complexity for the service desk. All the talk of not being able to retain the best and brightest might be true but the same goes for the IT personnel. You might retain a better MBA with your iPad & iPhone but you could very well lose some support personnel that go “BOINK” trying to assist a workforce with hundreds of devices and apps. Are devices and toys to be considered as benefits or as a true work instruments? Perhaps it attracts opportunistic gadget freaks instead of the best personnel. Do car policies help attract the best personnel in this day and age? I mean everyone offers it so it’s a level playing field. Perhaps not offering BYOD but providing really valuable environments works better. Flex work, telecommuting, better wages, interesting job content is still a lot better I think. The best people figure out fast that there is more and better to be had in remuneration than a device and your own app preferences.

Sure I know an iPad might attract a college graduate but they already have such high expectations (culture of entitlement) that perhaps this is not the best path to go. Corporate life is not like what you see on TV. They might as well learn that early. It’s not about a group of gorgeous young people acting important and professional whilst doing nothing, drinking rivers of macchiato form Starbucks and having affairs with the equally gorgeous colleagues. To complete the dream illusion they get paid generously for all that and at the end of the year receive a bonus to make a down payment on that city loft. Wake up! And be fair we’re talking top drawer human resources here and there in lies another issue as you’ll need to offer it to everyone in the company because, when you hear the lawyer talking, it opens you up to legal action due to discrimination if you don’t. Where is the differentiator than?

Now I’m not against it the concept. On the contrary I would love to see it work. But I’m afraid it’s not such a good proposition as it is made out to be when done in a structured way and on a large (read companywide) scale. Is it a perk or business value? I don’t have an iPad or an iPhone but I do use my tools and some devices out of corporate control to get my job done, so basically I’m there dudes. The main issue I still need to resolve is get employers to pay for expensive shiny toys I need to get my job done faster and better. The reason I don’t have them because I’m too cheap to buy them myself (so I don’t see the value to get my job done better?). But when the boss pays, well hello iPad! But I’d better not force my hand. I think my boss would say could luck at your next job if I ever told ‘m I takes an iPhone to retain me. But a CEO doesn’t have that problem. He gets a “right away sir” for an answer.

Is this for everyone? I’m not so sure. In the long term perhaps. Today no. I have generation-Y and millennial “kids” in my social circles and guess who’s asked to help them with all the tools, toys and gadgets? Right. They are indeed consumers! If you define digital natives as mere consumers than they fit the bill but I would suggest that the designation “digital natives” implies they can deal with all tech they use themselves at all times. In the end, when all self-service and tech support for their toys fail who do you think the problems ends up? Right. Ever dealt with a gadget junkie that is forced to go “cold turkey” in the blink of an eye? Face it, every helpdesk has to deal with recovering baby pictures, wedding movies, getting routers to work, helping with capturing a movie stream & configuring smartphones … consumers need support and that support has to be paid. Who does it and who pays is a different matter. Aren’t we just shifting it? What about contracts to make clear how does what, where and when? Have you ever work in a service desk in ICT for internal IT? Really? Where is all the “enabling of the business” when you’re waving with a contract as a user ends up at the service desk with a broken BYO device or application that was repaired but did not fix the issue and now they need help to get to the data stored in that obscure application you’ve never seen? And when it’s your manger are you going to put the contract in his or her face? What about the secretary that can make your life hell or heaven depending on how by the book they play? Sounds familiar? Same old, same old. One thing is for sure that cute, charming red head who’s very gadget minded and processes your requests for attending conferences doesn’t have a problem now and never will. No this is not sexist, it’s reality and you can always change the metaphor to reflect your own preferences, you’re totally free to do so In essence what I’m saying here with freedom comes responsibility and ownership.

Then there are the practicalities who buys it and how does it get paid. You need have that figured out and organized. How do you deal with the legalities and auditing of licenses? Lawyer heaven   Where are the tools to really manage devices and applications al those different vendors well?

Just some brainstorming and playing devil’s advocate here. Who wants this for work? Geeks. Who wants this a perks? Employees. Who wants this as a business? People selling solutions to manage and facilitate this. What does the business want?  The fact is consumerization of IT is already a reality. It just happens. It will be interesting to see how we all deal with it, why those choices are made and what their effects are. Feel free to chime in via the comments.

The Dilbert® Life Series: The Carbon Copy, Blind Carbon Copy e-mail Pandemic

Disclaimer: The Dilbert® Life series is a string of post on corporate culture from hell and dysfunctional organizations running wild. This can be quite shocking and sobering. A sense of humor will help when reading this. If you need to live in a sugar coated world were all is well and bliss and think all you do is close to godliness, stop reading right now and forget about the blog entries. It’s going to be dark. Pitch black at times actually, with a twist of humor, if you can laugh at yourself.

Have you ever worked in an office where no one ever takes responsibility and all communication is CC’d and BCC’d to an absurd number of people? There are corporate “cultures” that act very different from our own style. Size often has nothing to do with it. But this habit is just another symptom and indication of blatant management failure.

These are organizations where no one feels like they can make decisions or take actions without involving half of the company in some form of meeting or committee. CYA (Cover Your Ass) in action. One of the symptoms is the fact that just about anyone who has (or thinks they have) some important or urgent information sends all mail with some managers in CC or even BCC. Often the middle management acts the same way and before you know it more CC & BCC recipients are involved making the entire mail flow a mess and proving without any doubt that you’re in kinder garden. Decisions are postponed or never made. No one is going to take responsibility for a decision, that much is for sure. So when a decision is finally made it often by the wrong person, too late and probably not the best one. Basically you have a management structure where no one knows who’s responsible and is utterly dysfunctional

This is also a symptom of another issue: managers without authority. Yes, they are not very good at their area of expertise; they can’t delegate or organize and lack real people skills. These are often found in middle management where they can be used by the upper level. After all there needs to be someone between the hammer (management) and the anvil (employees). You see authority does not come from your rank or pay grade. It comes from what you know and can do and the support you get from other well respected managers or leaders. If you need to CC all your bosses and all bosses of the people you’re mailing that indicates that you’re a whining kid that can’t hack it. And no, simply not using CC or BCC anymore won’t solve that problem. I thought I’d mention this as they tend to think and act rather simplistic. We have a saying: “You salute the rank, not the man. You respect the man, not the rank.”

Anyway, the mail process is as most people in the mail are not involved, don’t care, don’t need and shouldn’t care and hopefully don’t want to care. Once it got so out of control I added some more people to the CC list and wrote sarcastically at the top of the mail body that we really should make an effort to senselessly involve as many people as we possibly could. Not very nice, I know. Shouldn’t do that, I know. Some got the message, some didn’t. Another solution is to ignore the mail. Really if so many people, including a bunch of managers above and way above me are in the CC list I would not have the arrogance to assume I have anything to say in the matter and thus I await their proposals or decisions.

The best employee a manager can have is Vanilla Ice. Really “…If there was a problem yo I’ll solve it …”, that’s what a good manager needs and wants. You see your boss has better things to do than micro manage the details of your incompetence. You know your end state, so all you need to do is figure out what you need and how you’ll achieve it. Results, that’s what your boss really needs, not details and moaning about how hard middle management is. I know shit flows down and gripes flow up but try to maintain a balance or you’ll find yourself holding a pink slip or being promoted to where you can do the least damage and annoy the least amount of people. I secretly think some people have that as a cunning plan .

But if you’re stuck with a couple of micro managers, do not despair. You can work around them, unless they surround you. In the latter case, break out and run! They deal with urgent and very pseudo important problems that are actually just details which are benign in nature and are not negatively affected by all that overzealous attention. So the trick is to keep it that way. You have to treat them like mushrooms: keep them in the dark and feed ‘m shit. As long as they don’t know any better and keep getting their “data” fix they are lovable. Whatever you do, don’t give ‘m real information or show them the real problems. Micromanagers really can’t handle them. Ambitious ones that get into the light and get gourmet food can become very dangerous. Both to themselves and the organization. Now you do need ‘m to keep ‘m involved and they need to sign and approve work and proposals. So give ‘m finished work, solutions that are ready to go. Forget about involving them in the details or the decision making process, they’ll just get lost. And guess what, this is like a good boss should work and act so we have a win-win situation for the entire company!

Now you know how to help prevent that e-mail becomes a burden instead of a useful tool. No CC or BCC unless really needed. Go practice it.

Technical Projects, Planning, Skills, Motivation & Psychopaths

When planning a technical project complexity adds ups very fast. Take a virtualization project for example; a lot more things than just the hyper visor installation are coming into play. You’ll need to asses a lot of needs and desires about SANs (snapshots, redundancy, replication, FC, iSCSI, FCoE), network (VLAN, 1/10 Gbps Ethernet, redundancy), disaster recovery/business continuity, hyper visors and there capabilities, management of it all and security. That is a lot of stakes and agendas to take into consideration. And then you haven’t even talked to the business managers, the application owners and developers. Now this isn’t limited to virtualization, but this is just a nice example on how so many stakes come together in one project.

One of the major mistakes, that is made again and again even up until this day in the second decade in the 21^st century is the fact that entire important or even critical IT systems are being put into place with a plan that can be paraphrased as follows “We’ll just set it up and sort of see how it evolves and just wing it from there”. I have been forced to do this quite often. This creates many problems some of which I will address below.

The single worst problem is that you create a vacuum. That can be storage space, bandwidth, ample resources for a huge amount of virtual machines or a mixture of all this. The results however are always the same and is one of two possibilities. Either they really don’t want and need it so it will never be used. You can also achieve this by keeping it hidden so they can’t use it. The other option is the most natural one. In nature there is a thing called a “horror vacui”. That means that a vacuum unless protected cannot exist, it has to be filled. Empty LUNSs with data, hyper visor hosts with guest, networks with bandwidth and backup capacity with even more terabytes. You might think the second option is better than the first one as at least the infrastructure is getting used. Unfortunately the reality is that this is creating a very expensive mess to run, support & troubleshoot. The legacy this creates is not a valuable inheritance but a bank breaking, efficiency and effectiveness ruining debt. Stop doing that right now, you are killing your business. You see technology debt is about more than just old hardware and software. It’s about what you build with it or what grows organically with it. Is that a fertile land that sustains the business or a cancer that is killing it?

The way to prevent this is planning done by competent, involved people with experience and context. No plan is perfect, but a plan gives you a framework to achieve the desired result. Even great people make mistakes but they have the skills and attitude to fix them or work around them.

What are some other problems? Wasting money. Take for example a completely oversized server farm. That thing will consume so much money over a three year period in energy and idle capacity that the amount would be sufficient to replace it with new right sized hardware (more bang for the buck, better energy efficiencies in three years) I don’t know about you but those are very disconcerting numbers.

You can also be wasting money and time. And those who know me I loath wasting time. What if the SAN solution you bought doesn’t perform as planned or isn’t the right fit? There goes 500.000 € or you find yourself in the CEO office explaining why you need an extra 400.000 € to get what is really needed. Oh oh! Do you have money and time to do it all over again or will you be living with that expensive mistake until the current solution is end of life? Do you have to wait until the CFO and CEO have recovered enough from the shock to allow a new attempt? Or perhaps you bought a SAN solution that is enough to run NASA’s workload and you’ve invested 4.000.000 € in a rather expensive data room heater.

Getting a virtualization project wrong can wreak havoc on a business and create a sizable financial hemorrhage. You can say that that’s not your problem but I beg to differ. If the project goes south that means you’ll have to find another job. The IT world where I live is rather small so you might even have to switch to another field as you’ll be forever known as the guy that sunk company X with his little “plan”.

The reverse, being rewarded for your hard work and success is not a given. In the end they pay you for getting the job done so results are expected, and to Joe Average manager all ICT is a PC with a software packet to install. So for all you eager beavers who think that with this kind of responsibility and risk management comes big reward when you get it right I suggest you think again. I have witnessed quite the opposite personally. Even when you’re running multiple enterprise SAN’s, networks, infrastructures like SQL Server, Exchange clusters, Hyper-V clusters, geo clusters, load balancers and providing 2^nd and 3^rd line support for those and taking 24/7 responsibility for the environment the only thing some managers care about is why the PC they never ordered with the software they never ordered can’t be installed tomorrow. “What kind of a chicken shit outfit are you running here” is what they’ll think when you can’t do that. They’ve read the glossy brochure that IT is a commodity and they expect it cheap and always on, much like electricity. In the end some (incompetent) managers act like ungrateful psychopaths. They’ll just abuse you less when you get it right. Don’t expect anything else. Often it’s the ones that are not capable to integrate things they can’t do or don’t understand into their business. They can not value anything that’s beyond their comprehension so they’ll never recognize it. To them, people are, for all practical purposes, resources that are identical, “Full Time Equivalents”. So don’t buy into the hype that there is a skills shortage from that lot and they can’t fill job openings. The volume in which they often waste talent and flush motivation down the drain is shockingly high and indicates that there is no shortage at all or that they can’t recognize skills when they find it and they’ll hire anyone. Surely they didn’t make a mistake so it must be a skills shortage. So you still want to be some hot shot technical architect? Or does a job that only produces open opinions and optional advice on paper sound more attractive. Per hour worked you’ll earn more, run less risk and have a lot less stress. My advice? Don’t switch fields if you enjoy what you’re doing, switch jobs. The best career advice I ever got was “don’t work with or for assholes”.

Well if you don’t agree with your bosses and you dare go against them you’re surely playing with your job, you could get fired! So? Does living in fear of being fired make good employees? Does not being strong and confident enough to tell your managers they are doing certain things totally wrong or that they are mistaken make for good advisors? The worst thing a boss can have are a bunch of “yes men” around him or her. That boss should be smarter than that. It doesn’t work. Having trust in the abilities and loyalty of your employees does not mean you need to agree on everything. As a boss you’ll make the final decisions, yes, but you’d better listen very carefully to your advisors and staff or you might as well have hired some monkeys. You can train them to say yes all the time, all it takes are some bananas. As an employee, don’t let yourself be treated like a monkey and if they fire you for throwing the banana back, good for you!

So you’d better love technology and building solutions because that means you are intrinsically motivated to go the extra miles. When you are, select a small group of people with the same attitude. You’ll be able to drag the devil himself out of hell with such a team at relatively very low cost. Whatever you, do don’t think you can externally motivate or coerce people into achieving this. Charles “Chargin’ Charlie” Beckwith knew that all along when he said “I’d rather go down the river with seven studs than with a hundred shitheads”. And guess what, he wasn’t taught this in some course, by getting a title or by being told this by a manager. He learned it himself by working with the best. These people will keep learning and growing on their own. They don’t need to be told what to do, how to train, what to use, they don’t need nannies & micro management. They need an end state and they’ll get it for you. Frankly that kind of skillset and ability scares the shit out of some bosses as they micro manage actions & items instead of doing their jobs. You can’t use force, treats or authority to make people achievers. In the end you can cut a diamond, but you cannot create it. Trust me. Putting that amount of pressure on someone that isn’t a diamond only turns them into a heap of crushed remains of what used to be a human being or FTE in your typical HR speak.

“Mate you’re not a conformist” my friend said … you’d better believe I’m not

The Dilbert® Life Series – White Collar Blues in Corporate Culture

It’s unbelievable how awfully bad a lot of methodologies, regulations, evaluations, and planning and audit systems are implemented and used. While this might seem to be just your average, run of the mill Kafka red tape, the outcome is often disastrous to the workplace. This is quite the opposite of what they are supposed to achieve: effective and efficient high quality results that are delivered as fast as possible without sacrificing any the above mentioned qualities. An added benefit would be a stimulating and happy work environment leading to motivated personnel thus achieving the ultimate productive workplace Walhalla. More than people and organizations like to admit unfortunately, this theory flies in the face of reality. Organizations become cesspools of demotivation, incompetence and careerism at its worst. Often the real (Machiavellian) objective seems to enslave employees by coercion, fear, passiveness and immobility in order to turn them into little mignons. Make no mistake, that’s exactly what writing vast amounts of mind numbing documents and reports achieves. In other words meet “Office Space”.

Bureaucratic red tape is one thing. Adding over the top, ill understood and badly implemented regulations & frameworks will sink any organization faster than a well-placed torpedo sinks a ship. Any hope of ever improving the results, motivate people and stimulate innovation are either killed instantly or drowned slowly. You end up with a worthless bureaucratic malfunctioning organization run by mediocre management, hiring mediocre people producing, at best, mediocre results. Your organizations agility, decisiveness, innovation and creativity are dead. You might as well have sent hit men to get it over and done with.  Are you even at least still thinking about your customers or clients needs somewhere in that situation?

Very often no one ever reads the documentation and reports that audits, evaluations and regulatory mechanisms demand. If they are being read, sometimes they are used to help an organization improve itself. But they are also read and misused to badmouth, reprimand, control and even coerce organizations and people into submission to further other less noble agendas. Look at the mess the global finance world is in. No one can deny we have more legislation, regulation, control mechanisms and audits than ever before and how are they used and what is the result? And it’s nobody’s fault or mistake; they all have tons of paperwork to document anything and everything you want.

Now let’s be crystal clear about this. There is a real need for regulation, evaluation, audits, policies and methodologies. And yes, that comes with its share of bureaucracy. But it has to be done right and with honesty in its purpose. Unfortunately the excessive nature of the perverse sublimations of these mechanisms on the work floor are enough to make one think tar and feathers or even guillotines did and do serve a genuine purpose. This is especially true if your job turns out to be a one where the only thing that can keep you from going insane is the fact that you’re a lunatic. Furthermore have any of those people ever caught on to the idea that creativity, flexibility and innovation needs a little chaos? Do they really think that you can put flexibility and creativity in a process that can be orderly reported on and audited? Sure they have, but the consultancies selling processes and services can’t bottle creativity, flexibility and real innovation. They deal in shrink wrapped products, so you’ll never hear them advice against their own bottom line. It’s hard enough to get any real work done in an office today as it is. Ah, the joys of landscape noise yards, and endless series of meetings, interruptions by way to many people busy filling out forms who needing input. Add to that architects and advisors who seem to suffer “idea diarrhea” and whose “easy and fast” implementations only fail because those operational employees just “don’t get it”. Middle management does all this in a vanity attempt to demonstrate their worth and avoid true responsibility. Sadly they only achieve quite the opposite and if management let’s ‘m get away with this, you now also have a good idea about the quality of your managers.

So what do all these mechanism truly achieve? Based on my observation of too many colleagues and acquaintances in their work environments I’ll report my findings. Well for one, as stated above, they are great tools for assimilation, compliance and submission to the power players. Everyone knows that many audits quickly become a mere bundle of check lists you need to have. You learn that evaluations are meaningless obligations and planning documents often seem to be more of an “after action report” than actual planning. This is truly perfect in a way. After all compliance is bliss and it’s far easier to achieve this with neatly organized forms and retroactive or revisionist “planning”. Trust me; your paperwork will look great.

Why do we go along with this crap? Because it’s easy, that’s why. That feeling of comfort we get by falling into simple routines seduces us. The path of least resistance is to become an expert paper pusher and methodology whore. No one will criticize you for making the best reports ever, with a keen eye for form and adherence to protocol. In return you get to enjoy the benefits of a predigested workload and you won’t have to work too hard. It’s so much easier to close your eyes. To me this is like freezing to death, you give up and go to sleep to be greeted by a false sense of warmth.

I also see people get demotivated and become cynical survivalists, which is the best outcome for them. Worse is the systemized destruction of productivity and ability to compete but I guess that’s far less important than it seems. That “free market” and result driven meritocracy probably isn’t as free and valuable as we are led to believe. The loss of productivity is plain to see by the way. If you have a 40 hour work week and now they add constant reporting, auditing, adherence to methodologies and policies to your workload, how much work are you actually doing? The reports and numbers become your prime concern. Sure they say that’s not how it’s supposed to be, but unfortunately it often turns out this way. Even more “cynical” is the fact that the most incompetent, underperforming, self-serving employees and managers thrive in these systems. Now this is a reality in any system but the farce here is that all this bureaucratic crap was supposed to reduce that likelihood. In that aspect it’s one big fail. Badly used audits, reports, evaluations and planning documents are not a very good indicator whether people are doing a good job. What they are excellent for is finding out who’s able to market themselves, either individually or as an organization, as impressive examples of professional excellence. They empower career hunting conformists and thus cultivate mediocrity. Some of the best people out there suck at the paperwork. Why? Well when you’re working 40 hours a week you don’t have the time to do it. If you still have to do it becomes overtime. And that’s the extra time you used to have to study and learn, to become a better professional. In other words your best people are forced to work harder and put in more time, which means that take a huge pay cut. To add injury to insult those systems “meant to help them” are psychologically harassing them. You drain your personnel’s motivation and energy away by simply abusing them. The ones who fill out the forms perfectly are the ones working 20 hours a week and then spending the rest of their time presenting those 20 hours as sublime feats of their expertise and creative endeavor. They have long recognized that when you put things on paper they come in existence without effort; far more so than if you really create them doing actual work. This is the so called “fake it until you make it” method. The system promotes underperforming, risk-free, easy work without responsibility and it attracts the kind of employees who seek to be submissive little mignons in return for a pay check and peace of mind and perhaps even a promotion. Is that what it takes to build a “state of the art” organization? Are you even at least still thinking about your customers needs?

People try to survive by threating that crap as a necessary evil. But make no mistake, in the end they will give up and will leave. The leave physically or mentally, i.e. they become under performers or cynical zombies soaking in apathy as their last line of defense. As I told my boss once: “You shouldn’t be afraid that your employees might leave. You need to be afraid when you fear your employees will stay”.

Unless you have a real low IQ or you’re blissfully ignorant, when you live the lie, you become the lie. A lot of people in the workplace are in a world of hurt. They survive thanks to their conformity and submission. Look people, you’re married, divorced, perhaps remarried and your live is complicated. You’re in debt. You have car payments, house payments, alimony payments, gas & electricity bills, insurance payments, kids to support, etc. And you really need to take a holiday to get ways from all that shit in a desperate effort to maintain your sanity. In other words you’re up shit creek. The day you start living the truth in your job you’ll become and undesired nuisance and, inevitably, an unemployed middle aged “nonproductive member of society”. Because when you’re job hunting with no real skills except for filling out paperwork and submitting to the lie what are you good for? Look, they can train 24 year olds to do that, for far less money. Sure you have a very impressive resume as an expert advisor, a senior architect, but you know what, they’re on to you. You see, they all have very impressive resumes and they all worked at the same places where people are hiding in the mass whilst pretending to be awesome and hoping desperately nothing will expose them as frauds. It’s a shared lie. Put ‘m among the real experts and see how well they can keep a rich and stimulating professional conversation going.

My advice? Start thinking! If you don’t, you’ll end up not even being allowed and capable to think and speak as you see fit. Whose fault is this? Yours. You submit and in return you get a job, an income and the illusion of security. And you are so desperately in need of that. Because you are a slave to debt and conformity, a victim of your own fears. So stop being afraid and get a grip unless you want to wind up like some humanoid battery in “The Matrix”. Be warned however, they’ll hire some consultant called Mr. Smith to get you “back on track”, but he actually thinks that you are a disease and he’s the cure.