Just Learn to Type... PLEASE!!!

So, a bit of a hobby-horse this one. Why don't companies make it a pre-requisite to have at least a reasonable level of typing and Office suite capability? Or, at the very least ensure that the new essential recruit has some relevant training.

Eh?

Ok, let me explain myself. I have what I consider the massive fortune of being able to touch-type at 60wpm. PAs shudder when they see me touch type because it's certainly not classical touch-typing, but it's still very effective. I can even do what many men can't - I can type and listen at the same time! I scared my CTO the other day with that one!

I can type an email, review it, cogitate on it, edit it and send it in about 1/3 the time that the majority of senior managers/directors can. This gives me more time to do other things, to think, to lead, gaze at my navel, whatever.

I had one manager who if you received an email from him any more than 2 lines long meant he had put his heart and soul in to it because it would have been painful and long to create. I never took his emails for granted! But he spent so long typing that it left him very little time for anything else.

However much we like it or hate it, typing and the ability to use the basic office suite effectively and efficiently is critical to a senior manager's success.

Surely if everyone could type fast, everyone would just write more? Possibly, maybe it would generate more emails, but I still believe they would be more effective overall.

As for office suite knowledge, I think I can illustrate that very easily: I had a call from a function the other day demanding Office 2007 because Office 2003 just wasn't letting them edit their documents the way they wanted to. I went and had a look. As I suspected it was a lack of knowledge of their existing toolset that was the problem, not Office 2003 letting them down.

Yes, you can see it bothers me. But if we senior leaders don't sort it out, before long Generation Y or whatever they're called now will come in and trounce all over us because be assured they will be able to type, and type fast and they'll have been using the Office suite since Year 1 at school. You can't survive in the on-line world if you can't type fast and that will come to the office without a doubt.

And no, voice recognition is not an option. Face up to reality, Go and find Mavis Beacon's Typing Tutor and learn to type, you will never regret it.

Oh, this post written and published in about 20 minutes.

Blocker or Enabler?

I was printing off some documents for a meeting the other day when I realised that yes, technology is a fantastic enabler, but it can also be a devastating blocker.

Why did I think this whilst printing out a document? Oddly it was because the printer was making me late for a meeting. Erm, actually, let me re-phrase that: my dependance on technology had made me late for a meeting, no actually, let me try again: my process for ensuring a successful meeting failed because it did not allow for the technology not quite working according to plan.

By this stage you may be wondering what I'm going on about. I needed a presentation printed out, I printed it a few minutes before the meeting expecting the colour laser printer to spit it out in a few seconds and I'd be at my meeting in time. Instead, firstly it ran out of paper, secondly it decided to re-calibrate half way through and then near the end it decided to clean itself. In the end I was 10 minutes late for the meeting. My expectations of technology had led me to be late for the meeting, I needed the print out to do the meeting. Fortunately my team waited patiently for me and I cursed the technology rather than my lack of organisational skills.

Then I thought about this in a larger context. How often do we have expectations of technology far in excess of it's capability and we end up with technology blocking rather than enabling. Is the NHS National Programme for IT a case in point - an assumption that technology was the answer and therefore used to solve a problem that wasn't actually, at its core, a technology issue thus ending up with technology being a blocker to successfully resolving the problem.

So, the question is how often in today's business arena is technology seen as the panacea when the problem should be looked at as a business issue of which the use of technology is just a part rather than the whole solution. When technology is the seen as the panacea, it becomes a blocker to solving the problem and can waste many millions. We as the people running technology in a company must ensure that the company we work for understand this and we help them use technology as an enabler, not a blocker.

Desktop Virtualisation - Fully baked or a damp squib?

Silicon.com had a piece recently about desktop virtualisation, apparently, it's all going to kick off this year. Is it? Is it really?!

In my view, it's a long way off and I'll explain why:

We have off-shore facilities that need access to our main CRM platform and historically another part of the group has provided this functionality using Virtual Desktops. We also have off-shore developer capability that also use Virtual Desktops.

I'm currently looking to take over this functionality, and having looked at the pain that it produces, the last thing I want to do is replicate it. It seems to be continuously unreliable, it is slow, fails at inopportune moments and usually does a great job of over-promising and under-delivering and is staggeringly expensive to expand or upgrade.

When I tell people the price for additional machines, they look at me as though I'm mad and I don't blame them: £600 for a basic virtual machine and £1,200 for a developer standard machine. The usual response I get is that they could go down to the local PC store and buy a machine for a lot less than that. And I wouldn't blame them!

How can virtual desktops get lift-off when the price point still isn't right. Surely a virtual desktop needs to cost less than £50 for a good spec virtual PC before we can really say Virtual Desktops have arrived. Anything else will just not make financial sense.

Also, in general so many things can get delivered by browser nowadays, the need for virtual machines is diminishing anyway. A basic PC with Windows and a browser costs so little nowadays, why would I want a virtual machine and all the hassle associated with them.

As for my remote developers, the best thing I can do for them is use a VPN or MPLS connection out to their office and create a LAN extension giving them direct access to our development boxes. Job done, lots of money saved.

So, why are Virtual Desktops supposed to go big this year. I've no idea, I've really no idea.

Not Management

A friend of mine has a very good idea for an on-line commercial business. He's sold the idea to a number of companies, even got some seed investment, but he can't bring it to fruition himself because doesn't have the technical skills to bring his dream to reality. A year or so on from the original idea, he's still unable to bring his unique proposition to reality.

Why? Two simple reasons:
- A lack of leadership & people management and
- A lack of detailed requirements.

Without these fundamentals his project will not succeed.

To keep costs down, my friend decided to rely on volunteer developers, working in their spare time inspired by both the idea and the promise of shares in the company. He also handed all responsibility for website development to the developers and left them to it having given them only a high-level idea of what the website was supposed to achieve.

Unsurprisingly deadline after deadline was missed. My friend was getting more and more frustrated. He had to persuade his seed investors not to demand their money back, very embarrassing. Finally on the way home from the golf course one day, we talked about the situation and managed to make him realise why his vision was failing to appear.

Simply, he had never given the poor developers sufficient detail in the requirements, had not controlled or managed them and had never controlled the direction the project was going at the hands of the developers. He listened and nodded, hoped it would all work out and got madder and madder, but would not acknowledge it was a management issue, simply put, he told me that "I don't believe in management".

I persuaded my friend to allow me to take control of the development. Up front, I told him there were only two possible results now:
1) Our developers would be reined back in and would follow detailed requirements we would provide. Or
2) The developers would entrench and then throw in the towel.

Either was acceptable. With the first result we got the website my friend wanted. The second result meant we could move on to pastures new using the newly detailed requirements that my friend had produced.

So, my friend and I took time out to develop the full requirements and logical map of how the website should work. We quickly had a far better idea of what the website was going to do than at any previous time. This logical diagram was given to the developers and openly discussed - many further requirements were formed. By the end of the session we had a decent set of documents that described the website and what needed to be achieved to make it a reality.

Now the developers had the detailed requirements, we had them constrained sufficiently to drive delivery. Initially we broke the whole thing down in to smaller portions, prioritising the work and agreed delivery dates. Every workpackage content and delivery date was decided by the developers - there was no chance that we could be blamed for setting unrealistic deadlines or deliverables.

The developers got going, time past, but instead of ignoring them as my friend had in the past, we did daily update calls and dug in to the detail every time. In the end and very much as I suspected, the developers threw in the towel. My friend saw this as a disaster at first, he thought we'd failed, but then he began to realise how far the relationship had fallen apart. My intervention brought about a dramatic conclusion, but helped bring issues out in to the open and mutually they discovered they were un-solvable.

Having seen the management in action my friend has acknowledged the need and he's also improving his ability to provide detailed requirements. We've found some professional developers who are better equipped to deliver specific work packages to deadlines and will be working full time, not part-time. Yes, the website has been delayed, but now it's far more likely to be delivered rather than never see the light of day.

I guess the point is, however small your dream or business is, never forget that to deliver that dream, you're going to need other people. Fundamentally that means leadership, people management and project management as a minimum. If you're not good at it, find someone who is. Don't bumble along believing that it'll all be fine. My friend learnt the hard way, please don't do the same thing.

Leadership and the Technician

Why does the best technician still frequently end up as the person promoted to run the team? I really would have thought we, as an industry, would have worked this one out by now and stopped this automatic process because the best techie is frequently by far the worst candidate for the job.

Most typically this can be seen in teams that are populated by uber-techies: network teams, Linux sysadmin teams, etc. The techies look upon the uber of uber-techies in the team as their silver-back gorilla. The senior management team spot it and reward that uberuber-techie by following the Peter Principle and promoting to incompetence. Indeed it's a double wammy because the promotion also reduces team productivity: the uberuber-techie is no longer doing uberuber-techie things, instead they are stuck in a world of people management and task allocation, sitting in management meetings bored out of their brains and generally not very happy with the result.

How wrong can it get, literally brimming with wrongability.

If I've not seen a spark of leadership capability, and frequently I don't, bringing in an outsider to manage the team is by far the best option. The only problem with this method is that the techie team usually fails to realise what's good for them and resent the imposition of someone with a management/leadership skill-set having had mis-guided expectations of promotion from within. So, if you do bring in an outsider, you MUST have methods in place to recognise the silver-back in your organisation and use techniques other than promotion to leadership to give them their continued growth outlet.

I've got one chap who's very happy being an uberuber-techie and just wanted to choose his own job title and get good salary increase each year. Well, that's an easy one - done and done! Others have aspiration to leadership, but have yet to demonstrate the skills, again that's not a problem. Provide them with opportunities to see if they really do have those latent skills - this can be done in minor, reasonably safe ways, for instance by providing project management opportunities or sending them on a leadership course or whatever. Finally if a non-management route to increased responsibilities is available then many will recognise that uberuber-tech is what they're good at and give up on the idea of leadership.

Simples!

The end of the Office?

The recent bad weather has again given my team the opportunity to test our remote access capabilities. Yet again we've proved that remote working works well for us. Just like in Feb 2009 we suffered no ill-effects from having half the team snow-bound - we had the tools in place to enable people to do their job remotely and everything continued as normal.

These enforced remote working periods have all been relatively short periods - mostly just a few days. Whilst I've said that we continued to function as normal, as the length of remote working increased the short-comings of our set up started to show. Right now, I don't believe it's ready for frequent or long periods of remote working and certainly not adequate for a permanent remote working solution.

It's not the tools that enable my team to do their job that are missing, it's the peripheral capabilities that you take for granted in an office environment. Most are based around the need to work with others and communicate and share information whether formally or informally.

For instance, how do you edit a document in a meeting with half the attendees working remotely? Yes, of course, you can use Webex and teleconferencing. It's all possible. But if you've not planned in advance it can be a bit of a nightmare - recently I attended a meeting where half the meeting time was used up whilst people joined the online and teleconferencing element. The inevitable rush through the document was anything but satisfactory.

People quickly miss the office interaction, casual conversation, walking around, impromptu brainstorming or whatever that can happen in the office environment to get things resolved. Remote working tends to introduce a formality that you just don't get in the office, it stifles many aspects of day-to-day office activities that are essential, but often taken for granted.

It also means that managers and leaders have to systematically alter the way they manage their people - they have to trust a great deal more and enhance performance management and measurement and get far better at consistent and regular communication - it's very easy to forget someone when they're working remotely and people can quickly become accustomed to doing the minimum to get along which would not be possible in the office and productivity slips away.

How to resolve this conundrum? Create and use an on-line virtual office. Your team can join it with their avatars and bobs-your-uncle, you've got your office environment back. You can achieve the social interaction and spontaneity that you get in the real office and resolve many of the issues described above. Once more you have an environment where people can interact spontaneously, managers can once more manage by walking around chatting with individuals more or less like they would in the office. It's obvious when someone's taken a lunch-break or in a meeting - they're not at their virtual desk, just like in the real-world office. Meetings can be held in virtual meeting rooms with virtual projectors sharing documents or presentations just like they would in the real world - no more long-winded sign-in processes, you just virtually walk in to the meeting room and get going and how wonderful, there's no limit on the number or size of meeting rooms!

There are a few of these types of environment on line, but I've yet to come across anyone who's actually used any of them and found it successful. We'll see, but surely this must be the way to go? How much could you save off the bottom line if you could close the vast majority of your office-space going on-line for the rest of it. How much travel would you save if all your meetings with clients were in the virtual office, plane rides to see the overseas offices would be a thing of the past, everyone could be in one "building" - no longer would teams have to be split over multiple locations. Taken up by the majority, this would decimate the office rental market, change the look of our cities forever, save companies millions, remove vast amounts of traffic from our roads and reduce everyone's carbon footprint... By that score, we should all start immediately. I for one am going to explore it further and see where it gets me...

ISPs and the DEP

Rory Cellan-Jones blogs here about who's winning the file sharing war, there are some wide-ranging and sometimes wild comments following the blog itself. Personally, I come down on the side of Charles Dunstone, the traditional ISP provides the highway along which data passes, nothing more. If a customer is doing something that infringes someone's copyright, then it's between the copyright owner and the customer, not the ISP.

I'm also struggling to work out what this current proposal and activity will achieve except another round of technology escalation. Every time the record industry attempt to block, stall or stifle file sharing, the technically minded come up with a way round it and file sharing goes on as normal after a short hiatus. Eventually the peer-to-peer networks will become so sophisticated in their obfuscation techniques that not even the ISPs with their deep-packet inspection tools will know what is file sharing traffic and what isn't making it impossible to traffic shape or know when or how someone is infringing copyright.

Does a piece of technology exist that was supposed to protect a system, service, copyright or device that hasn't been broken? Blu-ray was supposed to be secure, but it's now possible to rip a Blu-ray disc, it's somewhat complex, but completely possible. Only yesterday there was news that the PS3 had been hacked. As long as the copyright owners continue on this escalation route, so will the hackers and crackers and it'll be the hackers and crackers that win, not the copyright owners. That is unless the copyright owners change their model.

Actually, let's be specific here, it's the corporate monolithic copyright owners that need to change, there are many private copyright owners, particularly in the music industry, who are coping quite happily within the file-sharing domain, in fact making a tidy living out of it simply because their overheads are much lower, they get a greater margin from their efforts, they're able to specifically target their market and they provide bespoke products for their market. In other words they're providing value add a price point and regularity that the corporate monoliths cannot hope to achieve. These artists may not be making millions, but they're certainly able to live off their artistic achievements as long as they don't rest on their laurels and expect a CD to do their work for them.

Considering how long this file-sharing "war" has been going on for, I'm amazed that the basic lessons still don't seem to have been learnt and the large corporate copyright owners continue to point the finger elsewhere rather than understand they have only themselves to blame.