SQLAndy

Now to End of Year

Andy Warren — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 22:00:00 GMT

My friend Steve Jones posted Shutting Down for a Week and in that he talked about doing too much, trying to find balance. I’m right there with him, I’ve been slowly finishing up commitments and shedding tasks to get down to what is right now about a 45 hour week, with a single day trip remaining this year and no travel projected for January.

I’m starting to think about next year. How much do I want to travel? What are my new goals? I haven’t been able to get as much done as I wanted this year. I got a lot done, but not as much as I wanted. Trying to do too much, or not trying hard enough? Both? I’ve got a few ideas I think are worth effort, but I’m trying harder to quantify the effort. Building something new is exhilarating, but draining too if you do it on top of a normal job.

Mostly though I’m going to do things that aren’t work or career related. Catch up some stuff around the house, build a thing or two, do some extra reading, and when I’m ready I’ll make some decisions about the next phase.

PASS Update #67

Andy Warren — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 21:46:00 GMT

It’s been a slow few weeks since my last update. This week I did a call with Karla and Wes from PASS HQ to go over the SQLSaturday IT wish list, prioritizing requests as high, medium, and low, and then turning Wes loose to do the hours estimate on the medium and high items. It looks like we’ll be able to get a few more things done this year so I want to get all we can!

What we’ve tried to stick to with varying success over the summer is defining “sprints” of up to 40 hours with the goal being that we deploy changes about every 9 days. 40 hours isn’t much, but keeping our efforts small means we don’t get into scope creep, and more importantly, if something pops up and we have to stop, I want us to be able to get to a solid stopping place quickly. Nothing worse than having to stop four weeks into a six week effort, no way to deploy, and then trying to come back to it weeks or months later. Overall it has let us get quite a few things done and Wes has put a lot of effort into finding/fixing bugs as we go.

One of the things I’ve been trying to get going for a year is a SQLSaturday monthly newsletter, and I hope to see that finally happen in December. There is a lot of stuff that gets posted as lessons learned,but it’s distributed,this will attempt to pull that stuff together once a month, and it’s where we can let event teams know about tweaks to the site, minor policy changes, and more. I think it’s a bigger win than you might expect, but it’s hard to sustain, which is why I’ve asked HQ to manage it.

A gap we haven’t filled yet is sharing more about our successes with SQLSaturday. Karla is doing amazing work filling the role of our community representative. Having someone with time and energy is definitely help to spur some interest internationally. She is in the early stages of getting events going in China and Russia! Some of those will take months or even years to come to fruition, but it is worth doing.

Changing topics, so far the election process seems to be working ok. Once it’s done I’ll be curious to hear from the candidates and the nomcom if they liked it or not. A good election is really important to the Board, and it’s important to the long term health and success of PASS. As long as we can do better each year, eventually it will get to the point where its solid and well understood.

Thinking about work remaining to the end of the year I’ve only got a few goals left:

Write about the overall experience of being on the Board
Write about things I believe need to be done to make PASS more effective over the long term
Revisit the SQLSaturday/community budget and authorize some spending on things like lanyards (to support SpeedPASS for those events that want to do it)
Vote on the election slate, and make a recommendation as to how the two seats that will have someone appointed should be filled
Do a good hand off to whoever will be taking over the portfolio (hopefully committee)

Looking at that list and thinking about this being update #70 I’ll end up being a few short of my goal of 26 updates per year, but I think 70 or so isn’t bad, and it’s been useful, a way for me to think about where I’m going and to share that with those of you that follow along.

PASS Update #67 (Election)

Andy Warren — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 20:32:00 GMT

Today the slate of candidates for the 2012-2013 term was announced; Adam Jorgensen, Denise McInerney, Geoff Hiten, Kendal Van Dyke, Rob Farley, and Sri Sridharan. We’ve got six candidates to fill three seats (two additional seats will be filled by appointment next year to fill the vacancies created due to Mark Ginnebaugh and I leaving the Board early).

Before I continue, I want to say thank you to the volunteers of the nomination committee that spent a lot of time vetting the nominees this year; Wayne Snyder (Chair), Thomas LaRock, Bradley Ball, Jack Corbett, and Roy Ernest.

As we’ve done for the last couple years we’ve got Election HQ set up, a place for you to see what the candidates have to say and to ask them questions so you can compare and contrast. It’s worth checking the site at least once before you vote,and for those of you who have the time,I hope you’ll post good (and fair) questions to help us all understand their view points.

I debated writing some about the attributes I think are important in candidates, but decided that really those only matter to me – you get to decide what you care about and try to find the candidates that reflects your views or values or goals.

I wrote letters of recommendations for two of the candidates, Sri and Kendal, because I think a lot of them, and because they asked. I know all of the candidates to some degree, and think well of all of them – no bad apples in this lot. It won’t be easy to decide which three get my vote.

To the candidates, I hope you’ll tell us what you really think. I hope you’ll show us that you dream of doing things that benefit the community in ways large and small. I hope you’ll talk about your commitment to transparency and communication. I hope you’ll look at where we’ve been and talk about where we need to go. I hope you’ll learn and grow from the experience whether you get elected or not. Good luck to you all!

Saxophone Fire and Bad Words

Andy Warren — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 20:45:00 GMT

There is nothing like having two children to remind you how strange, funny, and complicated language can be. Try answering the question “why is — a bad word?” in a way that makes sense to a four year old. Yesterday she asked me if hate was a bad word, and I was trying to explain that it not a good word to use about people, but was ok to use about things. Not sure I was successful or she was satisfied, but I wouldn’t trade that conversation!

Sometimes it’s easier to just declare the word as bad, such as s—t in Boom Boom Pow by the Black Eyed Peas. Should a four year old be singing Boom Boom Pow or listening to it? Bad language is something they will encounter whether they do or not (my own use of language occasionally needing some cleaning up) and learning to filter is an important life skill.

Sometimes it’s easier to deflect. My seven year old likes Sex on Fire by Kings of Leon, and rather than explain the sex part, my wife has – for now – convinced them both that the song is Saxophone Fire. Good for a smile on any day, and another on the day when she figures out the title is wrong and then we get to explain it.

TechEd Comes to Orlando in June 2012

Andy Warren — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 19:42:26 GMT

Just saw the official announcement MS TechEd will be in Orlando June 11-14, 2012, at the Orange County Convention Center. Here in Orlando that means we need to get busy with oPASS and ONETUG to see if we can engage some of the speakers that will be in town for the week – always seems like a struggle, but it’s worth the effort.

SQL Mag Top 10 Bloggers

Andy Warren — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 20:29:00 GMT

I was astounded to see this blog at #4 on the list from the recent SQL Server Magazine Community Choice Awards.

Logo for The Mentoring Project

Andy Warren — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 21:09:00 GMT

We’re looking for ideas – see the post on designing the logo!

The Mute the Phone Office Prank

Andy Warren — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 21:03:00 GMT

The client I work with as a lot of conference rooms, all with the standard Polycom conference phone that works well enough. Most just have the phone, a few have the extension microphones (image below). I was a couple minutes early for a recent meeting where I was an attendee but not the host, and while we waited for everyone to join the call there were some of us at my end of the table talking and laughing about something, being loud, and I reached over to hit the mute button, thinking it would mute our microphone to decrease the noise to those on the phone.

Turns out it mutes the entire phone, which I guess makes sense, but I did it just as the host in the room was starting to talk. She thought she forgot to unmute, did so, and said hello to someone that had just joined – but you could almost see her thinking “I don’t remember muting”. In a flash of inspiration I realize that I have this microphone/mute button where she can’t see it, my laptop is blocking the view.

I wait until she glances back at the phone and then hit mute. Eyes go big – “did you see that?”. She unmutes. I give it about three seconds and hit mute again. She is by now convinced the phone is broken,unmutes it. I wait,she sits back. I mute again. She starts to lean forward and I unmute. Mute again. Unmute. Pause for a minute. Everyone at my end of the table – fellow IT types/pranksters at heart all – about to burst. I hit mute again and she is about to launch, looks around, and the game is over, no way anyone was going to conceal that a prank was afoot.

She took it well, and it was all done before the meeting started, so we didn’t throw the meeting off track with the antics. Just a little fun, but maybe something to add to your list of things to try.

Review: Gamma Seal Lids

Andy Warren — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 21:33:00 GMT

Last weekend I needed to go to Home Depot to get a five gallon bucket and a lid so we could store some rice we had purchased at Costco in bulk. The bucket was $3, and the lids were next to it for $2. We already have one of these setups at home for flour for baking, works ok, but removing the lid isn’t easy. Keeps the bugs out at the expense of not letting you in, but as we only go to it to replenish the smaller container we use during the week. The lid wrestling has always been a reason to not buy in bulk for my wife, and dry goods like flour, rice, and sugar are prime candidates for this kind of storage.

Sitting next to that lead was the Gamma Seal Lid, for $6 a lid that mounts to the bucket and then has an easy to turn screw off portion. Worth $6 not to wrestle with the lid? If it worked I was willing to say yes. I took it home and tried to push it onto the new bucket, not easy, finally put the lid on the floor, put the bucket on it upside down,and stood on the bottom to get it to click into place. Lid unscrews easily,nothing complicated about that part.

They sell more more than $6 at Amazon, so you may want to just buy locally. Definitely a good idea and good product. Looking at reviews on Amazon it’s been available since 2007, I just didn’t know/think to look for it. So I’m sharing here, and a reminder to us all that often there are solutions if we take the time to search – though not all of the minor annoyances we encounter in life even rise to the level of a search.

Book Review: Highest Duty, My Search For What Really Matters

Andy Warren — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 21:14:00 GMT

Highest Duty, My Search For What Really Matters by Chesley Sullenberger is the autobiography of the pilot who landed Flight 1549 in the Hudson. I listened to it as an audio book and was pleasantly surprised, it was a well done effort that covered a lot more than just the landing in the Hudson, though it was covered well.

More than the landing I came away impressed with the man. Imagine waking up on an average day to go to work, a few hours later being a national hero and getting a call from the President, not being able to go anywhere without being recognized. I suspect few would have handled that as well.

Listening to the story rather than reading it had an added bonus. Most audio books are read by someone other than the author, with books like this even though you know that you think of the author as the one reading you the story. I’m listening along as I drive and near the end the voice changes, it’s actually Sully reading the final couple chapters. It was unexpected. He sounds like a pilot. Faster cadence, clipped, approachable. He talked about some very personal things, including his father committing suicide, and it was more powerful because it was his voice,it was him telling the story.

Listen to it if you can over reading it,I think you’ll enjoy it.

Managing By Walking Around

Andy Warren — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 21:00:00 GMT

For a long time a core piece of my ‘style’ has been to wander the halls a couple times a day to see what is going on. It’s been effective as a consultant and as a DBA, I get a lot of requests for help as I pass by that I wouldn’t get if they had to email or call or IM, it’s just how things work. It’s also how I find out how things are going when I’m managing. It’s not about “checking up” but more “checking on”.

I was thinking about that recently, I see most senior managers either in their office or in a meeting, and I think its easy to get disconnected like that. I find most people like having me drop by for a minute once they realize I’m not there to catch them not working every minute of the day. It also means that I when I need to drop in for five minutes to discuss a sensitive topic that they aren’t immediately defensive. Not sure what I mean? Imagine that a manager two levels up dropped in on you, what would you be thinking?

Thinking on all of that, I was trying to recall where I learned this, and I just don’t remember seeing someone do it. The first time I used it was when I had a team of about 25 in the military. I had my own work to do, but I needed to make sure they had what they needed, so every couple hours I would make the rounds to see how they were doing. They liked that I checked on them, I cared about their success.

If you try this, I would offer a couple of tips:

Do it all the time. Teach them that you’ll walk by a couple times and if they aren’t obviously busy that you might ask “how is it going?”
Be sensitive to interrupting. Sometimes they have that rare hour to think and they will defer to you if you show up,so you have to learn the signals to know when it’s ok.
Don’t talk to everyone every time. You’re not running for office. Find a few different routes to walk.

Maybe not for everyone,but it’s been a useful tool for me.

Culture Cubes

Andy Warren — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 21:46:00 GMT

A while back I posted about Culture Posters, a technique for trying to build your culture by writing down the core attributes. It’s worth doing, but is a poster enough? How do you get the team to truly absorb it?

The CIO I work with right now took those same values and had them put onto a cube thing like the image above. It folds this way and that way, each side has one of the values from the poster – same colors, same fonts, same logo. One for each employee to put on their desk. Do they get used? Here’s something you might not expect – the cube has a couple magnets to hold it closed and as you flip it back and forth there is an audible ‘click’. It’s not loud, but it’s noticeable, and she hears it on the phone all the time. People play with the cube while talking on the phone, I do it myself.

Does that translate into learning and internalizing the values? I’m not sure about internalizing, but as a tool for sharing them I think it’s more effective than the poster idea, though the two work nicely together.

Distance Decreases Stress

Andy Warren — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 21:37:00 GMT

When I’m managing I tend to absorb the stress that my teams feel. It’s my job to help them be successful and to a large degree happy, so when they are stress – especially the frustration kind – I tend to share it with them. It’s human to do that, and in many ways functional, they aren’t “resources” to be used until depleted, they are people and stress has a real impact on productivity.

At the same time a manager has to detach some. Not all stresses can be fixed or reduced, and the work still has to get done. I was remarking to my manager about trying to maintain that balance on a day when I was feeling the frustration more than usual, and her comment was that it was easier for her to see the situation clearly because she wasn’t in the room with them each day. With the benefit of distance she could look at the situation and ask about the challenges calmly and logically. It was, and is, a powerful lesson.

The goal isn’t to reduce the stress of the manager though. It would be easy to create so much distance that the people really were resources and you never felt the stress from the team. Stress on the team is just one factor in the problem, but it can’t be the only factor when you make decisions.

Identify Risk Early

Andy Warren — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 21:21:00 GMT

One of the mistakes I see a lot is teams failing to identify risks early and failing to leave time to deal with the unexpected things that come up. Imagine a project that seems to have work something like this:

Task A. Needs to be done 100 times
Task B. Needs to be done 2 times
Task C. Requires analysis, if work needed will be done 10 times
Task D. Requires x hours per item, final count is unknown

Each of those four tasks has some unknowns. Some obvious, some yet to be discovered. Some may just require more time, some might need more than that – money to replace hardware, on site consultant, or a dramatically different approach. The trick is to try to identify those risks early.

Teams struggle with that. Let’s say they start with Task A to get work done, with the added bonus of wanting to confirm their time per task estimate – if that’s wrong, it’s a 100x error, so it’s important to figure that out early. That’s a good start, but as soon as the time estimate and work effort are solid, I want them to spend time on Tasks B,C,and D. I know that A can be done and I have a tested estimate, I don’t know if B, C, and D can be done, or done in the time estimate we have.

The team wants to get the work done on Task A. It feels productive to get work done, especially when it is perhaps 90% of the overall work. Interrupting that work to start on the other tasks is annoying, and it might even add a bit of time to the overall effort for them to change tasks and then change back later. It is worth the time and pain. Time and again I see teams push tasks to the of the schedule – often because they don’t know the answer – and when we get there we hit a real roadblock and it can’t be resolved in the time remaining.

Its not possible to identify all the risks, trying to do so can mire you in analysis. It is worth trying to identify the risks on a per task basis and resolving them early. Finding out early gives you time, finding out late means no time – and it’s hard to look competent when you discover on day 98 of 100 that Task D will require a visit from an external vendor that takes 3 weeks to schedule.

It’s not always easy to strike the right balance. Managers, especially project managers, should help teams look at the tasks and identify the risks and rewards. It’s not possible to drive all schedules based on risk, sometimes it will be based on available people, sometimes maybe just because the first task is the most profitable. What you can’t do is leave it to the team to decide. It’s not fair for them to have to figure out what execution order you want, you’ve got to tell them, after they have helped you understand the risks of each task.

The Calendar Driven Organization

Andy Warren — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 21:58:00 GMT

I’ve had jobs where I might have one meeting a week, I’ve had a few with some type of daily status meeting, and in my current consulting role I average more than 30 meetings a week. The size of the meeting may range from me and one other person to more than twenty, with the average being five or six.

That sounds like a lot of meetings. It is. Given that meetings have a bad name for efficiency, why so many? Obviously it’s because there are a lot of things going on, and the result of that is people need to schedule their time. In many calendar appointments are the ultimate todo list, the one that is almost universally respected in an organization.

Respected? Sure. When I go to schedule a meeting I pick a time when I’m free for the amount of time I need, start adding people I need to attend, and then start looking for a block of time when everyone (or most of them) are free. It’s not unusual for that date to be weeks in the future. I’ve either to go with that date or start calling everyone to see if they can rearrange. In practice the only time schedules get changed is when an executive needs to force something into the schedule and they have an admin that can call everyone to figure it out.

It’s a common sense and courteous system. If you need time schedule it. It mostly works too. Mostly. Where it gets complicated is when someone sends you a request for an hour meeting. Typically if it fits into the calendar you accept, or at least set your attendance as tentative. The hard part is right then you have to identify if the meeting requires any type of preparation and if it does, you have to schedule that work, or you may well end up a situation where the only way to prepare is to add time that is outside the ordinary day.

It can get worse. I try to review my calendar twice a day,one at the end of the day to see what I have for the next day and what preparation needs to be done. The other is first thing the next morning to see if anything changed. I can easily end up having my day totally driven by others,with no time to do thinking and no time to do the mundane work that I have to do each day like reply to email.

One way to combat that is to do email and coffee work type tasks in meetings where you’re needed, but not quite a direct participant. For example I often attend project meetings where a project manager is walking the team through an implementation plan. I’m responsible for the results of the effort so I like to monitor and watch for pitfalls, but I can also clean up my inbox while I’m there. Has to be done carefully lest I miss something important in the meeting, in practice it’s doable and effective if I’m not a direct participant. If I’m doing active work in the meeting then I don’t have time to do email and that works just fine.

This system of many meetings favors those that can keep the many different tracks in their head well. If you like to sit and think and work on one thing at a time, the transition to this kind of environment can be wrenching.

There are a few tricks that can help you succeed in a frequent meeting environment:

Clearly identify any work that needs to be done prior to the meeting and by who
Send out a reminder a day or two prior to the meeting if there is work that has to be done by some of the attendees to make the meeting productive, or risk them them showing up empty handed
Send out notes (less formal then minutes) after the meeting and call out action items clearly. If I’m copying a VP or higher on the notes I will then forward that same email to them and call out anything that requires their attention – they tend to not read FYI type emails. Notes are a safety net – after a day filled with 6 or more meetings it’s easy to not write down an action item, notes are a courtesy to your attendees (and a way to make sure the work you need gets done!). More than that, if they know you are going to provide notes they don’t have to take notes and try to participate.
If you have action items, put them on your calendar as soon as you’ve sent out the notes. Make time to get the work done.

It doesn’t always leave much time in the day for thinking. You may think you have an hour free at 2 pm, but by lunch you may find that someone has booked that time – no thinking today. The only way to survive and prosper in a calendar driven organization is to put time on your calendar for you. Maybe it’s 15 minutes each morning, or an hour every Thursday afternoon, but you have to schedule time for the work that you need to do, not wait for the ‘gap’ in your schedule that you hope will be there.

I don’t have a better suggestion for managing collaboration than the calendar. Realize that in many ways you are a ‘resource’ just like a meeting room and if you’re available, people will need your time. It’s not good or evil, it just is. Manage your calendar or it will manage you!