This last week, my family had a slight medical emergency. I took off and took care of my family. Now any employer has a few reasonable choices here. Mine asked me if everything was alright, if there was anything that they could do. One of the project managers offered to watch my kid for me while. This was overall an overwhelmingly positive response and way more than I had expected.
Although this got me thinking, when I mention employer, I’m really talking about the environment the organizational culture supports and then the actions of the people I report to. I know that my time at my current employer is not infinite and it isn’t terminal either. This got me to wondering…..
If I were to go out and look for a job, how would I know whether the place would be “Family Friendly”? I figure that I’ll need a few things to make this happen. First I’ll need a boss who I can work well with. Perhaps this is even a boss I can trust. This has played out very well for me in the past, and sometimes rather detrimental, but every time this has set the tone for my experience in the organization.
The organization I work for right now is the poster child for family friendly organizational culture. They recognize that if you are at work all day worried about your health or the health of those around you, money issues and any one of life’s interesting detours that you are most likely not going to be as productive an employee as you could be. Now they are not going to hand you a big bag of money (in all fairness I’ve never asked), but they will do all they can to assist.
This is where I think it’s going to be tough to find this in another employer. In many ways I would move to a much more commercialized environment, with deadlines, and perhaps even back in to marketing where there are crazy deadlines and is instead the antithesis of family friendly. The competitive, fast paced nature of the work draws me to this type of corporate culture.
Perhaps there is a corporate culture that balances out awesome performance and family friendly. And let me be clear what I mean by family friendly. I’m not talking about taking a few days every month to watch sick kids at home. All I’m really talking about is being able to take off in a pinch and not have my department come crashing to a halt.
Finally there is one that my wife had me add, and I know that it’s true but I really hope I don’t rely on it. Something she mentioned that sounded a lot like know what you can influence. Her point was that I really don’t have to find an organization that is family friendly for all of its employees, but for my job at the company. There are lots of jobs within a company and they key for my success is that I negotiate the proper arrangement so that I create a culture around me and not be concerned about everyone’s interpretation of the culture.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Merry TrentiMIS
Today marks our organization’s first anniversary of deploying the iMIS product as our billing and receipting application. This year after the release has been trying for many of our IT staff. As a solution provider, we strive to separate problem from solution, and deliver a solution that increases operational efficiencies, meets regulatory needs, and is at a minimum better than the old solution.
Well depending on whom you ask, the solution did not meet the minimum requirements for success.
From an IT organization we were able to decommission the final application running on big iron. We consolidated our SAN, improved our disaster recovery story, reduced maintenance expenses and significantly decreased the need for a big iron operator to be involved in the actual execution of many processes.
Our reports went from daily printouts to self-service reports, drill through capabilities and report history no longer involved paper.
Our bills went from something that looked like it came off of a dot-matrix printer in some sort of cipher code, to a nice professionally done invoice. We even had a usability team involved in the design of the invoice.
We could actually track the history of an account through the system on a single page view and no longer only had the most recent information available.
Finance was ecstatic, because for the first time the way we receipted money into accounts followed GAAP.
But not all was well.
As it turns out we had such a simple way of doing things in the past that moving to a proper way of doing things caused such chaos that it seemed for some that we had indeed moved backwards.
IT spent nearly 6 months post release “cleaning” up the best we could to prepare the business for what they need to do to accommodate the changes in the system. Now in all fairness there has been some significant turnover in key areas, but when the new people are asked how they would change it, they wouldn’t.
Today we celebrated Trent and iMIS. Trent is just one developer. He is part of a larger team who has been working together to help an organization adapt to the “right” ways to do things. We had been so mired in keeping things “right” that we didn’t stop to realize that doing things properly was going to be such a burden on the organization.
I can’t address the business issues right now, but I can do a little something for the development team, business analyst team, QA, and the rest of our IT staff.
We had dilly bars, played Guitar Hero III, put up signs celebrating TrentiMIS, and even went so far as to have an inflatable penguin with a sign “Merry TrentiMIS”.
This organizational change stuff is hard, and it’s even harder when you don’t accurately predict the organizational impact to a major system replacement. I’m not sure you can ever understand the true impact of the change, but we can do our best and manage instead of react.
Now back to my Guitar Hero, I need to take Trent down.
Merry TrentiMIS!
Well depending on whom you ask, the solution did not meet the minimum requirements for success.
From an IT organization we were able to decommission the final application running on big iron. We consolidated our SAN, improved our disaster recovery story, reduced maintenance expenses and significantly decreased the need for a big iron operator to be involved in the actual execution of many processes.
Our reports went from daily printouts to self-service reports, drill through capabilities and report history no longer involved paper.
Our bills went from something that looked like it came off of a dot-matrix printer in some sort of cipher code, to a nice professionally done invoice. We even had a usability team involved in the design of the invoice.
We could actually track the history of an account through the system on a single page view and no longer only had the most recent information available.
Finance was ecstatic, because for the first time the way we receipted money into accounts followed GAAP.
But not all was well.
As it turns out we had such a simple way of doing things in the past that moving to a proper way of doing things caused such chaos that it seemed for some that we had indeed moved backwards.
IT spent nearly 6 months post release “cleaning” up the best we could to prepare the business for what they need to do to accommodate the changes in the system. Now in all fairness there has been some significant turnover in key areas, but when the new people are asked how they would change it, they wouldn’t.
Today we celebrated Trent and iMIS. Trent is just one developer. He is part of a larger team who has been working together to help an organization adapt to the “right” ways to do things. We had been so mired in keeping things “right” that we didn’t stop to realize that doing things properly was going to be such a burden on the organization.
I can’t address the business issues right now, but I can do a little something for the development team, business analyst team, QA, and the rest of our IT staff.
We had dilly bars, played Guitar Hero III, put up signs celebrating TrentiMIS, and even went so far as to have an inflatable penguin with a sign “Merry TrentiMIS”.
This organizational change stuff is hard, and it’s even harder when you don’t accurately predict the organizational impact to a major system replacement. I’m not sure you can ever understand the true impact of the change, but we can do our best and manage instead of react.
Now back to my Guitar Hero, I need to take Trent down.
Merry TrentiMIS!
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Congrats you almost have your own AD
A curious thing happened as we wanted to leverage more of the Microsoft stack in the development process. We determined that we could use Exchange rules, SharePoint and Dynamics CRM as platforms for application development. Just as we were discovering this our infrastructure group for all the right reasons didn’t want us developing on top of our production Exchange, AD and SharePoint boxes.
We made a courageous decision to isolate our development environment from the rest of our environments and empowering the development group with configuration, administration and troubleshooting responsibilities for their new environments. We wound up with our own child domain, a DNS server and a whole bunch of issues.
For those of you trying to isolate your own development environment, I strongly suggest negotiating with your infrastructure team exactly what your requirements are. We deferred many of the decisions off to them as it is their area of expertise. What we wound up with is troubleshooting the infrastructure (with their assistance) while trying to install our first application. Now in all fairness our first application is Dynamics CRM and it can be a beast, but I’ve installed this thing on single and multiple box installs a few times now and I’ve never been this frustrated.
For those developers out there who would like their own little slice of Heaven, I strongly suggest working side by side with your infrastructure team and be specific about the type of environment you require. If necessary get an outside mediator to assist you. Perhaps you will not spend a week of your iteration debugging DNS and Kerberos issues and avoid the temptation to point fingers.
We made a courageous decision to isolate our development environment from the rest of our environments and empowering the development group with configuration, administration and troubleshooting responsibilities for their new environments. We wound up with our own child domain, a DNS server and a whole bunch of issues.
For those of you trying to isolate your own development environment, I strongly suggest negotiating with your infrastructure team exactly what your requirements are. We deferred many of the decisions off to them as it is their area of expertise. What we wound up with is troubleshooting the infrastructure (with their assistance) while trying to install our first application. Now in all fairness our first application is Dynamics CRM and it can be a beast, but I’ve installed this thing on single and multiple box installs a few times now and I’ve never been this frustrated.
For those developers out there who would like their own little slice of Heaven, I strongly suggest working side by side with your infrastructure team and be specific about the type of environment you require. If necessary get an outside mediator to assist you. Perhaps you will not spend a week of your iteration debugging DNS and Kerberos issues and avoid the temptation to point fingers.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Convergence 2008
Definably not a techie conference, but then again I thought TechEd was missing hard core technical content, so perhaps I’m in the minority, or it’s just been so long since I wasn’t technical that I can’t tell the difference any more. Nobody here at the conference is talking about threading, garbage collection, kernels and other real techie topics. Instead they are discussing the configuration and deployment of business solutions. This got me to thinking. Perhaps this IS the new technical. I wonder if the guys who wrote operating systems for a living would think PDC wasn’t technical enough….
As I begin to network with folks here I realized that the people here don’t have a big dev team. Some have PMs, some have BAs, and some have developers. I met a number of mid-sized companies that had a 2-4 techies per 100 business people. I was curious how this works. It turns out that many of the tasks we would consider internal staff tasks, they depend on external vendors for support. Many of the customers run Dynamics GP and from time to time they have a vendor come in and help them out. I spoke with a controller who knew how to open GP and run a custom report, there was no IT process involved, he showed me how he knew what was going on inside his accounts.
This got me thinking….
What if the IS department I worked for cut its size in half, or better yet what if it was a goal of our organization to significantly reduce the staff of IT. Instead of cutting a position or two here or there, how could we fundamentally change how we are structured? If we could find a way to cut our staff in half, could we push that half staff back into the business? I’m meeting many folks here at Convergence that have made an enterprise commitment in Microsoft technology and have a satisfied customer base.
As I begin to network with folks here I realized that the people here don’t have a big dev team. Some have PMs, some have BAs, and some have developers. I met a number of mid-sized companies that had a 2-4 techies per 100 business people. I was curious how this works. It turns out that many of the tasks we would consider internal staff tasks, they depend on external vendors for support. Many of the customers run Dynamics GP and from time to time they have a vendor come in and help them out. I spoke with a controller who knew how to open GP and run a custom report, there was no IT process involved, he showed me how he knew what was going on inside his accounts.
This got me thinking….
What if the IS department I worked for cut its size in half, or better yet what if it was a goal of our organization to significantly reduce the staff of IT. Instead of cutting a position or two here or there, how could we fundamentally change how we are structured? If we could find a way to cut our staff in half, could we push that half staff back into the business? I’m meeting many folks here at Convergence that have made an enterprise commitment in Microsoft technology and have a satisfied customer base.
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