I had a great talk on project management the other week.
A statistic:
Number of $10 Million plus projects that worked as designed = ZERO. Number of $1 Million projecys that worked as designed = about 90%.
So, if you split a $10 Million dollar project into ten $1 Million dollar projects, with the outcomes of one corresponding to the prerequisites of the next, you have a 1 in 3 chance of it all working (0.9^10), which is a hell of a lot better than doing it in one go. As you slice it into smaller bits, the probabilities go up. You also get more chances to cut your losses and exit the whole thing.
IANAMBIASTB1 (I Am Not An MBA But I Am Studying To Be One)
I've recently joined the new CIO's task force for putting together a plan that addresses the immediate problem of defining career advancement paths and payscales."
First of all, if there is enough time to put together a task-force that will produce a plan but not actually do anything about fixing the problem, then I think you can see the chosen solution to the "immediate" problem. Namely, "yes, we are doing something about it.. look at all the meetings we are having". Its a first step (the classic acknowledge the problem) but drop your expectations in terms of actually resolving the problem.
Creating defined and achievable goals with defined rewards will cost the company money in increased remuneration. With good management, some strategic planning would be done that should show that the cost of increased remuneration will be more than offset by increased productivity due to happier little serfs and a decreased necessity for finding and training staff. There is nothing in your description to suggest that "good management" is a feature of this company.
The concept of a "career path" is a bit of an anacronism. It traditionally ties into the public service or traditional heirachical organisations where one could progress from office junior to clerk to senior clerk to junior manager to senior manager. In modern flat or modularised business structures, this doesn't really exist. IT especially so, as a highly trained technical specialist may earn more than a non-technical manager, and wouldn't regard a management position as a promotion anyway.
Let me just note that not everybody wants a challenging job, or to learn something new. Some people like to learn one set of skills and apply them for the rest of their lives. Believe it or not, such people do exist in IT, and if you've got these on the staff of an IT section that simply does the same thing day after day, then you don't have a problem. Its everybody else who you are worried about.
The concept of a "dead-end job" however, depends on what the company actually has its web people doing. If all they are doing is programming the ecommerce site in ASP day-in, day-out, yeah - they are going to get bored. Who wouldn't? Where's the challenge? You need to identify what in the broader company goals will entail novel (and hopefully interesting) IT projects. This is what the CIO should be doing anyway. If there are no interesting IT projects, you aren't going to keep good people. Taking a stab in the dark, i'd guess that there isn't a lot going on in an airline that is going to keep somebody who likes to be challenged interested in the job.
So, the company needs to accept a level of churn, and senior IT people move to other companies for different experiences. This means streamlining the recruiting and training processes to ensure a constant influx of new blood and avoid the exodus of knowledge. (Skills can be hired, knowledge and experience are much much more valuable).
In general, pay won't keep most IT people in a crap job, so increase the stuff that we see as rewards - I call these "The three T's":
Training, Toys and Travel. Training means our employees are more valuable to us, but also valuable to others. But happy employees may need a $10k to $20k increase before being tempted away from a "fun" job.
Finally, the goals need to be divided into a hierachy. The group needs to be rewarded, but as does the individual for their own achievements outside what they put into the group.
Try telling that to a bride on her wedding day. It's obvious you've never taken pictures for hire.
How many wedding photographers turn up with a single camera body? You can't stop a wedding to wait for the photographer. The Pros I know take three - a digital SLR, a standard SLR loaded with colour film and a standard SLR with black and white print film.
Several Theories:
- People in New Hampshire are too left wing to watch CNN
- Until drunk chicks head to New Hampshire to flash their chests for beads, nobody is going to care.
Seriously - the media coverage is shite. New Hampshire is a nice place (except for the taxes).
I've got a personal principle that I should not punch people in the face. That principle doesn't see to have lead me to starve.
Generations of stand-over men have made a good living by following your principle.
The Audiophile appreciates how music sounds on a high-watt system that's driven purely in the linear response region, has inperceptable distortion, crosstalk and noise, has a frequency reponse from 15Hz-22kHz that need not be flat, but must be pleasing to his ear.
The Audiophile understands that a great system starts with the speakers and works back to the source.
The Audiophile understands that spending time moving his speakers and furniture around the room will give you the best bang-for-buck improvement in sound.
The Audiophile understands that the difference between a CD player worth $200 and one worth $2000 is not as important as the difference between a set of speakers worth $200 and that worth $2000 - doubly so if you are keeping it digital until the tuner.
The Audiophile knows that the person who spend $1000 on each speaker cable is a wanker, while he calculates the per meter-resistance of his quality OFC cables and ensures that the paths to the drivers are as close as possible.
The Audiophile understands that a sub-woofer should not felt not heard. If its not SUBsonic, its just a woofer.
The Audiophile looks at the BOSE Lifestyle system with the contempt it deserves.
The Audiophile doesn't claim that the response of vinyl records is superior, but can appreciate the imperfections of the recording media as an important part of the whole listening experience.
The Audiophile doesn't store his CDs in the freezer, nor drawn on them with green texta.
1. Candy is a tangible commodity. Credit card details are not. You give candy to somebody, you have no candy. You give credit card details to somebody, your credit card details are still there, in your wallet, next to the photo of the kids, so there's nothing wrong.
2. People are stupid. There are still people crying that wearing a seat belt is a volation of their rights. Obviously, anything that goes bad is somebody else's fault. Of course misuse of credit card details is not my problem.
By the way, send me your paypal login and password. I need to confirm that you are you.
All the "Oh whoah is me, all the good tools are gone" just reinforces that if you want software, you have to pay for it some how. This could be in cash money - the traditional commercial software model - or in blood, sweat and tears - as a community contributer.
I think in the last 10 years I've contributed maybe a few hundred lines of code to open source projects. That's nothing compared to the number of lines I've used. I have no right to complain.
I agree - in principle - but principle doesn't put food in your mouth or pay the rent.
These guys did a wonderful job. Six years contributing to software that was obviously so good that other people could make money off it. Its one thing to work on an open source project in your spare time, or to be employed by one of the few companies that can leverage free software to make money, but these guys aren't. So unless you are working on the kernel, on samba or one of maybe a dozen other projects, you can't give up your day job.
Maybe by closing the source, one of their competitors will buy them out and they will have enough money to live on and write open source code. Rather than berating these guys for leaving the fold, thank them profusely for the six years of hard work.
If you don't like it, fork it. Once GPLed, always GPLed, and only V3 and above is going closed.
This is not a case of "which is better", but a "what is right for what I want to do". There are "Best Practises" for doing this sort of thing that take the religion out of server-farm design.
First thing to work out: (1) How many minutes of APPLICATION downtime are acceptable (2) How much money will I lose for each miunte the application is down.
Multiply (1) by (2), and you have a rough idea of your budget. Ideally, this should be the last thing - you work out your needs and then pay for them - and that was true five years ago. Today, IT budgets are a lot tighter, and the money often comes first. At least by taking this approach, you have a dollar value to present to the board to get funding approved before you spend a huge amount of time and effort putting together a proposal that will jet be rejected.
If this is only a few thousand dollars, you aren't about to rush out and buy Oracle RAC licenses. You don't need them. If you are going to lose tens of thousands of dollars per minute, you are going to go for big-iron servers running Oracle RAC and run a global cluster between HA data centers.
From there, you can attack the design from the Top-down.
You then look at your application, and work out how each component scales: Horizontally, vertically or diagonally (H+V). In general: - web servers don't need to be clustered as they aren't stateful - Databases scales vertically, though if you've got the money, Oracle RAC is an option. Once you get above 4 CPU cores in the cluster though, you need to go Enterprise edition, and this is expensive. - App servers may go horizontal or vertical, depending on the design of the app.
Once you know how stuff scales, you can start working out what will run where. Some applications play nicely together, and can be combined. From there you can start to work out what OS's you need, and from that the hardware platform. Yes, I know this runs contrary to most people's design philosophies (is, choose the OS, then the app), but 90% of the time the app has dependencies that will limit the OS.
Designing a data center shouldn't be as detached from personal preference as possible. The obvious link is that you don't spend huge amounts on one OS if all your in-house expertise is in another. But this is one of the last filters, not one of the first. It may be cheaper to roll-out Solaris (for example) and hire or train to get the expertise, than it is to port the app to (say) Windows.
All Japanese seafood research involves a hook. This is just an exension of their use of whales for scienfic purposes.
mmmm... scientific purposes in garlic butter.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a great talk on project management the other week.
A statistic:
Number of $10 Million plus projects that worked as designed = ZERO.
Number of $1 Million projecys that worked as designed = about 90%.
So, if you split a $10 Million dollar project into ten $1 Million dollar projects, with the outcomes of one corresponding to the prerequisites of the next, you have a 1 in 3 chance of it all working (0.9^10), which is a hell of a lot better than doing it in one go. As you slice it into smaller bits, the probabilities go up. You also get more chances to cut your losses and exit the whole thing.
IANAMBIASTB1 (I Am Not An MBA But I Am Studying To Be One)
I've recently joined the new CIO's task force for putting together a plan that addresses the immediate problem of defining career advancement paths and payscales."
First of all, if there is enough time to put together a task-force that will produce a plan but not actually do anything about fixing the problem, then I think you can see the chosen solution to the "immediate" problem. Namely, "yes, we are doing something about it.. look at all the meetings we are having". Its a first step (the classic acknowledge the problem) but drop your expectations in terms of actually resolving the problem.
Creating defined and achievable goals with defined rewards will cost the company money in increased remuneration. With good management, some strategic planning would be done that should show that the cost of increased remuneration will be more than offset by increased productivity due to happier little serfs and a decreased necessity for finding and training staff. There is nothing in your description to suggest that "good management" is a feature of this company.
The concept of a "career path" is a bit of an anacronism. It traditionally ties into the public service or traditional heirachical organisations where one could progress from office junior to clerk to senior clerk to junior manager to senior manager. In modern flat or modularised business structures, this doesn't really exist. IT especially so, as a highly trained technical specialist may earn more than a non-technical manager, and wouldn't regard a management position as a promotion anyway.
Let me just note that not everybody wants a challenging job, or to learn something new. Some people like to learn one set of skills and apply them for the rest of their lives. Believe it or not, such people do exist in IT, and if you've got these on the staff of an IT section that simply does the same thing day after day, then you don't have a problem. Its everybody else who you are worried about.
The concept of a "dead-end job" however, depends on what the company actually has its web people doing. If all they are doing is programming the ecommerce site in ASP day-in, day-out, yeah - they are going to get bored. Who wouldn't? Where's the challenge? You need to identify what in the broader company goals will entail novel (and hopefully interesting) IT projects. This is what the CIO should be doing anyway. If there are no interesting IT projects, you aren't going to keep good people. Taking a stab in the dark, i'd guess that there isn't a lot going on in an airline that is going to keep somebody who likes to be challenged interested in the job.
So, the company needs to accept a level of churn, and senior IT people move to other companies for different experiences. This means streamlining the recruiting and training processes to ensure a constant influx of new blood and avoid the exodus of knowledge. (Skills can be hired, knowledge and experience are much much more valuable).
In general, pay won't keep most IT people in a crap job, so increase the stuff that we see as rewards - I call these "The three T's": Training, Toys and Travel. Training means our employees are more valuable to us, but also valuable to others. But happy employees may need a $10k to $20k increase before being tempted away from a "fun" job.
Finally, the goals need to be divided into a hierachy. The group needs to be rewarded, but as does the individual for their own achievements outside what they put into the group.
There was a recall in Australia in last month's Choice magazine, so presumably there are other Australian notices as well.
Chances are there is a recall notice for your juridstiction - its just that the link posted was from the canon-asia.com site.
How many wedding photographers turn up with a single camera body? You can't stop a wedding to wait for the photographer. The Pros I know take three - a digital SLR, a standard SLR loaded with colour film and a standard SLR with black and white print film.
Several Theories: - People in New Hampshire are too left wing to watch CNN - Until drunk chicks head to New Hampshire to flash their chests for beads, nobody is going to care. Seriously - the media coverage is shite. New Hampshire is a nice place (except for the taxes).
No. As in Osama.
Thats only if you play his interview backwards at 78rpm.
Nice story, but you omitted to tell us what it tastes like.
Fr33 K3v1n!!!!
I've got a personal principle that I should not punch people in the face. That principle doesn't see to have lead me to starve. Generations of stand-over men have made a good living by following your principle.
The Audiophile appreciates how music sounds on a high-watt system that's driven purely in the linear response region, has inperceptable distortion, crosstalk and noise, has a frequency reponse from 15Hz-22kHz that need not be flat, but must be pleasing to his ear.
The Audiophile understands that a great system starts with the speakers and works back to the source.
The Audiophile understands that spending time moving his speakers and furniture around the room will give you the best bang-for-buck improvement in sound.
The Audiophile understands that the difference between a CD player worth $200 and one worth $2000 is not as important as the difference between a set of speakers worth $200 and that worth $2000 - doubly so if you are keeping it digital until the tuner.
The Audiophile knows that the person who spend $1000 on each speaker cable is a wanker, while he calculates the per meter-resistance of his quality OFC cables and ensures that the paths to the drivers are as close as possible.
The Audiophile understands that a sub-woofer should not felt not heard. If its not SUBsonic, its just a woofer.
The Audiophile looks at the BOSE Lifestyle system with the contempt it deserves.
The Audiophile doesn't claim that the response of vinyl records is superior, but can appreciate the imperfections of the recording media as an important part of the whole listening experience.
The Audiophile doesn't store his CDs in the freezer, nor drawn on them with green texta.
You're not from California, are you.
I cry bullshit.
Show me a single Formula 1 car with 4 pairs of 15" subwoofers.
They don't know anything about innovation. No wonder they are being outsourced to india.
I have two theories on this
1. Candy is a tangible commodity. Credit card details are not. You give candy to somebody, you have no candy. You give credit card details to somebody, your credit card details are still there, in your wallet, next to the photo of the kids, so there's nothing wrong.
2. People are stupid. There are still people crying that wearing a seat belt is a volation of their rights. Obviously, anything that goes bad is somebody else's fault. Of course misuse of credit card details is not my problem.
By the way, send me your paypal login and password. I need to confirm that you are you.
If there's a hole in the market, start a project.
All the "Oh whoah is me, all the good tools are gone" just reinforces that if you want software, you have to pay for it some how. This could be in cash money - the traditional commercial software model - or in blood, sweat and tears - as a community contributer.
I think in the last 10 years I've contributed maybe a few hundred lines of code to open source projects. That's nothing compared to the number of lines I've used. I have no right to complain.
I agree - in principle - but principle doesn't put food in your mouth or pay the rent.
These guys did a wonderful job. Six years contributing to software that was obviously so good that other people could make money off it. Its one thing to work on an open source project in your spare time, or to be employed by one of the few companies that can leverage free software to make money, but these guys aren't. So unless you are working on the kernel, on samba or one of maybe a dozen other projects, you can't give up your day job.
Maybe by closing the source, one of their competitors will buy them out and they will have enough money to live on and write open source code. Rather than berating these guys for leaving the fold, thank them profusely for the six years of hard work.
If you don't like it, fork it. Once GPLed, always GPLed, and only V3 and above is going closed.
I don't think that apostrophe means what you think it means either.
Yeah. Bloody white-flag-waving garlic-frog-eating gsm-designing europeans.
Bastards.
This is not a case of "which is better", but a "what is right for what I want to do".
There are "Best Practises" for doing this sort of thing that take the religion out of server-farm design.
First thing to work out:
(1) How many minutes of APPLICATION downtime are acceptable
(2) How much money will I lose for each miunte the application is down.
Multiply (1) by (2), and you have a rough idea of your budget. Ideally, this should be the last thing - you work out your needs and then pay for them - and that was true five years ago. Today, IT budgets are a lot tighter, and the money often comes first. At least by taking this approach, you have a dollar value to present to the board to get funding approved before you spend a huge amount of time and effort putting together a proposal that will jet be rejected.
If this is only a few thousand dollars, you aren't about to rush out and buy Oracle RAC licenses. You don't need them. If you are going to lose tens of thousands of dollars per minute, you are going to go for big-iron servers running Oracle RAC and run a global cluster between HA data centers.
From there, you can attack the design from the Top-down.
You then look at your application, and work out how each component scales: Horizontally, vertically or diagonally (H+V).
In general:
- web servers don't need to be clustered as they aren't stateful
- Databases scales vertically, though if you've got the money, Oracle RAC is an option. Once you get above 4 CPU cores in the cluster though, you need to go Enterprise edition, and this is expensive.
- App servers may go horizontal or vertical, depending on the design of the app.
Once you know how stuff scales, you can start working out what will run where. Some applications play nicely together, and can be combined. From there you can start to work out what OS's you need, and from that the hardware platform. Yes, I know this runs contrary to most people's design philosophies (is, choose the OS, then the app), but 90% of the time the app has dependencies that will limit the OS.
Designing a data center shouldn't be as detached from personal preference as possible. The obvious link is that you don't spend huge amounts on one OS if all your in-house expertise is in another. But this is one of the last filters, not one of the first. It may be cheaper to roll-out Solaris (for example) and hire or train to get the expertise, than it is to port the app to (say) Windows.
All Japanese seafood research involves a hook. This is just an exension of their use of whales for scienfic purposes. mmmm... scientific purposes in garlic butter.
26 feet > 8m in japan.
No. They said workers. Reading Slashdot is not work....
No.
Cool. So this is the first real-world implementation of Wi-Fi-Fly-Hi-Ji technology!
I've been creating proteins by hand since I was 12!