My World and Welcome To It

A Blog for Shirey Consulting Services – Views and Thoughts About Just About Everything

Archive for June, 2010

Intro to Technology – Part 1

Jun 8

Posted by dshirey in Uncategorized | Comments off

I could be wrong about this, but it seems like there are an increasing number of people who make technical decisions who really don’t know anything about technology. 

 

I know, that sounds snooty, and I don’t mean it that way.  It’s just a fact of life in today’s world.  I mean look at hospitals.  They used to be run by crotchety old doctors who had a soft side for career nurses and young interns.  Now they are run by ‘administrators’ who don’t know a compound fracture from a subdural hematoma.  It’s just the way things are now. 

 

Some of these technology deprived people are financial types, but many are quite frankly the CIO’s or other IT heads that are being recruited from the general management ranks rather than from those who have made technology their lives.  And so, I thought that in the spirit of détente and to prove that I really am a team player, I would put together a couple of short posts that cover things that every ‘techie’ should know. 

 

And the first is – there’s no free lunch. 

 

Just as explorers spent much of the 17th and 18th century looking for the Northwest Passage that would make going from the Atlantic to the Pacific easy, so today’s technology leaders are anxiously leading expeditions looking for zero cost IT and ERP.   

 

That is, they have bought into the tales told in taverns and inns by traveling salesman and conmen, about fabulous ERP packages that will provide their every need, or platforms that are nearly free and then practically run themselves once installed.   Their eyes aglow with the promise of low cost IT that is ridiculously simple to use, they gather their forces and like Ponce De Leon, set out for the promised land. 

 

And to that I say, as Cher did in Moonstruck – ‘Snap Out of It’!   There is no free lunch.  If you want something that is cost efficient and which pretty much runs itself then you are going to have to make some very good platform and software decisions and then invest a fair amount of time and care tuning them to your particular needs.    

 

I am personally sick to death with hearing about CIO’s who have started grand initiatives and three years later they are still not quite ready to cutover and the budget not only for the project but for the ongoing support dwarfs what was being paid before.  And if that isn’t enough, they’ve just discovered that everyone needs to be off the machine(s) in order to run planning.  What were you guys thinking?    

 

This may come as a shock to some but sales and marketing people get paid to sell their products, not provide unbiased and bottom line information.  Of course what they say sounds good.  It’s supposed to!   It’s up to you to read between the lines and see what is not being said.   Haven’t you people ever bought a used car?

 

In the end, whether it’s an IT platform or an ERP system, it’s not the money that’s important.  Just spending a ton of cash is not a guarantee that it is going to work or that it will be cheaper in the long run.  You need to look at overall system integrity for IT and business fit for ERP.  And that is something you are going to have to dig out of the details to make sure it really will work the way the sales force says it will. 

Tags: , , , , ,

How Stupid Are We?

Jun 7

Posted by dshirey in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

For reasons of my own, I have been trying for some time to set a baseline for human stupidity.   Or, if you are an optimist, intelligence. 

 

In other words, I want to try to plot the lowest common denominator for how smart (or stupid) people should be to function in our modern world.  Unfortunately, it seems to be a moving target, and it doesn’t seem to be moving up. 

 

I was watching Alexandra Steele  the other night and she did a little feature about 5 tips on running in hot weather.  Now, I don’t run, my knees and lower back put the kibosh on that, but I do cycle and so I thought this might be just the thing to give me an edge this summer. 

 

I don’t remember all five, but the first was startling.  ‘Run in the morning or evening, when temperatures are cooler’.  Whoa.  Talk about a bolt of lightning.  I never would have come up with that. 

 

They followed that up with an admonition to ‘drink plenty of fluids’.  Again, wow!  Unfortunately they didn’t indicate what particular fluids would be good so for my next ride I took along a bottle of bourbon.  I may not do that again. 

 

The third was ‘wear light clothing’ along with the brilliance to ‘dress weather appropriate’. 

 

I don’t remember the rest but can everybody see what’s wrong here?  This advice is the kind of thing you would teach a five year old.  And yet this is expert level advice.  What’s up with that? 

 

And then it hit me.  This is the same kind of advice that we get everywhere.  On TV, in magazine articles, and, especially, on the web.  It’s the kind of thing that the author can come up with in 15 seconds.  It’s non-controversial.  There’s no way anyone can file a lawsuit against you if it somehow goes wrong because it’s so milquetoast that it can’t go wrong. 

 

And, for the most part, it’s not news to anybody. 

 

There is a whole industry out there today that is selling information, knowledge.  But they have yet to prove to me that it’s info worth having.  And it certainly isn’t making us any smarter.  We’re just learning to think shallower and be satisfied with less from our content makers.  I weep for the future. 

Tags: , , ,

So, How Long Will this Take?

Jun 5

Posted by dshirey in Project Management | 1 Comment

There have been a thousand studies on the question of ‘why projects fail’, but many times it begins before the project is even started.  And it begins with a simple question from the person who wants to project done to the person who is going to do the project – ‘rough guess, what is this going to take?’. 

 

Those words are the beginning of the end for many projects.  The idea is to give a rough guess of what it is going to take to do the project, just something that will tell the requestor if this is something they want to proceed with or not. 

 

The problem is, the estimate given is always based on incomplete or inaccurate information and is always, always wrong. 

 

You see, the thing with people is that no matter what their intent when they ask that question, what they are told becomes part ‘truth’ and so if you say a ‘couple of weeks’, it becomes ‘two weeks’ which becomes ‘two weeks from the moment you said that’ which then becomes hopelessly too short to ever be realistic. 

 

The end result is that no matter how the project turns out, no body is satisfied.  The requestor feels like you were not being honest with them, all they wanted was a rough guess and no rough guess worth a tuddle’s hoot could have been as far off as your was, and the doer is annoyed because it would have been nice to know up front that when we talked about creating a report that we were really talking about creating a report from data on another system and then emailing the report to them without any specialty software to do so. 

 

Every project, whether it is waterfall, agile, or some mutant version of both must start with a solid understanding of what needs to be done so that an estimate of what it will take to do it can be developed.  And a solid understanding requires time to interrogate users about what they want and dig to the bottom of the pile.   

 

There is no such thing as a rough estimate.  The world is too complicated.  And the sooner people who want things done realize that there is no free lunch, no easy way to eyeball a project, the better off we will be. 

 

Project Management – it is a science, not a guess. 

Tags: ,