Journyx Project Management Blog

We in IT have a reputation for being grumpy. In our defense, it’s mostly because we have to work with you people. But all jokes aside, let me tell you what put me in such a great mood this morning. My recently revamped marketing department came to me and asked me whether or not Timesheet was green. I believe I quipped something about how it ain’t easy being green, and that, personally, I preferred my servers in a nice matte black.

I certainly can go on about how my S-a-a-S solution is, in fact, pretty green, what with high efficiency A/C units, double roofs and insulated walls at my datacenter. There is also the fact that there is less power-per-user in my installations than your own internal installation. And yet, you know what? It’s about more than that. Being green is important, but what is also really important to me is ensuring that my customers are up and running and happy 24 hours per day.

Perhaps one of my vendors will start painting the equipment that I’m currently buying a nice shade of chartreuse.

By the time you read this, I will be gone. On vacation, that is. And while I’m gone, Journyx will fall apart without me. Flames will rise from the earth to engulf not just my department, nay, but the entire company. From Development to Sales to Support and, of course, Marketing, the wails of the lost souls will fill the building and no one will be even remotely capable of functioning. When I return, there will be disaster after disaster that I alone will be able to clean up. There will be mountains of work piled up on my desk. And everyone will hate me, cursing my name as they vow to drive the hard-won relaxation from my bones.

Does that sound like how you feel about taking a little time off? If so, then you really should talk to someone about your martyr complex. Because no matter how guilty we as Americans are inclined to feel about taking time off from work, we really ought to. And I’m not talking some kind of “I’ll be checking email and voice mail hourly” thing here. I’m talking about an honest-to-goodness “I am not available. Sorry. I’ll be back in a week (or two, if you’re bold)” vacating (or, vacation) of the office.

Now I understand that there are some professions where you can’t really go on vacation. Transplant surgeon and owner-operator of a one-person consultancy come to mind. But really, everyone else ought to be able to take a least a few days off every now and then and think about something other than the Henderson liver/account. So unless there’s literally no one else who can keep the fires burning (or if Mrs. Sydney’s kidney is depending on you) then do yourself - and likely everyone else around you - a big favor and take some time off before the summer ends and the mad press to squirrel away nuts before winter really takes hold.

Say it with me. “I will be out of the office for the next few days. Please contact one of my able-bodied and intelligent coworkers if you need assistance.” Good. I know that was hard. Now say it again, and try not to falter. You can do this.

And if you can’t, well, I’ll send you a postcard.

- Andrew Trent, Journyx Director of Web Content

Hello, Gentle Reader. Welcome back to another installment of the Grumpy IT Guy. Rather than berating you and yelling, I’m just going to start out by asking you a simple question. Why must you turn my idyllic IT department into a House of Lies?

Over the years I’ve had several customers (internal and external) as well as personal friends requiring IT assistance due to anomalies on their systems. I noticed this particular aspect of you humans years ago when I ran a computer service company. When we ask you what changed, we’re not asking because we want to criticize you, although sometimes that just improves the whole experience. No, we’re asking because it will make fixing things a whole helluva lot easier if we know what happened.

Let’s turn this around to another industry for a moment, shall we? A priest walks into a doctor’s office. Okay, it doesn’t have to be a priest, and this isn’t really a joke. He says, “Doctor, my knee hurts very badly.” The doctor asks what he did. He says nothing. Don’t you think that if this guy was playing soccer, took a hard fall and wrenched his knee, that this is information the doctor might like to have?

Sure, sure. He’s a doctor. He can triage and find out what’s wrong with the knee without what you people seem to think are “unnecessary” back stories, but why not make everyone’s lives easier by being up front? In the above situation, you probably would have been.

Now, let’s invoke the power of 3…

You: “My computer got really slow. Nothing is working right.”
Me: “Okay. What happened? Has anything changed? Any virus notifications? Open any attachments? Do anything different?”
You: “Nope.”
Me: “So, you haven’t done anything different, and this just started?”
You: “Yep.”
Me: “Absolutely nothing has changed, and you’ve done nothing out of the ordinary?”
You: “Oh, well I did install this new version of iTunes.”

Why, for the love of everything with holes in it, must I ask three times? I usually do; it’s been a habit for several years. Two lies and the real answer. Almost always. With everyone.

Second, don’t get me started on iTunes. Maybe I’ll create a whole column about that.

Third, yes, I can triage the machine and find out why iTunes has suddenly decided to install 9 versions of QuickTime, 12 million helper applications, and basically do everything it can to overtake your machine. However, actually telling me this up front points me in the right direction immediately.

This happened with another guy I helped, after the problem had been resolved:

Him: “What could cause something like that?”
Me: “Usually an unclean system shutdown or a power outage.”
Him: “You mean like if a server closet gets overheated?”
Me: “Heat won’t usually do that if the box is still running.”
Him: “You mean like if a server closet gets overheated, and everything shuts down?”
Me: “Yes, that could certainly do it. Out of curiosity, why do you ask?” I sighed, knowing the answer.
Him: “That happened this weekend.”
Me: “So, um… when you said ‘nothing changed,’ you meant…”

Yeah. Installing programs, your machine crashing just prior to bad behavior… those things just don’t qualify as “nothing changed.”

Someone else entirely upgraded their back-end database over the weekend, but nothing changed. Someone else replaced a hard drive and reinstalled the system, and they couldn’t find programs that they didn’t install, but nothing changed. Someone else actually had a power surge which caught their monitor on fire, they replaced the monitor, but the machine was “acting flaky.” Nope. They didn’t mention the FIRE until later.

Sometimes it’s pretty obvious why we’re grumpy.

Yes, O Faithful Reader, it’s time for the next installment of Grumpy IT Guy. Why, you ask, O Sage of Silicon, are you grumpy today? Well, once again I had to deal with a @#$%^&* operating system. Several, in fact.

Am I the only person in the world calling for a change? ZD.Net recently wrote an article on the most annoying software products on the market today, and to paraphrase one of their statements, if I’m even aware of the existence of my operating system, something has already gone horribly, horribly wrong. This is true of every operating system out there today, and it went horribly wrong in the design phase.

Let’s take them one by one, shall we? First, let’s talk about the one I have to use most often: Windows. Windows NT 4.0 was probably the flagship operating system put forth by Microsoft to date. It was pretty darned bullet-proof, and it just sat there and let me “do stuff.” I could easily stop and start services, save, open and print, and it was pretty much running 24×7, once SP6a came around.

Then came Windows XP. Now I’ve got task bars with hidden icons, launch bars, buggy multi-monitor setups, HP printers that consume 100% of resources when they print (which they did NOT do under NT, thank you very much) and popups that tell me that I need to reboot or the update to my update software won’t update. Once I do that, another update starts, and I have to reboot. Then I have to reboot in order to reboot. Then, once that’s done, I’m gonna need to reboot.

Don’t even get me started on Linux. Ubuntu? It just works? Are you kidding me? If by “it just works” you mean “you can’t connect to a VPN” or “you can’t use wireless” or “I will crash when Flash or Java pops up” or “I will get in your face about updates that continually fail to install,” then I guess I have to agree. RedHat tacks the name Enterprise on the end. “Enterprise” apparently means the opposite on the update side, or “you can’t possibly update security errata, because you’re in dependency hell.” Here’s an interesting bit of homework for you. Go install RedHat (pick a version, any version after 3.0) without X Windows and printing support. Right. Go ahead. Yep, now reboot. Wait for it… Yep, that’s X Windows, the package you said “don’t install.” Oh, if you’re on 4.0, I sure hope you set up a non-privileged user on the screen they didn’t give you to do that, because you won’t be able to log into the console as root…

I remember recently setting up a Mac for a new employee here, and while my Crapintosh experience goes back to System 6, it’s been noticeably flagging. So, when I pulled this sleek machine out of the box and got it started up, I yelled across the office to a compatriot, “HOW THE HELL DO I STOP MY CHILDLIKE SENSE OF WONDER?!” He came over and pressed the mute button for me. While I no longer had to listen to Apple’s “Welcome to Your Mac” movie, there was no way out of it. This was a few weeks ago. I think the movie is just about done now. Hopefully my developer will be able to use her machine some time in Q2. Of course, when she does, she’ll have to learn an entirely new “intuitive” operating system. I won’t bother regaling you with stories of the counter-intuitiveness of Apple; I’ll just refer you to the definition of the word ‘intuitive’ and point you to a Mac.

When did operating systems become so invasive? Why do they have to do so much? I long for a return to the days of DOS when my O/S just sat there and waited for me to do something, then smiled happily and let me get on with my life. If I actually trusted Google, I’d revert to a thin client that ran nothing but a web browser, and I’d use nothing but online applications. It’s not that I don’t trust Google, it’s just that right after I wrote that sentence, I got an email from them asking why I didn’t trust them, along with several sidebar ads about anger management and zen. Creepy.

Of course, if I did that, I’d just have to choose between IE 7’s infernal nonstop javascript errors or Firefox’s 14 hour load time and constant 20 second interruptions…err… “notifications” that there’s a new version out…

- The Grumpy Journyx IT Guy

Yes, children, once again it’s time to hear from the Grumpy IT Guy. This one is actually being written the day after the last one reached your avid ears; that’s how grumpy I am right now. You want to know why? Of course you do, or you wouldn’t be readin’ my little piece here, now would ya?

So there I was, at the request of one of the executives, trying to download and install some sort of log analyzer for something he was doing, when the product site told me, “Hey, bonehead! You’re using Internet Explorer. We like Firefox. Nannynannybooboo!”

Alright, it didn’t really say “bonehead” or “nannynannybooboo,” but I sure felt it. I went ballistic.

This was the third time this week that I experienced what I like to call “Developer knows best.” If there are any developers out there, please listen up, alright? You don’t. That’s all there is to it. To force me to use a tool which I have not selected as being the best tool for my particular job because:

a) It’s easier for you to write in that one
b) You just “don’t like” the other prevalent tools in the arena
c) You’re trying to make some hippie statement about increasing market share

…is entirely wrong. I have, for a variety of reasons, chosen Internet Explorer 7. I’m not going to argue about Firecrap being better or worse than Internet Exploder. That’s your thing, not mine. I’m going to tell you quite simply that it is the tool I choose to use.

By the way, once I got the software installed, I saw no difference in usage. Yes, I checked.

Recently, a multi-protocol chat client we’ll call “Pidgin” ran into a similar situation. The developers decided that the auto-resize of a text window based on how much you’re typing is “much cooler” (or whatever idiot reason they chose) than the “manual resize” feature, so THEY TOOK OUT THE MANUAL RESIZE FEATURE.

Well, guys, people were using it. We were happy. If I wanted your application to auto-size, I’d turn it on. I don’t. Now, however, I can’t do anything but that. Oh, wait, I can uninstall it, which is what I did. Technically, I can ban it from use at my company. I think I’ll do that!

Actually, if I did that, I’d be inflicting my personal viewpoints on a base of users, wouldn’t I? I have people here using Outlook, Thunderbird, our web client, and some other tools I don’t know about to check their mail. Some folks use OpenOffice, some use Google Docs, some use Star Office, some use Microsoft Office. It’s the tool that makes them feel the most comfortable doing their job. I let them use it. Rather, more properly, I do not inflict rules and strictures upon them because I have some ill-conceived notion that my choice is better than theirs.

Let me explain a truism of programming to you. This is most recently attributed to Colin Powell, but actually comes from Helmuth von Moltke (the Elder). No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. How does that apply, you wonder? Well, it’s quite simple. No matter how good you are at writing software, you can’t possibly take all my needs into consideration. You can call your software “feature complete” if you like, but that doesn’t mean it does what the bulk of people want it to do in the way they want it done. You MUST, therefore, be open to input on how to make it useful for those of us who will be using it.

When a developer makes a decision to enforce strictures on his users, he is playing God. He might know more about writing the particular software than I do, but I can guarantee that I know how to do MY job better than he does. I wouldn’t tell a developer that they had to use a certain editor to write their code; they shouldn’t tell me I have to use a certain browser to see it.

Wake up, guys. You’re just becoming the cliché that you really didn’t want to be. Get over your God Complex, or get out of the field and go teach in a public school where your dogmatic insistence on opinions disguised as fact is an accepted norm.

- The Grumpy Journyx IT Guy

Hello children. It’s time for another installment of “The Grumpy IT Guy,” or what I like to call, “Why the Hell Can’t People Just Do Their Jobs?”

This month’s installment comes to you courtesy of a large telecommunications company who, for anonymity’s sake, we will refer to as “XO Communications.” We discovered last month that when you call our fax line from an XO line, it doesn’t answer. It rings forever. When you call from anywhere else in the world, it answers. This was a new development; it had been working just fine three weeks ago.

Now, this occurred right near the time that my Veep of Sales likes to call “End of Month.” Being March, it was also what my Leadership Team likes to call “End of Quarter.” They also seem to like to have these things called “sales” which do things like “fund payroll” and other minor details. Since I am strongly invested in my ability to continue paying my bartenders after work, it peaked my interest to hear, “THE FAX IS DOWN! THE FAX IS DOWN! NO ONE CAN SELL!”

Alright, well, that’s not really true. Our sales team is top-notch, man, and they can sell all day long, fax machine or no fax machine. However, I will admit that it is remarkably difficult to get the orders to them if, say, the fax machine is not working. I crawled out of my cave into the bright fluorescent-lit world of my colleagues and stumbled over to the fax machine. I dialed out, and it worked. I dialed the number with my cell phone, and it worked. I wondered why the sales team felt the need to turn my place of work into a House of Lies. I dialed the fax number from my office phone. It rang about 30 times before I gave up.

“Aha!” I said to myself. I liked the sound so much, I said it again, out loud this time. “Aha!”

I picked up the phone and called XO Communications. It also rang 30 times, but being used to that, I waited. At about ring 9,283,182, they answered. I explained my situation and they said they’d get right on it.

I received my ticket number via email and a few minutes later, I received a second email telling me the ticket was closed. “It’s a Time Warner number,” they said. Annoyed, I went to the online helpdesk and tried to re-open the ticket to explain the situation. This is not possible at XO Communications, you see, because once they kill a ticket, it stays dead.

I opened a new ticket, fully explaining the situation. Their response was that this is a Time Warner problem, and they closed the ticket again.

Irritated, I opened yet another ticket and waited. A day or more. Then I came in one morning and saw an email stating that the problem was resolved. Okay, not bad, I thought. Only 1 1/2 days to get this fixed. I picked up my phone and dialed the fax number, which rang… and rang… and rang. And, some say, if it’s very quiet at night and there is a full moon, you can still hear the ringing today!

Flabbergasted, I went to re-open the ticket. Oh, right. So I submitted a new ticket, explaining the situation again. It got closed. The problem was not fixed. I think we’re four business days (Thurs/Fri, Mon/Tue) into the process at this point; it is now April and a new quarter. I decided to call my sales rep over at XO. He got someone to call me back, they got a good line on the problem and they told me it should be fixed by morning. The next morning, I came in to find another email saying that the problem had been resolved. Yay for getting my sales guy to help! I picked up my phone and happily dialed the fax number.

Yes, you know where this is going.

I called my rep back and left him a voicemail. Left several that day, in fact. Left several more later that week. A week later, after I left a message telling him to come get his equipment and that we’re contemplating suing for breach of contract, he called me back. All of a sudden, XO decided to take me seriously, and I got some real techs on the phone. I was finally working with someone who had a clue!

After several technician phone calls (and two more closed, unresolved tickets later), here’s what we know. If you’re calling my fax line from an XO.com VOIP line, you’re not going to get through. Even though you did back around March 25th. They have, at least, conceded that this might be on their side of things.

And you wonder why IT is grumpy?

-The Grumpy Journyx IT Guy

Happy Hallmark Card Day, everyone. Err…Hallmark Store Day? Err…That Day That Guys Don’t Get to Watch Sports Day? Yeah. That day. Every man reading this post knows to which day I’m referring, and every guy out there feels my pain. My little bit is the Grumpy IT Guy, so let me tell you a little about how that Most Annoying Day (okay, it’s not really, but it should be) has started to cost you more, and why they’re blaming it on technology and our guys.

I love my wife very much. Very much. I like to buy her roses. I really do. It makes everyone else in her office very jealous. I can call my local florist in the morning and have a couple dozen roses that last for a week delivered that very day on most days. Yeah, you know where this is going.

Being The Guy Who Does His Christmas Shopping on Christmas Eve, let’s just say it was the morning of February 13th, and there I was trying to send my girl the standard chocolates + roses thing. I had seen three different ads from three online vendors on television during sporting events espousing their abilities to send at the last minute and promising prices well below $92,145 for a dozen roses. Anything below $10,000 is okay on VD.

I booted my “trusty” PC that morning (I literally had to kick it to wake it up), blithely ignoring all the work ahead of me because, well, I’m in IT, and I don’t really like to do anything; I just want to surf the ‘net all day. I browse over to each of these sites, and surprise, surprise! The prices for the roses are just as advertised! Wow. Each of these sites had advertised 12-18 roses for between $25 and $50. Delivered. I’m in. Watch the love meter rise enormously for me as my wife gushes at the pretty flowers and makes everyone in her office jealous, again! Score.

Proceeding naively to checkout, I found my bill suddenly expanded to the $120 range. For $30 roses. Hmm. Opening my cart I wondered what other little goodies they shoved in without telling me anything. Nothing. Where were the fees? Delivery. Perturbed, I went to the second site. Same thing. Then the third. Guess what? $150.00 at the third.

Alright now guys, here’s the thing. You sell roses all the time. I guarantee on May 21st, there’s no extra delivery fee. I can guarantee it because I’ve done it before - on a normal Wednesday for Thursday delivery, you don’t hit me with a $35 “rush” charge. I’ll even accept the $5.00 VD fee, since you’re probably passing it on from the local delivery guys, but come on.

1. You sell flowers for delivery. It’s what you do. The prices did NOT go up. You’re just gouging me because you can.

2. Your online transaction fees did not go up from last week for today. I promise. So, we’re gonna call your $20.00 processing fee that wasn’t even included the last time I did this what it is, and guys, that smells remarkably like what comes out the south end of a north-facing Longhorn.

3. Your rush charge is completely ridiculous, and you know it. You’re pocketing all that money. I know because I called a few florists that I know who were way overbooked, and while they offered to squeeze me in, they wouldn’t take an offered bribe of $50.00 to put me higher on the list.

Stop blaming technology, stop charging me “transaction fees” for the lowest per-transaction cost-based system in the world (the Internet), and stop telling me that they might not be there on time because “the system is overloaded and being slow.”

-The Grumpy Journyx IT Guy

Back in October we began a project to assess many of our internal processes, including those in my angry little world of IT.

This proctologic exam was undertaken to prove that, among other things, we keep private data private. The assessment proved what I already knew to be true. We do, in fact, keep private data private. That’s why we call it private. Go fig.

This whole thing was a new endeavor for me, and let me tell you, there are tender areas of my body that still hurt.

Now, to make an agonizing story shorter for your sanity, let’s just say that when we received the “draft” report* I discovered that many of the information in the 66 pages was just blatantly wrong. So I found myself in the unenviable position of rewriting the report.

Actually, it was worse than that. I couldn’t just rewrite the damned thing. Instead I had to give a point-by-point change list of what was wrong and what was right, because, you see, the folks doing the assessment had to write and sign off on the report themselves. CYA, thy name is the 21st Century business world.

The good news is that it was this very process that reminded us in IT here at Journyx of the usefulness of checklists. My suffering was assuaged ever-so-slightly by the fact that I was able to go through our checklists (expertly designed by, well, me) and use them to quickly and efficiently comment on each and every page where inconsistencies were found.

Some people call this kind of thing project management; I just call it getting my stuff in order.

It’s amusing to me that the very people responsible for handling the assessment do not have their own checklist in place and must rely on the people that they’re working with to ensure that the data they themselves have to sign off on is accurate. Think about that for a while.

*Whenever I hear the word “draft,” I remember one of my creative writing profs back in college who admonished us by saying, “Never waste my time with a draft. If you don’t think it’s a final product, what makes you think I want to read it?” I truly understand his point now.

-The Grumpy Journyx IT Guy

Okay, it’s January. But it’s now late enough in the month that all those New Year’s resolutions have likely melted away like ephemeral icicles in the Texas sun. Alright, maybe not for you, but definitely for some people. Like me.

In any case, this is my favorite time of the year to make real efforts at change. When all the glow and shine is off and things are starting to get back to normal. In other words, when no one is looking.

This year, as befits someone who works with timesheet software for a living, I’m going to approach my problems with time management. And I’m going to do it with time boxing. I’m not the sort who can dive whole-heartedly into a complete Getting Things Done methodology (I know, I’ve tried) - but time boxing I think I can get into. If nothing else, it will help me address my chronic near-ADD. It’s not really diagnosable ADD, of course, but a propensity for feeling soul-crushing boredom with whatever task I’m actually working on. I know that something more interesting is out there, just waiting for my attention, but normally I’m too bloody-minded to break my work up in the way that time boxing pushes you to.

To help me on my way to a time boxing title, I’m going to be using David Seah’s Emergent Task Planning form, which comes from his excellent Printable CEO Series.

Now if this works, I’ll finally have time (and focus) enough to take up that other pursuit I’ve been meaning to look into… Kickboxing.

-Andrew Trent, Journyx Director of Web Content

If I had a business critical project, and I could afford his day rate, I might be tempted to hire Darth Vader as my next Project Manager.

What makes Darth Vader a good Project Manager? I can see from your expression that I have some convincing to do. OK, it might raise a few eyebrows around the office, but let’s look at the facts.

If you recall, Episode 3 “A New Hope”, the first original Star Wars film, sees the evil Galactic Empire trying to build the Death Star. An ambitious project in anyone’s eyes. The project however was running behind schedule.

The poor chap in charge was informed by a very fancy video conference that Darth Vader was taking personal charge as the new Project Manager to get the project back on track. Darth was in true project recovery mode but how could he make the difference? He might have built C3P0 and a pod racer from scrap in his earlier incarnation as Anakin Skywalker, but he certainly had no major construction project experience.

Many organisations now elect to go this route. They have the subject matter experts but now recognise that project management requires a different set of specialist skills. The tools and techniques of project management can be applied on any project and a good Project Manager should be able to add value to any environment, whether it’s an IT implementation, a hotel build, an office refurbishment or construction of a Death Star.

Read the rest at PROJECTmagazine.