Journyx Project Management Blog

PhoneMyPhone.com allows you to cause your cellphone to ring in order to escape a bad date or a boring meeting. “Oh man, sorry guys, I have to take this…”

I would never do this, of course.

- Curt Finch, Journyx CEO

Money is tight in times like this, and morale can get low. Know what Journyx CEO did a few years ago that really lit a fire beneath the salespeople? He told them that if they exceeded their quota by 33%, he would dye his hair the color of their choice. It was an incredible long shot. A totally safe bet. Soon the confidence of the sales staff was such that he decided to tell his wife about this great idea.

“You promised what?”

“Well, it was a long shot, honey. They’ve never…”

“Have you lost your mind. Dress silly. Do anything. But don’t screw up your hair!”

Then he got a series of lectures about hair chemistry and sure enough, he learned a lot.

But a bet is a bet.

Admit it – you’ve always wanted to know a little bit more about your friends at Journyx, the people who make your life easier by providing the top web-based solutions for time tracking, invoicing, project accounting, resource management, cost reporting and more. Well, the wait is over. Over at the Journyx Facebook page, we are honoring our valued (and quirky) employees via…

The Journyx Employee Hall of Fame!

Head over there now to learn more about Scott, our Grumpy IT Guy, or Troy, our less grumpy Technical Support guru. Better yet, “like” Journyx on Facebook so that you won’t miss all of the other employees who are yet to be featured. (We will pretend that you are doing so for sheer love of Journyx and not for the chance at an iPod Touch.)

Karl Richard at ProjectConnections came up with a humorous example of “A Project Manager’s Facebook Feed” that is worth checking out. Here’s a sample:

Karl Richard posted a note: HEY!! I Finally PASSED THE PMP EXAM!!

PDU4P: Congratulations, Hey, you only have three years to rack up those PDU’s. Better get started now.

PM Fellow: Excuse me, but you seem to have forgotten that it’s PMP®, not PMP. You’ll need to correct that.

Loving Wife: Does that mean we finally get you back home to do some chores?

Hello, Gentle Reader. Can I ask you a question? Do you have any children?

I remember when my son was 2 years old. He seemed to think that just because he wanted something, he should be able to have it. You couldn’t reason with him; he was only two. If you didn’t give him what he wanted, he would throw a temper tantrum. Sometimes his mother would give him whatever he wanted just to shut him up. That never helped. It just created a larger sense of entitlemtent for the next time, and there was no argument against it, since she had just given in.

Alright, I don’t actually have a son, but I’ve known plenty of kids who acted just like that (myself included). All children act that way at some point in their early lives, when they’ve not yet “gotten over” themselves, and when they still think that the entire world revolves around them. It’s called egocentrism, and Piaget theorizes that this stage occurs somewhere between the ages of 2 and 7.

On a completely unrelated note, I was talking with my McUsers the other day (all 4 of them) and they suggested that since we have “so many” Macintosh users these days, perhaps IT ought to give them special software and special considerations. Now I understand that Messiah Jobs has recreated our childlike sense of wonder, but did it necessarily require a childlike sense of math to come along with it? Let’s put it this way. Assuming I have 10 employees at Journyx (we have more), you’re still 40%, and only 40%. While it’s a relatively-large tail in such a situation, it’s still not large enough to wag the dog, children.

As I denied this request, I had one of the McChildren say to me, “But I’m a special case.” Oh, yes. Of course. I completely forgot the “special case” clause. You see, this particular developer has development environments installed on his personal, not-backed-up workstation rather than the RAID-ed and network-monitored VM build station which others use. Yessiree, Bob! You’re a special case alright. You’re just Yet Another Damn Mac User (YADMU) who ignores policies and procedures because they just don’t apply to you.

After this conversation, I then had 2 of the YADMUs come to me individually to “present their case” for why they should be given special treatment, special hardware, and special software. I spent the next 30-40 minutes attempting to blow them off while they treated me like a special specimen who should probably be wearing a helmet. I finally resorted to the 1st Law of IT: If you ignore them, they eventually leave. They did. That was nice.

Personally, I have nothing against the Macintosh. Actually, I think that Apple has put out a pretty fantastic product. It’s just that I believe strongly in the proper tool for the job. Breaking down my 4 Mac users in the company, we have “the web guy” which makes sense since he’s producing content and posting web stuff, and it makes his life easier. We have 2 professional services coders, and that makes perfect sense, since they… umm… spend most of their time in a terminal window… on a Linux server… writing code. Okay, maybe that doesn’t make any sense. Finally, we have a developer. See the part about the professional services coders, except this guy also builds our Windows installation on his Mac. While that’s a “neat” thing to be able to do, I certainly wouldn’t chock it up under “business-critical” when an equivalent Windows machine costs roughly 20% of what his Macintosh cost. Oh, we also have a couple remote users who use Macintosh, but they don’t count since they’re not here.

I guess what I’m getting at, here, is that I have nearly 100 machines up and running in our infrastructure at any given time. You’re a lousy 4%, guys. 6% if you include the remote folks. 2% if you only include people who actually NEED a Macintosh to perform their job more effectively. And, you know what? In most companies these percentages are going to be about the same, so where do you get off with a childlike sense of entitlement?

Oh, I forgot. You’re a special case.

Hello Gentle Reader. This month I am going to regale you with some of the top “rights” that people seem to assume they have, as seen from an IT perspective. I’m sure you all know some of these people.

1. I have the right to do 50% less of a job and assume that someone else will clean it up.

Wow. I don’t even know where to go with this one. I should have started with something else.

No, really, you don’t. You do not have the right to do half of a job just because you think it might be easier for someone in IT to complete it for you. This reminds me of working at UT when frazzled freshmen would come running into the lab at the Zero Hour needing a computer and waving a sheaf of papers, begging me to do everything but actually type their paper which was about to be late. They were 17 or 18 years old; I sort of expect it from someone that age, but after that? Really, people?

2. I have the right to a 2nd (or 3rd) monitor because someone down the hall has one.

No. No, you don’t. If you need extended real-estate for some BUSINESS reason, we can probably make that happen, but unless the business makes the standard desktop setup include 2 monitors, you don’t have any right to that whatsoever. Citing that “so-and-so has an extra monitor,” doesn’t work for two reasons. First, in all likelihood, “so-and-so” needs two monitors, and that would be why it’s there. Second, I assure you that “so-and-so” didn’t whine to IT that he/she needs to keep up with the Jones’ – they requested it with a good business reason.

3. I have the right to a new machine because:

This is a common misconception. You have the right to a new machine when your manager budgets it a thing for you. If it is up to IT to provision the entire company from our budget, then you have a right to a new machine based on an end-of-life policy determined by IT and agreed to by the principals in the company.

4. I have the right to have my problem prioritized much more highly than someone else’s because:

You have the right to get out of my office. The squeaky wheel might get the grease, but it’s a temporary fix. The squeaky wheel gets replaced or stuck in the trunk as a spare. The squeaky wheel rarely remains part of a well-tuned machine. Remember that the next time you think that a problem should be prioritized. Perhaps you should just ask where on the list you are and why. If you don’t understand, that’s fine. If you’d like to discuss prioritization based on importance, that’s fine too. But do not walk into IT with your head held high, assuming that because it’s You, we will drop everything.

5. I have the right to complain about things not getting done after I have willfully violated procedure.

Ahhh, yes. When you have not followed procedures and things get dropped through the cracks, do you really think that we did it on purpose, or is it possible that we put these procedures in place so that things would NOT drop through the cracks? Think about that for a second. Is it possible that we like our jobs? Is it possible that we want to keep them? Is it possible that we would prefer to go through the day without pissing people off? Is it just
possible, then, that these procedures are there to help you as much as us? They are.

To be honest, though, sometimes when you violate them, we do ignore your request entirely then pretend to have forgotten it. You can tell this because when we do, we usually make a pointed comment about the fact that something got violated, and that must be why we forgot
about it.

6. I have the right to violate policies of other departments because they are inconvenient to me.

See above, and be careful, guys. I know a few people who got fired over doing this consistently. Really, we usually put policies and procedures into place to protect (in order), ourselves, our clients, and you. When you violate them, you usually cause a large number of people (yourself included) unnecessary pain and work.

7. I have the right to go complaining to everyone that can make anything happen if the answer I receive is “no,” because:

You have the right to ask your question. We have the right to answer it correctly. Every now and again, “no” is the proper answer. I know you probably don’t like it, but, no, I’m not going to buy everyone Microsoft Office 2007 when there’s a free converter pack for the older versions. It’s just not going to happen unless you want to pony up the dough. Now that you have your answer, however, feel free to go complain to your boss, my boss, the officers of the company. Create a firestorm if you like. Just remember this: IT has a very long memory, and when you do that, it is personal. Also, it’s not just IT that sees and remembers when you act like a baby. It’s everyone you involved. Not us. You.

6. Say it, forget it, write it, regret it.

If you write an email where you denigrate and berate someone, there is now written evidence that you did so, and it WILL come up at your review. That said, this is not an implicit suggestion that you go close your coworker’s door, roundly and soundly berate them, and leave feeling smug. Rather, what I’m trying to suggest is that you should write down whatever it is you want to say and then leave it sitting for an hour or two. Maybe overnight. If you have a close friend with whom you work, or you’re personally close with your boss, you might ask them to review it prior to sending. Let’s look at it another way, shall we? You’re either right, or you’re wrong. They’re either right or they’re wrong. In most cases it’s a combination of all of those. If you’re 100% right, you have nothing to lose by waiting to cool off before you send that note, and if you’re 100% wrong, you’ll thank me later. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve violated this rule (usually directly to my boss) and had to apologize later for acting like such a jackass.

7. Socialize!

I truly hate enforced socialization, free beer notwithstanding. I loathe it. I would rather have my arm broken in most situations. However, when my sales team hits their numbers for which they’ve been struggling all quarter, and they invite me to join them in a celebration, how do I look if I turn them down? When the company throws a “company appreciation” thing, and they’re (purportedly) trying to appreciate me, how do I look if I don’t go? Right. If you go out with them from time to time, if you hang out a few times outside of work hours, you look less like a machine and more like a human. People are more likely to respond positively to someone with whom they’ve spoken personally than someone who seems a black box to them.

8. Tell them your hopes, your dreams, your fears!

Okay, maybe you don’t want to go that far, but have a personal conversation with the people in your office. Get to know their kids’ names and their spouses’ names. Tell them what you do in your spare time. Become human. Topics to avoid include Star Trek, Star Wars, which of the two is better, fart jokes, sexist comments, and the intricacies of any code you’re working on at the time. Listen more than you speak.

9. Document your work

My CEO was telling me about working on computers way-back-when (think “vacuum tubes” — he’s pretty old) and asking a kid sitting next to him, “How did you do that?” The kid responded, “I’m not going to tell you!” For quite some time, IT was a magical kingdom wherein only the wizards (IT folk) could live happily, and we guarded our secrets jealously. This is pretty
common for a new knowledge-based field. Look back at the history of guilds and so forth. That time has long since passed, however, and “job security through obscurity” really needs to go away. Other people must be able to understand what you’ve done, why you’ve done it, and how to fix it if you’re unavailable. No one thanks a person who leaves a company in an incomprehensible mess. You will gain far more job security by professionally documenting and resolving problems than you will by trying to become indispensable by keeping it in your head.

10. Lighten up

Laugh at jokes, even if they’re at your expense – especially when they’re at your expense. When making jokes, make JOKES, not insults. Accept jokes at your expense, but never make them at someone else’s. Remember, you can choose to make friends at work, or you can decide that some people with whom you work aren’t worth your time. Either way, you have to work with them. Be gracious. Be helpful. Be professional. Above all, be polite.

I hope with these few points y’all will see what I’m getting at and lighten up a little bit. Remember, if everyone thinks you’re a jerk, and you think everyone’s a jerk, it’s quite possible that the majority opinion is correct.

Hello again, Gentle Reader. Today I was reading Slashdot as I scarfed down a burger, and I came across a long-standing complaint from a relatively new IT worker.

The title of the post was “How Do IT Guys Get Respect and Not Become BOFHs,” and the guy who wrote it seems to be in a bit of a quandary.

This is one of those long-standing “complaints” that IT whiners… err… staffers have, and I gotta tell you, it makes my blood boil. There’s a line from one of my favorite movies (Grosse Pointe Blank) where John Cusack says, “If I show up at your door, chances are you did something to bring me there.” Similarly, I want to point out to all of my IT brethren, “If people are treating you like something that’s stuck to the bottom of their shoe, there’s a damned good chance that your own attitude caused it.”

This is not to say, of course, that there aren’t jerks in the world, and it’s certainly not to say that we don’t encounter them. The nature of IT is such that if you have one jerk in your company, you are eventually going to have to interact with him or her. Put your best foot forward, and do your job.

On that note, I’d like to offer 10 humble points and pointers for my brethren.

1. You don’t know everything; stop acting like it.

You didn’t go to law school, graduate school, nursing school, college on an athletic scholarship, paramedic training, screenwriting seminars, business school and the seminary. You might have gone to a couple of those, but you know what? You don’t know everything. The fact that you can defragment a hard drive does not give you the right to treat someone else with disrespect because they do not know how to do so. I guarantee in most cases, that person knows more about their job than you do.

2. It’s not usually the user’s fault if they get infected.

Often I’ll hear IT folk complain about having to clean a machine from a virus, and usually derogatory comments about the user are made during this tirade. Alright, guys, really, c’mon. Most infected machines happen that way BY ACCIDENT. When you denigrate a user for something outside their control, you are really only asking them to avoid you in the future, and, trust me, you REALLY want your users coming to you at the FIRST sign of trouble, not after they’ve been infected for six weeks.

3. If there weren’t issues, you probably wouldn’t have a job.

IT folk often complain when they have to solve problems that are well within their job descriptions. I’ve never really understood that. I see it as a 2-pronged situation. First, well, I’ve got something to do. Not that, in my particular job, I’m usually lacking. I’ve worked hard enough and long enough that I’ve entered into a position where it’s also my job to be proactive and steer our company through upcoming hurdles prior to encountering them.

IT, however, is by nature a pretty reactionary field. Much of our time is spent reacting to problems. That brings up my second prong. Look, mom, job security! You see, it’s the rare company that’s going to employ you full-time if they have no problems. My suggestion would be stop complaining and understand that it’s your job.

4. They’re users, not losers.

This is very similar to point 1, but it’s a bit more subtle. The problem is that IT folk who understand subtlety probably don’t often make this mistake anyway. You see, by making jokes about your users, by calling them dumb, by bitching about them after work, you’re fostering, in your own mind, an Us vs. Them mentality. There’s an Eastern philosophy that translates roughly to say-do-think. The idea behind this is that if you say something long enough, and if you start to do things to back up what you say, eventually your brain will believe it, and it will become true. If you constantly refer to your co-workers as idiots, you’ll start to do things that reinforce this, and you’ll start to believe it consciously and subconsciously. This will not make you welcome at the company picnic.

5. By the way, it’s losers, not lusers.

Stop using stupid tech speak. It makes you look, at best, aloof, and at worst, lazy, stupid or geeky. Spell words out properly. Somewhere along the way you were presumably taught things like grammar and spelling, comma-splices and capitalization, alliteration and repetition. Use these things. Communicate professionally. This means using actual words, not 3l33t speak. If you wouldn’t write it that way to your grandmother, don’t write it that way to anyone else. If you cannot spell, use a spell check utility.

Forgive me, Gentle Readers, for I have sinned. It has been only a week or so since my last Grumpy IT guy, and violating all rules of deadlines, I’m writing this one just a wee bit early. Whyever would you do that, Grumpy IT Guy? you might ask, and I have 2 responses to that. First, mind-ya-business! Second, okay, really it’s because sometimes something will just annoy you so very, very much that you have to rant about it immediately or go kill someone. Since I’m at work, eliminating my coworkers when they didn’t actually do anything to deserve it (yet) doesn’t seem quite right.

Anyway… Last night my wife asked whether I’d be willing to hook up our projector and veg out on the sofa watching movies. Since I had just bought the proper cable to hook up my HD cable box to my projector, I said “sure,” and went about it.

Imagine my surprise when an unnamed cable company tells me onscreen, “Hey, you can’t do this – it violates copy restrictions.” Specifically, it said, “Copy Protection. The DVI/HDMI output is blocked. Press select to cancel.” I assumed that this was due to the fact that the cable box was still in the booting process, and while I waited for it to boot, I got the stellar geniuses from the cable company on the line to help me, a 30-minute procedure in and of itself.

Once they were online, I found out that cable boxes can sense what’s on the other end, and they disallow projectors. That’s right. I can go to a local store and legally buy or rent a projector for use in my own home. I can then take it home, but I cannot use it with my cable. This is clearly spelled out in my usage agreement with the company. Oh, wait… no, it’s not. By the way, that little gem took my support brainiac about 20 minutes to find out whilst I was on hold.

In light of this, I’d like to offer a few suggestions and things to watch for.

To the companies out there:

a) If you’re going to cripple your product, don’t call it “a free full-featured version.” Many times I’ve downloaded a trial version of a product to test out capabilities only to find out that those capabilities aren’t enabled for me to evaluate. I can, however, spend $600 to find out that it’s inadequate to my specific needs, and, thank-you-sir, but you opened the box, so we can’t accept the return. I’m going to give Journyx a big pat on the back, here. We don’t do that crap.

b) If you’re going to have restrictions in your usage agreements, bullet point them out in large text. Failing that, go ahead and actually INCLUDE THEM somewhere in the agreement. Credit cards, airlines, cable companies, I’m looking in your direction.

c) On that note, “this contract may be modifiable by us at any given time, but never by you, and we won’t tell you, but it’s still your fault” is complete and utter blatant disregard for contract law. I’d like to see someone take some of these jokers to court on that crap at some point. Extended warranty folks, credit cards, cable companies, I’m looking in your direction.

To my Gentle Readers:

Stop putting up with it. Take it to whatever level you can. Scream at supervisors. Write letters. Write to the oversight committee if there is one. Write your congressman. Write your local news programs. Stop putting up with it. If all else fails, sue.

Perhaps if we all just stopped letting ourselves get pushed around, maybe companies would stop doing it.

Hello again, Gentle Reader. If you’ve been keeping up with my rants, perhaps you’ve noticed that most of the time you’re all at fault. Yes, we in IT blame you for everything. One of the nice things about being in IT is that we can almost always twist the situation around so we’re not to blame. Ah, it’s a nice life.

However, I do have to admit that sometimes even those of us in IT make mistakes. Yes, I know. You’re shocked, and you’ve probably just lost all the confidence you ever had in our happy little world, but yes, Gentle Reader, it is true. Sometimes (rarely, and with appropriate witness-eliminations) we do, in fact make mistakes.

The most frustrating part about making mistakes in IT, though, is repeating the dumb ones and never learning from them.

For your amusement, I include several mistakes I have personally made, repeatedly, over the years, and will probably make again.

1. Spending lots and lots of time debugging a network connection issue without checking the cable. I last did this little gem about 6 weeks ago. I estimate that I have lost about 2-3 months of my life working needlessly just because I didn’t check the connection first.

2. Running as a super-user with the thought, “I’m good enough not to make THAT mistake.” Hours of data recovery later after an “accidental” delete of some important data (usually recursively), I swear I’ll never do it again. A few months or years go by, and I am once again good enough that it will never happen to me. Nope, that can’t happen. No way. Right. So…here we go, again.

3. Not documenting a strange scenario. After spending 4-6 hours debugging an obscure problem on someone’s system, I think, “Wow, that was a fluke. It won’t happen again.” Several months later, when the solution has happily slipped from my brain, that exact same ugly problem rears its head again. It’s a toss-up whether the 4-6 hours of repeat debugging and fixing is more frustrating than the little voice in the back of my head that says, “Didn’t I just fix this? Dammit, what was it?” Guess what. I don’t document it this time either, do I?

4. Not backing up my own system. I can at least justify this one. I don’t keep important information on my PC. It’s all on the network, backed-up, etc. However, when I have to reinstall my machine, there are always a few little things that were on it that made life easier, were simpler to find there, or were just plain not used by anyone but me. So, now that the new machine is ready, I back it up immediately! Uh-huh. Yeah, right.

5. No code-review or best-practices for “one-off scripts.” This one is also slightly justifiable. Slightly. I mean, if I write a single-use script for a particular IT purpose, I do not expect someone else to incorporate it as the underlying mechanism of their nifty new feature somewhere else. If I had… well… I probably still wouldn’t have had it code-reviewed, because it’s MINE! ALL MINE! MINE, DAMMIT! The problem, of course, is that I work in a collaborative environment where I constantly lean on other people, as most of us do, and when I have to do so, I feel that I have the right to expect their stuff to work and be readily understandable. My colleagues often remind me of this particular double standard, in not-so-nice words…

6. Assuming a solution to a problem before investigating it. Ever hear the phrase, “So-and-so doesn’t listen?” Most people really don’t, if you think about it, and sometimes in my professional life I’m guilty of this cardinal sin. Rather than listening to what the well-meaning victim is trying to tell me, I assume that I know more about the problem. This usually leads to an hour or more of fruitless labor where listening to the complaint or actually reading the email instead of assuming would have saved everyone a lot of frustration.

So, yes, Gentle Reader, even we IT gods fall victim to these sorts of things from time to time, and I have to tell you, in the grand scheme of “grumpy,” ain’t nothin’ makes me more annoyed that taking way too long to solve a problem because I’m the one at fault.