Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Just to prove I'm not part of the conspiracy against Chrismas, here's a Merry Christmas for all you that celebrated it (sorry I'm late), and a Happy Hanukah, Joyous Kwanzaa, Cool Dwahili, etc.

I'm on vacation and will resume bloggging on January 3 when I return for a new year of work.

BTW, it's strange to go from Minnesota to Arizona. I don't think I could get used to living in the desert but it's in the middle 70's and quite nice. We hiked up Camelback Mountain, which is right in the city, and that was rigourous and really, really dry. When you get near the top you can see all the golf courses irrigated with the precious groundwater or the water diverted from further north. Sedona tomorrow.

Have a good week.

Thursday, December 22, 2005

Two Things and Then....Anger

First, by request, the title of the book that I've pulled my business essays from is "Best Practice, Ideas and Insights from the World's Foremost Business Thinkers" Perseus Publishing, 2003.

Second, my son called me on point 5 of my last blog about whether something we KNOW can be false. I think the debate about what is knowledge and what is belief underlies some of our headlines these days, particularly the evolution vs. intelligent design debate. I'll debate it with him next week.

I've been mulling over what to write about Widgets, where people are being "asked" to work very long hours, sometimes six or seven days a week to meet ridiculous commitments to the customers by upper management.

The more I thought about how to respond, the more I asked myself what compels me to respond at all. I had to dig a little into that dark closet that is my mind but I found the answer today.

I'm angry at that place.

I'm angry because I had to leave a job that exactly fit my skills and abilities and that involved working with some of the smartest, most interesting, and most fun people I have ever known. I had to leave because the games played by many of the managers and the utter contempt of the top management for realistic planning created what I felt was a hostile, stressful workplace. The stress was eating away at my entire life. When someone in management sneered at me and asked "Why do you work here?" I knew I had to go.

I'm also angry because the people still at Widgets, people that I truly care about, are treated worse than I've ever seen anyone treated in an organization (except at the Going Postal Service I suppose). They are treated badly while being promised it will all get better if they can just get past the next deadline (which leads to the next deadline). They are treated badly and rewarded with pizza, snack bars, and standard job benefits like training which is portrayed as an amazing concession by management. The people who run the place understand very little about who works there and what they want and need. In fact, they hardly understand the Internet or how you organize work for that medium.

Yes, I have a good, if not exciting, job at an excellent company where my coworkers are friendly, cooperative, talented and professional. My manager is funny, realistic, and appreciative of what I do on an ongoing basis. My psyche recovered when I left Widgets and I also got back several hours each day that I would have been working. I should be happy...I should drop the whole Widgets thing.

Unfortunately, I'm still angry at that place. I think I'll be angry for a long, long time.

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Today's topic is knowledge. I'm partly reacting to an essay titled, "Managing What We Know" by Laurence Prusak.

1)Knowledge is more than information, it's information and experience combined. You can also learn things by extensive study but the advanced student tries to also experience the subject (i.e., a French major goes to France).

2)The best way to teach/train someone is for the teacher to share the experience of the subject with the student.

3)People often don't share their knowledge because they are unable (because of time or ability) or unwilling (no incentive) to do so.

4)People are divided up in organizations without a good understanding of what they know. Everyone wants to draw organization charts, not knowledge charts. (I started "evangalizing" about organizing people according to knowledge near the end of my employment at Widgets--I'm sure everyone has forgotten about that by now.)

5) There's a difference between knowledge and truth. Knowledge is socially constructed--if we all agree on a fact, then it's a fact, even if it's false. (e.g., Most Americans probably still believe that Al Quaeda was active in Iraq before the US invasion).

6) There's a kind of knowledge we can't explain, sometimes called (among other things) procedural knowledge. How far do you have to turn the car's steering wheel to make a right turn? You can't explain it, you just know how to do it.

I think we all wind up in situations where we need to share information or we need to learn to do something. What should we do first, what's a good strategy? Thinking about knowledge helps you make those decisions when you need to and every time you try, you learn how to do it better.

Sunday, December 18, 2005

One more week and then vacation. I have a lot to do on Monday and three hours on the phone on Wednesday with people at the other location, but by Thursday it'll get quiet at work. On Friday everyone will, I'm told, be out of there by 1:30.

I have a few interesting business essays still to talk about--one on Knowledge Management and a few on leadership. I think the essays I've talked about already are the most pertinent to my own and the Widgets situation. I'll cover the rest this week.

I'm looking forward to my first week off in a year. If you work, shouldn't you have and be able to use your time off? Shouldn't they make you take your time off so you can fresh and enthusiastic? I'm really so sick of getting up five days a week with very few breaks (apologies to my Widgets friends working nearly every day for much longer hours than I work).

I got the information for my legal insurance this weekend. I can call a lawyer line and ask about all sorts of stuff. I'm going to call about an unresolved issue at my last workplace and about doing a will. They also have a web site with downloadable forms for common legal transactions and for living wills.

Thursday, December 15, 2005

This week I was encouraged to sign up for one Saturday this year as the representative of my organization for the monthly software release. It's actually two Saturdays since I have to shadow someone before I "solo." It's surprising that they would trust me to do it but I'm okay with it. I did the same sort of thing for years at Widgets during launches except now I'll be coordinating people who are testing the software as soon as it's launched.

My group is going to grow quite a bit in 2006. That's mainly tester jobs, testers being programmers who really like detail. A lot of the work is writing the test cases then scripting them in various ways. They pay pretty well and it's a very nice, well run group. If you're interested let me know.

I met another ex-coworker of mine as I was walking up the stairs to lunch. We both stopped, pointed at each other and said the same name out loud. (He has the same first name as me.) We were both tech writers at Not Big Blue. In fact he and I did a presentation together in San Francisco at a Sun Jump Start conference. He left there pretty soon after I did and has been at Laws R Us since. The tech writing group at Laws has seem a lot of turnover and turmoil (normal for tech writing groups) so he's had good and bad times there. That's four ex-coworkers from Not Big Blue that I've found.

One more observation. I've ridden the parking lot shuttle busses twice since they started running in late November. What I've noticed is that even in bad weather (I rode it when it rained and when it snowed the other day) the bus is almost all women. The men just trudge through it, which I normally also do.

The other interesting thing is that even though a lot of people ride the bus in from the parking lots, not many people get on the waiting busses at the end of the day to ride back out to the parking lots. I still haven't figured that out. Anyone have any theories?

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

My seven hour class on the legal and regulatory system was good. I was surprised how much of that stuff I remembered (three branches of government, federalism) but I didn’t know much about legal practice (criminal vs. civil). There are intriguing questions like how could OJ be not guilty in criminal court and guilty in a civil proceeding (different burden of proof, no right not to testify in civil cases, etc.)

We were also given an introduction to how legal and legislative information is published (in consecutive order, in subject areas, etc.), who publishes it, and what the competing products are. I picked up the meaning of a lot of company acronyms.

I left home fifteen minutes early this morning and got here right at 8:30 when the class started. Driving in snow storms is annoying. Surprisingly most of the class was there when I got to the classroom.

I did manage to sneak in a flu shot at lunchtime. I was worried that there would be a long line but when I got to the door there were three nurses standing around waiting for someone. They started to jokingly fight over me until I picked one. With all the pandemic publicity, I suppose the regular flu doesn't seem so scary anymore and people are just skipping the shot.

Now I’m headed out to soccer through what will be an abysmal traffic jam on 35E. The traffic should be cleared up by the time I head home.

I haven’t heard much from Widgets in the past few days as people put in their 18 hour days to prepare for this week's launches for the Network Who Should Not Be Named. I’m withholding comment until then.

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Food and Learning

Today was holiday pot luck day. Considering that I work in a place with a wide diversity of national backgrounds, it was disappointing that it was the same potluck you see everywhere in the upper midwest. There was the usual section of meatballs, cocktail weiners, and sloppy joes in crock pots, a macaroni and cheese section and the required pasta salad section next to the standard veggies and dip. The only interesting thing was a delicious carrot desert that you see in Indian restaurants. I did my usual peanut/sesame spicy noodles, which got some good comments--I put a lot more hot stuff in this year and it was way better than previous versions.

Yesterday was Sri Lanka day and the Diversity committee put on a lunchtime event. First there was a tabla player and slides of Sri Lanka, then food and a talk about the country. I didn't stay for the whole thing but it was nice.

Today they had a three hour play about the life of Thurgood Marshall that the lawyers went to for continuing learning credits. I was going to go for a few minutes just to see what it was like but I never got around to it.

Tomorrow, I have an entire day of class on the legal and regulatory system. That sounds like what they tried to teach me in high school but now I work with these public records every day so I really do need to understand them. The teacher is the same one I had for my product intro course--she's funny, explains things well, and moves things along. I'm looking forward to it.

I also signed up for a 20 hour project management class that will take me very close to my certification requirement for project management. Well, close to the classroom requirement.

I did have plenty of time today to download Firefox 1.5 and a bunch of extensions that were talked about in Wired. The weather extension is nice but I'm not sure about del.icio.us. I'm intrigued by the extension for adding your own JavaScript to pages but I didn't have time to figure that out. More stuff to play with when I have time.

Monday, December 12, 2005

The Cart People

Before I talk about the cart people, I just want to say that I've been communicating with various people back at Widgets and I'm speechless. Give me a few days and I'll comment.

****

There are all sorts of people wandering through my company campus, keeping things working correctly and looking nice. There are cleaning people who periodically appear at bathrooms and kitchen areas and leave them spotless. There are tech support people who "come down" when you have IT problems and the person on the phone can't help. There's all sorts of food service people in the cafeterias and delivering food to meetings. There's even the plant people who water and wipe the multitude of plants everyday.

My favorite group is the cart people. Beginning on my first day of work I noticed that several times a day I would see someone casually pushing a small equipment cart down the hall. I never saw them stop anywhere or even saw a cart parked anywhere.

Were they from the help desk or doing cube setup? I didn't think so since I never saw them at anyone's cube. I was curious. I watched and waited for a clue.

A week into work I came upon a cart person lurking outside a meeting room. He was obviously hiding from the people in the room, poised behind his cart, waiting for something. I walked by slowly, watching, but nothing happened before I turned the corner.

Finally, two weeks into my job, I saw a cart person in action. A cart guy stopped, picked up a conference phone from the cart, carried it into a meeting room, plugged it in and left. Ah ha! The cart people are the ones that bring phones (the company doesn't have a conference phone in every meeting room since there are so many), projectors, DVD players and any other AV equipment you order for your meeting and then take it away when the meeting is done and take it somewhere else.

It doesn't seem like a bad job so I'm putting it on my list of possible future careers. Only one year until I can switch jobs.

Thursday, December 08, 2005

While I had a mostly dull day, I did spend an interesting hour at a demonstration by three lawyers and a law clerk of how they use my company's product. What was most interesting was their thought process before they used the product. Not only did they consider what the most efficient search terms and connectors would be, they also planned how to do the search in the cheapest way possible. (A lot of customers pay by the transaction, so every search costs them a certain amount of money, following links cost money, printing costs money, etc.) The online research cost is passed on to their customers and the customers don't like to get big bills.

One of the lawyers was asked to show how he used our competition's product to do the same search and then was asked what he liked about their product. They were all asked what they would do to improve the product.

The auditorium was full--I saw all sorts of people including programmers, testers, and librarians. I saw a lot of people taking notes.

In the morning I decided to study up on my next project so I got my usual at the coffee shop and then found a somewhat comfortable chair in the library and read. That was a peaceful half hour.

I haven't said much about my first project manager brown bag a few days ago. Project management is a craft/discipline/profession that brings order to the world and these brown bags discuss how this can be done. This particular session was about creating a communication plan and there was a wonderful example that everyone praised and asked not-too-penetrating questions about. In the midst of the discussion I asked my coworker, who is involved with the project the communication plan was for, how well this plan worked. She said, "I've never seen this before." No one had communicated the communication plan. ;)

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Not much time for blogging. I went to soccer from work and spent a lot of time before and after talking about the situation at Widgets with my former coworkers.

I still hear from people that even though Widgets is a hell hole, it's a cool place. I know when you're sitting there and there are some fun things going on (cool things invented by the workers, not the company), the hopeful person looks for the good stuff and says, "Well, it sucks but it's cool." Hey, no company is cool that has so little respect for people that it regularly demands all their time and energy to finish poorly conceived and planned projects.

At my new workplace we're having a serious discussion/disagreement about resources, testing and the launch date for a feature but it's a discussion that includes all the project people and starts with the idea that the feature MUST work correctly at launch. We'll come up with a consensus that we'll send to the upper management who, I'm told, will agree since the consensus will be well thought out and documented. That's the respect I look for in a workplace.

I wouldn't call my workplace "cool" but it's good for now. I don't think there's a perfect workplace, just places that give you more of what you need and want. You put in your five or six years and move on...

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Geeking/Flexing, not Breaking the Workplace

Geeking

I did some good work today, got a thumbs up from my manager on my first pieces of work, and attended a not very exciting project manager's forum.

The highlight of the day, however, was my tour of the Laws R Us data center. I think you have to be a geek to be excited about something like this but I was really impressed. Our group was taken downstairs to a huge complex of room containing numerous mainframes, thousands of Unix and Windows servers, rows of routers, many terabytes of storage and some of those cool robotic tape silos (that one is for you, Soccer Girl). There was a battery room with a frightening number of huge batteries and a room with generators that can produce a couple of megawatts each. The amazing thing is that there is a twin data center one quarter of a mile away in an underground bunker.

Top acronyms during the tour:
CRAC - Computer Room Air Conditioner
NAG - Network Assistance Group

Flex, Don't Break

Wow, this is a great essay. In "Making the Workplace Flex, Not Break" Ken Murrell sees the problem this way

"The roadsides of business growth will be littered with the husks of organizations that once enjoyed success but then couldn't change. Often the failure will have occurred because in the process of building success the organizations broke their people. In the past this breakage was most often a matter of physical breakdown; now more often the breakdown is in the spirit of the work force. Sadly, this also creates a disintegration of the workplace community often to an irrevocable degree."

What to do? Build a flexible workplace by doing the following:

"- Align work priorities with a clear vision.
- Involve everyone in deciding those priorities.
- Define and publicly state how people will work with one another.
- Promote the idea of the whole person at work
- Reward risk-taking to enhance experimentation and discovery.
- Boost performance by boosting learning."

Monday, December 05, 2005

Monday was a big day for my latest project. I went to the weekly project meeting with the entire team and then I held my first quality meeting for an hour with the people that will test the project. This is a REALLY quiet group--I know they have all the information but they needed coaxing to get them to talk in the meeting. I did a lot of "So does anyone have any more dependencies? Anyone? Really, does anyone have any?" Kidding, but that's close to what it was like. I felt like I was back teaching my required writing class again with a room full of students staring at the floor.

I went to an hour presentation on billing, which is a big deal at my company. Someone in my group wanted to learn more about it so they suggested a training session for everyone who wanted to come and it was arranged. I learned a lot but they didn't finish the material. There's going to be a follow-up session.

Our lead group met to finish meeting about the meeting that we want to have every other Monday. We're all agreed now about what we're going to meet about and I actually think it'll be useful. Well, I hope so.

I had a nice talk with someone that works with one of the three types of content that the company sells--the type that no one was able to explain to me. She explained it all pretty easily and walked me through the process of migrating the content to XML, which is what she mainly does. The process is time consuming and gets held up in long queues and by random errors. She's working a lot of hours to try to get her section of the content converted by year end.

My business book quote today is from "Managing Today's Angry Workforce" by Florence Stone. Florence thinks the biggest causes of anger today are
- downsizing, or the threat of job loss
- the pressure to do more with less, or the loss of existing resources
- disempowerment, or the loss of control over work to be done
A lot of the essay is about the way people are acting out their anger in workplaces, but we know that in Minnesota there's just an increase in passive agressiveness. Anyone know what that looks like?

Sunday, December 04, 2005

Friday, I made progress on writing quality strategies for my projects and I'm about ready to put some of my documents on the intranet for my manager's review. I'm a bit nervous about it but I do think the documents are okay.

Also on Friday I went on a one hour tour of the company's printing plant and bindery. It was really fun to see the entire book printing process, following books from composition to plating to printing to binding. The operation is in a building as big as three football fields and runs 24 hours a day, every day of the week. I'm going on a data center tour next week.

I had another Widgets guest for lunch on Friday. People feel guilty if they leave the Widget headquarters for lunch since they are working long hours and all this weekend to launch all the projects coming up. The cruise ship blows people away when they visit but at this point I'm getting used to having all the amenities.

On Friday I received my Widgets stock certificate and an invitation to a special stockholders meeting in late December. I had a whole packet of information on the financial reorganization of the company, stuff I never would have been told if I was an employee. I'm going to carefully review the materials and maybe show up on that day to vote my astounding number of shares. I'm still thinking about a shareholder resolution.

I was thinking the other day that I often blog about Widgets and Not Big Blue, but rarely about prior jobs. A lot of them were short-term contract and freelance jobs and weren't particularly interesting. The only other long stretch I've done in my life was at the Going Postal Service. That was a long time ago and I can't think of much positive to write about from that experience except for learning some contract law during my three years as a union steward. If anything relevant comes up from this dark past, I'll try to remember to bring it up.

Thursday, December 01, 2005

Okay, before I do my business philosophy ramble (it will be entertaining) I want to report that I successfully did my job today. I led a meeting where I walked a project team through a quality strategy document. We had a very good discussion about general scope, risks and dependencies of the testing and some people were suprised at the size and possible complexity of the project. People are very intent on doing a good job and everyone contributes. Yes, they push their group's view of the process but they are very cooperative and enjoy working together. I was very happy after that meeting.

At that point I still had two hours until the huge Holiday party so I went up to the library to unwind. I was browsing around the display of new "business" books when I saw one that might be interesting and picked it up. It's full of short essays about good things to do in a business and I found things that really sounded right to me. Tonight I want to write about one of these essays.

It's called "Finding and Keeping the Best Talent in the World" by Richard Leider. His contention is that talented people want "purpose driven" workplaces. How do you build a purpose driven workplace? You answer the following four employee questions over and over.

1. Where are we going?
2. What are we doing to get there?
3. What do you want me to do?
4. What's in it for me when I do?

Good pay is essential, he says, but there needs to be more than that. If a company can't answer those four questions, the talented people, looking for "purposeful, challenging work" and the chance "to express and develop their strongest talents" will quit.

I was going to write about appreciation today and thought a lot about what I really liked from my management. Is it the thank yous and occasional bonuses that make a difference to me? Nope, what I really want is those four questions answered because then I know what we're doing and what my part of the effort is and how the company will show their appreciation. If someone answers those questions for me they're showing me that they respect and appreciate me and they need me to be part of the effort.

The next essay discussed driving fear from the workplace. I think fear comes when there is no openness or trust and definitely no shared purpose. Widgets has some people who use fear as a management tool and high levels of sarcasm and burn out are the direct result. Oh yeah, and me quitting.

My current manager talks to me about those four questions. The conversations at our weekly one-on-ones often are rambling but he likes everything out in the open as I do. The only fears I have at work are the normal fear that I'll screw up but I'm pretty good at working through that feeling. It's great to just do your job as best you can and know that you'll definitely get something out of it if you do good. That's good enough for me right now.