As a software development management consultant, I'm always looking for innovative ways to improve employee morale.

My friend and associate, Greg Wright, told me about an interesting process for improving morale that his company practices.

They have an appeasement committee and budget.   The appeasement committee is a group with one representative from each department.  Each month, a different member of each department is represented in the group.  If certain corporate goals are met, the committee plans an event for the company for that month.  The events are simple and not too expensive:  bowling, or mini-golf and pizza, etc.

What I find valuable about this example is that five important objectives are met:

1. The individual employees are empowered by being able to participate in the suggestions to improve morale.  This personal involvement is more meaningful to them, and more appreciated.


2. If a committee and a budget is in place, morale-building events won't take a backseat to unexpected fires, or brand new deadlines.


3. The effort-vs-reward principal is set in motion, which is one of the foundations of capitalism.


4. Corporate goals get communicated, and emphasized, and are constantly on everyone's minds.


5. Team-building outside of the stressed work environment will occur.  This brings a fresh dimension to work-place teamwork.

Morale building is important because it separates the sweat-shop jobs from the career jobs.  This simple process can do wonders for your organization.

Mike rry
www.RedRockResearch.com

I value Excellence over Heroics.

'Excellence' can be defined as "the crisp execution of established procedures."  Think about that for a minute.

Do you know of a software development shop where several prominent developers often stay up late into the night, or come in regularly over the weekend to solve high-profile problems, or put out urgent mission-critical fires?

The thrill of delivering when the whole company's reputation is at stake can be addictive.  I remember once staying up 37 hours in-a-row to deliver an EDI package for a bankers convention.  I was successful, delivering the application just before it was to be demo'd.  I went home and slept for 24 hours straight afterwards.

The problem with 'Heriocs' is that the hero is compensating for the effects of a broken process.  Think about that for a minute.

If heroes are needed to make a software development project successful, then really something upstream is broken.

Most problems requiring heroics at the end of a project stem from improper effort estimations, inability to control scope, inadequate project tracking transparency, mismanaged Q/A scheduling, unnecessary gold-plating, or inadequate communication between the development team and the project users/stakeholders.

A well-organized development group humms along like a well-oiled machine.  Proper project scoping, analysis, design deconstruction, estimating, tracking, and healthy communication between development and the users/stakeholders will bring that excellence that trumps heroics.

Hey, I hear that Microsoft is looking for some Heroes.

Mike erry
www.RedRockResearch.com

NewsCHIME.com, the 'News from everywhere, every 10 minutes' website has officially passed the 100+ repeat visitor mark!  This site was launched in May of '08 with no advertising at all, and now enjoys more than 100 repeat visitors, and over 1000 unique visits per month.

I classify a 'repeat visitor' as somebody who has come back four or more times.   The number four is kind of arbitrary, but I think somebody who comes back only once or twice is not really a captive audience participant.  They are more link a potential customer peering into the store window.

NewsCHIME.com was created to bring headline news to people who, like me, love to read the news.   We love it so much, in fact, that that's all we want to see on the site--news headlines and nothing else.

Have a BlackBerry and a few spare minutes between (or during) your meetings?  Go to NewsCHIME.com and check out what's happing across the world!

Need to do research for education, work, or personal interest?  You can search for headlines topics from the past 18 months or so on the search page.

This works great if you are expected to know about something newsworthy in a short amount of time.

For example, a search for 'Obama' or 'McCain' and a quick headline perusal will give you a one-sentence summary of everything noteworthy these candidates have done for the past 18 months.  10 minutes on NewsCHIME and you be more infomed about the upcoming presidential election than more than 300 million other people.

Need research project material on the mortgage meltdown, type 'mortgage' and you'll see the unfortunate play-by-play.

Be sure to take note of what you will NOT see at NewsCHIME.com.  You will not see lots of useless links to various websites that have nothing to do with your topic.  You will not see pictures of dancing people,  and you will not see ads from GM, Chevy or eHarmony.

I almost forgot to mention, NewsCHIME has free news alerts!  That's right, Free!  Sign up and select which search criteria you want, and as those terms are named in news events you'll be the first one to know about them.

So, impress your friends, impress your boss, impress you teacher.  The faster you can get at information, the more beneficial your decisions will become.  Enjoy.

Mike J.
www.RedRockResearch.com

The value of information...

Here's a fun site if you are a news junkie.  www.NewsChime.com is a simple site that grabs news headlines from major news sites and lists them in an easy-to-peruse text-only format.

I've got the site on my PDA which makes reading news articles perfect for that boring meeting or that inconvenient 10-minute wait you hadn't planned on.

An interesting feature on www.NewsChime.com is the ability to search for keywords in past news headlines.  Want to know what has been newsworthy about Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama?  Housing Crisis?  Gas Prices?  You can easily search for past headline keywords with this feature.

www.NewsChime.com also allows you to get news alerts sent to your phone or email.  I have news alerts sent to my phone about mortgage prices, home-loans, home-lending, and foreclosure because we talk a lot about this at work.  It's been fun to be the first one at the office to know the latest.

www.NewsChime.com is a free service.  Enjoy.

Mike J. Berry www.RedRockResearch.com

In a conversation with a friend once, they jokingly described their inability to play racquetball against other seasoned players as "They are playing racquetball, while I am just hitting a ball around the room."

I'll borrow that reference and apply it to Software Production Support.

Is your Software Production Support group "playing racquetball," or are they "just hitting a ball around the room?"

From a distance they can appear like the same activities.  On closer inspection however, one is much more organized, elegant, patterned, and proactive--while the other is only reactive.

Finding the order from all the choas separates the effective from the ineffective.

There are three particular areas your Software Production Support team should be focus on.  These three areas are:

1. Maintaining Systems
2. Managing Customer Expectations
3. Become a Quick-Reaction Force

1. Maintaining Systems:

Think of your production servers like a fleet of cars.  In a fleet plan, the company sends every car to get an oil change after x number of miles, a tire rotation after y number of miles, and a general tune-up, fluid change, etc. after z number of miles.  This pattern repeats itself for the life of the car that is serviced by the fleet manager.

How often are your server hard drives defragmented?  How often are the transaction-logs backed up?  How often are the indexes reindexed, and the statistics updated?

How often are memory settings adjusted for performance? Latest patches applied? How often are your servers checked to see if there any impending disk space issues?

To maximize system performance, create a "fleet plan" for your servers which checks all of these items at regular intervals.

2. Managing Customer Expectations:

If a server fails, do you know which systems depend on it? If a database goes corrupt, do you know which applications need it, and which corresponding business units will be impacted when that happens?

Do you have a way to communicate to those groups immediately?

Create a dependency map for your products.  A dependency map illustrates which servers host which databases, and then which databases are used by which applications, and finally the names, numbers, and email groups of the business users that are affected by that server/database failure.  This will enable your team to proactively manage your customers expectations.  You can notify them before they have to notify you.

3. Become a Quick-Reaction Force:

The SWAT team, the FireStation, and the Ambulance services all have something in common: they are ready to take action at a moment's notice.

They have the information they need available to them, and additional services available with a simple call.

Do your products have support information organized and readily available?  Do you have the names and numbers of your account representative for each third-party product or tool you support?  Do you have the product-support phone numbers and your support plan credentials readily available?

Do you know who knows what about each application in your enterprise?  Who programmed it originally?  Who has supported it lately?  Which business units use it?  Where is the source code located?

Keeping information about each system updated in a central location should also be part of your "fleet plan."

Another effective tool for a Quick-Response group is a monitoring system.  Something that indicates the overall attitude of each of your production servers?  Disk Space available? Will the system reply to a ping?  Is SQL Agent running? Is that required Windows Service up and running?  Monitoring tools like Nagios can do this for you.

Another great idea is to keep a lessons-learned log for each component you support.  Track problems, fixes to problems, assumptions to be confirmed, and ways to test if the component is functioning properly.

All of these pieces in place will make your production support much more effective.

So, think about it...is your Software Production Support team playing racquetball, or are they just hitting a ball d a room?

Mike J. Berry
www.RedRockResearch.com

Decades ago I had a friend tell me this question was posed to their High School class. I never found out what the class concluded.

Over the years I have thought often about the answer to this question.

My earlier conclusion was that professionalism meant a separation of work and personal life.  This is something that I think the older generation is better at.  The younger generation seems more transparent about personal matters in the workplace.

As the years go by, however, my experience doesn't support this conclusion as a definition of professionalism.  I find many professionals are actually quite personable.

This has caused me to re-evaluate the answer to this question.

I think the answer I would give now is that professionalism means ownership.  It means responsibility and accountability for producing the appropriate results.

I walked into a CostCo last week looking for a large household item.  I found a smiling attentive employee with whom I asked where I might find the item I was looking for.  He said "I'm new here," and shrugged his shoulders.

There was this moment of pregnant miscommunication.

No doubt he was unable to help me due to his present unfamiliarity with the store layout, but as a customer I felt neglected.

I thought to myself, "Well, are you going to get someone for me who knows where this item is?" And then I realized I had, perhaps, misaligned expectations for customer service from a new employee at a wholesale warehouse selling everything from car tires to margarine.

Then the light bulb went on---a more professional employee would have "owned" my problem.  They would have found someone who did know where my item was and would have walked with me until my problem was solved.

Suddenly I realized I had the answer to my decades-old question: Professionalism means ownership.   Ownership of issues.  Ownership of assignments.  Ownership of tasks.

My thanks go out to the anonymous clueless employee.  After several decades, I finally have my answer.

How would you answer this question?
Mike J. Berry
www.RedRockResearch.com

A Quality Management System, sometimes referred to as a Total Quality Management (TQM) System, is a simple concept that will dramatically improve software production quality over time.

Companies that don't have a quality system are commonly reacting to production and support issues due to omissive events.

A simple rule of thumb is to ask yourself how many fires your development team has put out this month.  If any come to mind, then chances are you don't have a proper quality management system in place, and should read on...

I remember early in my career I struggled to get my employees to follow our procedures.  Whenever we'd encounter a production problem with our software, it would inevitably be a result of someone not having completely followed an established procedure.

We would have a big discussion about what should have happened, and about how "we can't forget to do that next time," yet we'd experience the same omission later.

I would get frustrated because I could never seem to find a way to get my team accountable for following our established procedures--until I discovered the "Quality Management System."

A Quality Management System has the following three elements (the Three P's!):

1. Process (documented--most of us have processes or procedures we are supposed to follow.)


2. Proof (a separate checklist, or "receipt" that the process was followed for each software release.)


3. Process-Improvement (a discussion, and then an addition or adjustment to the documented process.)

Most companies have an established--and hopefully documented--software development process.  (If you don't you can download one from my website for Waterfall, or Agile here.)  This is the first 'P' and should be in place at every established development shop.

A great question to ask the team is "How do you know the process was followed for each release?"  This is where you may get the deer in the headlights response.  This is the second 'P' and is the piece missing from most software development shops.

Think of this 'Proof' document as a checklist accompanying each software release.  The checklist would include every major step in the documented process, names of team members performing specific functions, and locations of final source code, test scripts, install files, etc.  The checklist would also require a series of quality checks.  Ie: Were requirements signed off by the customer, stakeholder, tester, and developer?  Was the help file updated with the new release number and appropriate functionality?  Was the source code checked in?  Where is it located?

As problems occur, the checklist would be added to so that the product would be protected against a similar failure in the future.

The governing driver considered here is that one particular problem might broadside the development team once, but after the process is improved, that problem should never occur again.

For example, you might have a stored procedure that goes into production without a "Go" statement at the end.  After the error is discovered, and fixed in production, your team should have a discussion and conclude that a checkbox needs to be added to the quality document stating "All Stored Procedures Confirmed to have 'Go' at the end."

From that point on, whenever a stored procedure is moved into production, the developer presenting it must check for 'Go' statements at the end and then sign their name at the bottom of the checklist.

This is the difference between process improvement, and hope.  Many companies view process improvement as a discussion and some verbal affirmations.  What they are really doing is "hoping."

Actually, the "act" of process improvement is physically altering a written process or procedure.  This is the real definition of process improvement--the third 'P.'

The final endpoint of a quality management system is to achieve excellence.  I've heard excellence defined once as "Crisp execution of established procedures."

You can't have excellence without procedures, proof, and process-improvement.

Mike J. Berry www.RedRockResearch.com

Do you have one of those executives that harasses you with status updates to projects, yet never attends the status update meetings?

Perhaps they call you, email you, stop in to your office, and want to know what the latest on project X is?

Is the behavior effecient?  What suggestions do you have about how to convey project status communication within your organization?

Mike J. Berry  www.RedRockResearch.com

I was sitting in a KFC eating lunch, reading the slogans muraled on the wall.  This particular KFC is supposedly the first KFC in America.  Yes, it's in Utah.  Along with some chicken legs and a drink, you can enjoy a small exhibit showing Colonel Sander's original briefcase, white suite, shoes, etc.

One mural read, "Somehow we'll do it, by the principles of thrift, honor, integrity, and charity."

I thought for a moment.  Some of the financial service companies I've worked with would fail if they valued charity.  Then I thought about how trust is a wonderful interpersonal dynamic, but the companies I've worked with in the medical field allow no latitude for trust.  Everything must be written down and authorized by a credentialed physician.  Walk into a pharmacy and you'll need a signature on piece of paper to get a prescription filled.

Hmmm, just like charity is an anti-value in the financial services industry, trust is an anti-value in the medical industry.

I spent the day thinking about this new concept.  I owe the title of 'Anti-Value' to the Discovery-Channel documentary about Anti-Matter I was watching the night before.  I  guess I'm coining the phrase here, but it makes a lot of sense to me.  Normally, a value is something our society charish's, yet in a particular situation, or line of business--it becomes the wrong thing to do.

I started seeing how this concept can be applied all over to help clarify the decision making process.

I remembered taking third place instead of second in a Maryland school-district programming competition in high school because I let the guy from our rival high school cut in line in front of me to turn in his test.  When the results were announced we had both scored the same grade, but because he handed his paper in first, he won second place and I won third. (I beat him in the State programming competition the following month.)

I've never forgotten this experience, and actually now that I think about it, offering your competitor any leeway is an anti-value.

Some business meetings I've been involved in are a collage of participants cutting other participants off mid-sentence to make their point known.  Rude? Yes.  But, in fact, politeness may be considered an anti-value in these types of situations.

I think the concept is fascinating.  Just as a good value system should be in place to help an organization, department, team, or individual govern their decisions, an anti-value system can compliment a value-system by providing additional clarity for the decision making process.

One example of this is the U.S. government's policy on dealing with terrorists.  The government values having a "no negotiating with terrorists" policy.  As a disincentive to future terrorism, they have an additional policy to provide or produce exactly the opposite of what the terrorists are demanding.  The notion--to give them what they want--really becomes an anti-value, and is an additional input to the decision-making process.  So, in fact, their policy is set by values, and anti-values.

I hope you find this concept as fascinating as I do.  It was the best $7.79 I've spent on lunch in a while.

Mike J. Berry www.RedRockResearch.com

Marshall Goldsmith's New York Times Bestseller, What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful is an excellent self-help book for executives and managers wishing to improve their "soft skills" and other interpersonal traits.

Goldsmith is an executive coach who has worked with more than 80 of the worlds foremost CEO's.  As a symbol of his influence,  Alliant International University recently renamed their school of management after him.  With these credentials, probably anything he writes is worth reading.

In his book, Goldsmith lists twenty-one common "soft-skill" dysfunctions he has encountered while coaching top executives.   He explains that the higher you go in executive management, the more your problems are behavioral.  A few of these behavioral problems are as follows:

1. The need to win too much

1. Making destructive comments

1. Starting sentences with "No," "But," or "However"

1. Telling the world how smart you are

1. Speaking when angry

1. Withholding information

1. Clinging to the past

1. Playing favorites among direct-reports

1. An excessive need to be "Me" (or, "I can't change, that's just how I am")

1. Goal obsession

To get the whole list, you need to read his book.  The first half of the book details these ten and the other eleven common issues at length.

One of the primary challenges Goldsmith writes about is getting executives to understand how they are perceived by others in their work environments, and at home.  He separates our personal "perception" into four categories:

1. Public Knowledge (Traits known to others and self)

1. Private Knowledge (Traits known to self but not to others)

1. Blind Spots (Traits known to others but not to self)

1. Unknowable (Traits unknown to others, and not know to self)

Goldsmith says that the most interesting traits to examine and study are #3, the blind spots known to others but not to ourselves.  He provides a formula for detecting these traits, examining them, and fixing any negative discoveries.  The formula is:

1. Collect feedback from everyone around us, using both deliberate and subtle tactics.

1. Apologize to everyone for any negative traits.

1. Advertise that you are beginning a personal campaign to improve and that you would like their feedback periodically as you work on improvement.

1. Listen to feedback in terms of "what can I do in the future to improve" and not "what did I do wrong in the past" (one is positive, one is negative)

1. Thank people for their suggestions, and don't disagree with them.

1. Follow-up relentlessly.  This is the key to the improvement process taking shape.

He explains, for example,  that as a professional coach, he and a colleague call each other each evening and report to each other on the progress of their goals.  This simple practice enables them to metric their performance over time--the same thing effective executives do to examine trends in their departmental interests.

Goldsmith discusses several other topics in his book.  One interesting aside is a list of common reasons why goal setting can fail:

1. Time: It takes longer than expected, so it couldn't be completed.

1. Effort: It's harder than was expected.

1. Distractions: Nobody expected a "crisis" to emerge that took resources or time away.

1. Lack of Rewards: After they see some improvement, they don't get enough positive response from others, so they give up.

1. Maintenance: Once a goal is met, there is no fortitude to stick with the pattern that brought success.

One of the closing thoughts in Goldsmith's book struck me as quite novel.  As one of his executive coaching tools, he sometimes asks executives to produce a "How to Handle Me" guide for his staff.  This is a short memo detailing behavior, values, lessons from past experience, and input from past and present coworkers and direct reports.

As new hires are on-boarded, part of their welcome packet is the "How to Handle Me" guide from their manager.

I found the most valuable part of Goldsmith's book to be his formula for collecting feedback about others' perceptions of us, and how we can affect change within ourselves where needed.  I appreciated Goldsmiths continuous transcendent theme that all of these tools and dynamics also have value at home to improve our family lives and social relationships.  This was a reoccurring theme in his book.

I recommend Goldsmith's book for middle to senior level management, and to any husband or wife.

Mike J. Berry www.RedRockResearch.com