Enterprise Software Vendor Presentations

One of the greatest obsurdities I observe in IT are vendor sales presentations. For better or worse, I've had the opportunity to sit in on several of these. The experience has usually left me more confused about what the product does walking out. By and large, these presentations abuse jargon and buzzwords. They often use colorful diagrams representing the product with pretty shaded boxes and arrows, yet never really give enough technical detail to ask intelligent questions. Sure, these are often crafted for executives so leaving that level of detail out is appropriate. Still, I think a presentation is ineffective unless it focusses largely on: a product demo, product architecture, and extensibility and support of open standards. The sales people giving these presentations too often lean on buzzwords and cleverly named components and product-lines.

Being a fan of Spinal Tap & Office Space, I thought a mock-presentation would be appropriate.
It may not be a huge exaggeration to say many vendors could take the presentation below, swap in their company logo, and use it on their next road show.

Here's the presentation:

Decision styles & change management

The way top decisions are made is one of the most defining aspects of a team or organization's culture. The textbooks describe how leaders should swap decision-making technique depending on the situation at hand - see the diagram below.






However, the technique that a decision-maker chooses is often influenced by their personality and communication styles. For example, styles of leaders like Steve Jobs and G.W. Bush would be described largely as 'command', with perhaps moments of 'consultative' style. For leaders with keen vision & strategy, this can be extremely effective. Just look at the iPhone - an risky& expensive product to develop that happened to pay off big time. However, leaders who place bets on the command style stand to lose big time if those decisions don't pan out. The diagram below displays the relationship with culture these results can have... and I think it also emphasizes the positive cultural effects that inclusive decision-making and communciation can have.

Including teams in the input for every decision can be expensive time-wise, but can pay-off in more than just the quality of the decision. A strong two-way communication pattern between decision-makers and affected staff can buid a relationship of trust and respect that is important to maintain.

*P.S. - I'm not sure where these diagrams came from. I found them while cleaning my hard-drive... and they spurred this thought, so I figured they'd do more use in a blog than my recyle bin.

Software Development Project Template

So Microsoft Project is one of the more abused pieces of software out there...
One of the project 'templates' that come with Project is for 'Software Development'. Although you'd have to be a sorry excuse for a PM if you actually relied on this alone... I did find the list of tasks to be a decent reminder of what is often overlooked: (I've edited the list below down a bit)

Software Development Project

Scope
Determine project scope
Secure project sponsorship
Define preliminary resources
Secure core resources
Scope complete
Analysis/Software Requirements
Conduct needs analysis
Draft preliminary software specifications
Develop preliminary budget
Review software specifications/budget with team
Incorporate feedback on software specifications
Develop delivery timeline
"Obtain approvals to proceed (concept, timeline, budget)"
Secure required resources
Analysis complete
Design
Review preliminary software specifications
Develop functional specifications
Develop prototype based on functional specifications
Review functional specifications
Incorporate feedback into functional specifications
Obtain approval to proceed
Design complete
Development
Review functional specifications
Identify modular/tiered design parameters
Assign development staff
Develop code
Developer testing (primary debugging)
Development complete
Testing
Develop unit test plans using product specifications
Develop integration test plans using product specifications
Unit Testing
Review modular code
Test component modules to product specifications
Identify anomalies to product specifications
Modify code
Re-test modified code
Unit testing complete
Integration Testing
Test module integration
Identify anomalies to specifications
Modify code
Re-test modified code
Integration testing complete
Training
Develop training specifications for end users
Develop training specifications for helpdesk support staff
"Identify training delivery methodology (computer based training, classroom, etc.)"
Develop training materials
Conduct training usability study
Finalize training materials
Develop training delivery mechanism
Training materials complete
Documentation
Develop Help specification
Develop Help system
Review Help documentation
Incorporate Help documentation feedback
Develop user manuals specifications
Develop user manuals
Review all user documentation
Incorporate user documentation feedback
Documentation complete
Pilot
Identify test group
Develop software delivery mechanism
Install/deploy software
Obtain user feedback
Evaluate testing information
Pilot complete
Deployment
Determine final deployment strategy
Develop deployment methodology
Secure deployment resources
Train support staff
Deploy software
Deployment complete
Post Implementation Review
Document lessons learned
Distribute to team members
Create software maintenance team
Post implementation review complete
Software development template complete

Intranet 2.0 - thinking mashups, feeds, and consumability

The entrepreneurial spirit is demonstrated strongly on the Internet by ambitious web-geeks, excited to develop their ideas into new ‘web 2.0’ applications and ‘mash-ups’ of data and services on the web. Individuals & small teams have rapidly implemented new cutting-edge sites like zillow, del.icio.us, friendfeed, facebook, etc. The ‘web 2.0’ Internet today is becoming ever more useful as social networks, collaboration, and data mashups help make information better and easier to access. So, what about the INTRANET?

It seems that organizations are buzzing about ‘web 2.0’. Adoption is slow due to complex technical (and political) environments, and the lack of exposed services/feeds in legacy apps. Most internal apps are designed around the immediate business requirements... meaning traditional concepts like security and databases are the focus of design. In the Internet ‘web 2.0’ world, things like consumability and open APIs are a new additional design focus. After getting through the policy discussion & dodging the 'yesbutters' of web2.0... there are some new tools that are going to help the workplace play catch-up:

Web 2.0 collaboration platforms like Sharepoint 2007 –

There’s a lot to say about the new Sharepoint. There’s nothing else really like it, since it provides so many ‘web 2.0’ish features in one tidy package (with blogs, wikis, discussions, surveys, sharing, content management, and more). Sure, you could buy separate ‘best of breed’ individual packages for each of these components… but then you'd have to support & implement each product individually. Sharepoint is good enough & lets you easily deliver custom sites that can produce & consume RSS and XML(via XSL).

Mashup tools –

I fell in love with Yahoo! Pipes at first site. On the Internet, you could potentially mashup ANYTHING using this tool (sometimes with the help of a feed scraper like Feed43). There are some promising comparable tools now coming available for organizations to mashup all those internal feeds. One that looks great is IBM’s Damia (very similar to Pipes). Another is Kapow… but Damia looks more advanced. With tools like these, you could start mashing up internal feeds on Sharepoint sites to avoid all those confusing situations where users need to visit multiple places to lookup what they need.

Tools are just part of the solution. Organizations are going to have to start considering support for feeds & consumability in their products & projects now to steer away from the old ways where data needs to be looked up in a dozen different places.

SAP R/3 Icons

SAP R/3 Icons

...because they are a mystery to us all.

A few helpful SAP nuggets

SAP Online Help

Useful SAP transaction codes

SAP R/3 Step-By-Step Transaction Instructions

Workstation slowdown?

Ever have one of those days where your machine is dragging along?
Maybe IT department deployed an update, or you installed something you shouldn't have.

Whatever the cause - Windows 'Task Manager' doesn't help much... especially when svchost.exe is the culprit. There could be dozens of services running under svchost. You'll never know which one is problematic until you can dig deeeper. Process Explorer is a nice tool to do just that. It let's you expand processes by their threads, DLLS, and examine their CPU+memory usage at a granular level.

It's a first step to healing disfigured workstations:
Process Explorer v11.04