Three mountaintops

I call these “mountaintops”: they’re overriding principles of my life.

We

Get smarter

Total World Domination

“We” means “honor and respect my teammates and the team.”

“Get smarter” means my quest for knowledge, hard skills, and soft skills will never end.

“Total World Domination” means winning is a mindset and not a score.

I thought this was funny.

I’m sitting in Sequel Server Reporting Services class at Netdesk in Seattle.  James, the instructor, has mentioned he learned to read a Chinese menu.  And I said to him, “Well, did you feel like reading anything else?” 

Alec Baldwin for ?

There are few intellectual pleasures greater than hearing, and not being the target of, a world-class insult.  I suppose this antisocial behavior has its genesis during the five years I spent imprisoned in a tony, British public school-style New England boarding school, where insulting (colloquially known as “ranking”) was an art.  School wasn’t materially different from Hogwart’s, getting there via train and complete with the Oxbridge-schooled masters boxing your ears for talking in class.  The magic occurred in March, when the Harvard acceptance letters arrived and you realized some of the fat letters were addressed to individuals whose family portfolios where larger than their SAT scores. 

The best part of my five years: I’m very hard to beat in a game of Six Degrees.  The Queen of England, Greta VanSusteren, Vladimir Putin, Astronaut Story Musgrave, Governor Tom Kean, John Sculley, Ron Perelman, Roger Penske, Bruce Hornsby…I’m one jump from all of them.  Well, one of those connections is mine, another is my sister’s, and one is my brother’s.

But I digress, which is, after all, the point of blogging.

Watching Alec Baldwin’s profile on 60 Minutes reminded me of his comments (in a 2006 blog in the Huffington Post) about Dick Cheney:

“I want to apologize to all of the readers of this blog for referring to Vice President Cheney as a terrorist. I suppose that, in the post-9/11 world, one would be hard-pressed to refer to anyone other than a militant Arab fundamentalist who hijacks a plane and pilots it into a building somewhere on our shores or a Palestinian who bears a bomb into a cafe in Israel as a terrorist.

“How about something more measured, then? How about…a lying, thieving Oil Whore. Or, a murderer of the US Constitution? No wait! Try…the worst Vice President in US history? Anyway, let me work on that.”

Soooo…I think Mr. Baldwin left out “paranoid” in one (or both) of his characterizations. And I’m anxiously awaiting a high-class ranking on Mr. Baldwin from anybody on the right side of the spectrum.

And how about this reference to Kim Basinger’s (his ex-wife’s) lawyer?

“A 300-pound homunculus whose face looks like a cross between a bulldog and a clenched fist.”

And Ms. Basinger’s lawyer is female.  This guy is a hoot…

Enrich your projects with “rich requirements”

I’ve walked into many otherwise well-planned projects where the requirements have gone straight from the users’ lips to the WBS.  This is bad, bad, bad, and wrong, wrong, wrong.

The smart PjM won’t let this happen.  Smart IT management won’t let this happen.  Why?

It’s smart to manage stakeholders’ expectations and requirements from the earliest stage of the project.  We know that a key measure of project success is meeting (at a minimum) stakeholders’ expectations (and, while this isn’t the only CSF, we know that an on-time, on-scope, and on-budget project not meeting stakeholders’ expectations will definitely be categorized as a failure).  The smart move is to make sure those expectations are managed properly from the day the project charter is drafted.  And the way to do that is to work closely with users early during the conceptual phase (the Microsoft Solutions Framework calls this the “envisioning track”; Doug DeCarlo calls it the ”visionate” step) to insure the requirements are realistic and achievable.

This approach doesn’t mean you want to reign the requirements in-on the contrary!  The goal is to make sure the project team can deliver effective results.  And a great way to accomplish this is to have PjM’s and business-savvy team members work with the stakeholders and users in developing what I call “rich requirements”.

A “rich requirement” is a user’s requirement enriched by feedback, suggestions, clarification, and a sharpening of focus from the project management side.

Users’ requirements are frequently couched in terms of an existing, specific situation.  Smart IT people know the use of design patterns and leveraging existing code offers huge productivity and quality benefits.  So, a smart IT person working with a user’s requirement should be able to see not just the specific situation but the abstracted requirement, or, not what the user is asking for, but what the user wants.  The process to accomplish this is to question the user about the requirement itself and the framework of the requirement, and then to offer a vision of the deliverable.

Here’s an simple requirements example.  The sales executive needs a monthly sales analysis report ordered by sales territory, with orders and dollars.  The IT requirements specialist can offer these enriching ideas like these:

1. Design the report to run from a date range, thereby allowing daily, weekly, quarterly, and ad hoc reporting.
2. Design the report to run with territories based on state/province, country, metropolitan statistical area, and based on distance to distribution centers.
3. Design the report to run with various ordering options (e.g., descending dollar volume, by state/province).
4. Design the report to support reporting by regional sales managers.

Okay, none of this is rocket science.  Even so, you’d be disheartened at how often IT people fail to think farther ahead than the user.

It’s likely the user will concur with some ideas, reject others, and leave a few undecided.  That’s okay-what we’ve done is demonstrated IT’s value by showing an understanding of, and an appreciation for, the nuts and bolts of the user’s side of the business.  Business users are pleased when IT people know the details of the business, and if you had been awake during Accounting 101 instead of working on that goofy bubble sort routine, you’d know sales go in the credit column.

Ah, you say with a gleam in your eye, you’ve gone out of scope and you’re gold-plating.  No, I say-we’re not doing project planning; we haven’t defined project scope.  We’re developing requirements that eventually will become part of the preliminary scope.  What we’re really doing is building more value into the project for the user.  If IT offers 10 suggestion and the user agrees that any have value, the following has been accomplished:

1. IT has proved it is sensitive to the big-picture needs of the business.
2. IT will accelerate the value received from the solution by providing more features earlier.
3. IT, by providing a ”better” solution, has increased customer satisfaction by reducing the possibility of the user coming back with an enhancement request.
4. If unrealistic requirements (“sales report broken down by age and sex of the customer”) are removed, the development effort will be simplified.
5. The net effort to develop this report will be substantially less, and quality will be much higher, than if IT made multiple modifications to the report based upon a series of enhancement requests.

The IT requirements person must know enough about the business to make a reasonable case for any proffered suggestion.  With any requirement, it’s critical to test it by challenging its basis, and the best approach is to ask for a clarification or explanation.  Respectful questioning was once known as the “Socratic technique”; today, it’s known as the “5 why’s”.  The goal of questioning is not unlike the process of decomposing the WBS to get to what Karl Wiegers calls “inch-pebbles”: by asking questions, you’ll refine your understanding of the problem, you’ll uncover hidden issues, and you’ll be able to do a better job of estimating the effort required for delivery.

A key IT success factor is recognizing the need to be in the user’s office, not hunkered down behind a pair of 24″ monitors in the IT department. 

Guiding, assisting, and coaching the user during the requirements definition process can pay big dividends all around.  It helps IT and the project team deliver the right value earlier to a happier user.  And a happy user is IT’s best friend.

Look who’s rooting for Hillary: more follow-up

Rush, you fat, lying, felonious, drug-abusing sack of…well, whatever: your “Operation Chaos” fell flat.

Your suggestion to your Dittoheads that they vote for Hillary just to prolong the Democratic party’s internecine fight is disrespectful and truly un-American.  Your flippant blowhardness is an insult to past and present American military, both alive and dead.  It doesn’t matter that your plot couldn’t stand up even if you slipped it the Viagra you purchased under your doctor’s name (did you ever explain why you flew to the Dominican Republic with a suitcase of of Vitamin V?  It reduces jet lag in hamsters, so it will work just fine for for a weasel like you); you’ve shown your disdain for the privilege and responsibility of casting a thoughtful vote.  Is there no limit to your sense of self-importance?

Millions of people have died protecting America and our liberties, including all citizens’ right to vote.  Voting with a secret ballot is one of our key freedoms (although you’ll notice there’s a concerted effort by the labor union lobby to banish the secret ballot with the introduction of “card check” union authorization: see http://www.unionfacts.com/articles/cardCheck.cfm for details.  And you thought I was a tree-hugger?  Hah!)

I suppose we shouldn’t expect any more from this clown.  Remember when Rush mocked Michael J. Fox on-air, by all reports one of the nicest people in Hollywood, for exaggerating his Parkinson’s Disease symptoms?  Even though Rush apologized for his ad hominem attack, he salted the wound by linking Fox’s non-partisan support of stem cell research as a move calling for a “Republican defeat”.  What’s next in the Limbaugh Book of Medicine-painless dentristy?  Bloodletting?

One of the key principles in effective negotiations is focusing on the facts of the problem and not the parties.  It appears Rush Limbaugh never let a fact get in his way, unlike Bill O’Reilly, who could care less about truth in the first place.  Apparently, neither is smart enough to argue the conservative position on its merits.

We deserve better.

What’s in a name? Microsoft, learn from IBM!

“Google” is a takeoff on “googol”, the noun representing the number 10ˆ(100) (ten to the hundreth power).  Just think of it as “1″ followed by 100 zeros and you’ll be close enough.  The takeaway is that a catchy name, like “Google”, has a huge consumer value because it can slip into our lexicon and become a generic noun and/or verb.  Need to copy a document?  You xerox it…but don’t say that at Xerox, ’cause they’ll be pissed.  Johnson & Johnson’s “Band-Aid” and Kimberly-Clark’s “Kleenex” are other common product names that have become part of our language, much to the dismay of IP lawyers everywhere.

“Live Search”…it’s a slick product and Microsoft has some Big Brains working on it (that would be a fun team to work on).  But the name sucks-MSFT needs to come up with a catchy name.  I’m surprised it’s not called “SearchPoint” (think PowerPoint and SharePoint) but even that isn’t a great name.

Microsoft could take a lesson-just one-from IBM.  Those of us in the midrange community have surgically-implanted neck braces so we can withstand IBM’s whiplash-inducing and totally pointless name changes to The Platform Formerly Known As The AS/400.  Even Sean Combs look to IBM for guidance every time he changes his handle!  Microsoft needs to come up with a catchy new name for the Live Search engine, a name that’s two (or fewer) syllables, capable of being a verb, and with an available URL.  No, not Yahoo!, thanks, but Mine.com appears to be available for a price (domain-squatting: what a business model!).  Oh, wait-the antitrust lawyers in Redmond will put the kibosh on this one for sure.

Microsoft does a fine job of naming initiatives and prerelease products (e.g., Longhorn, Orcas).  Speaking of names: “Bob”…well, that was a great concept but the hardware wasn’t up to it.  It’s time to for some serious consumer marketing and to come up with a people-friendly name for Live Search.

Microsoft has a huge investment in the “Live” brand and Live Search is an integral component.  I’m not suggesting diluting the brand; I am suggesting the search engine itself needs to have a friendly name that could be the center of an effective advertising campaign.

When I’m sitting in some seminar and somebody mentions “googling” something, I (just to be contrary and to suck up to the Microsofties) say, “Oh, you mean Live Search it?”  The MSFT gang murmurs their gratitude but “Live Search it” is a mouthful: it doesn’t flow.

There’s one other little thing.  You don’t have to check, but the kindergarten-colored Google logo is often whimsically stylized to reflect a holiday or an event.  Nerf wars in the halls notwithstanding, I think slight dose of graphic pizazz on search.live.com would help enormously. 

Those of you with bad memories of one (well, several) of my hallucination-inducing web sites (all of which were of garage-band quality) are probably staggering to the medicine cabinet in “Live Search” of anti-laughing-hysterics drugs at the thought of me suggesting a professionally designed web page needs pizazz.  But I’m considering it as a consumer, not as a producer, and my eye would like to be tickled.  Let’s entertain and inform (and advertise) with the New-Name-Not-Selected-Yet Microsoft search engine.

So, let’s come up with a catchy name and let’s advertise the hell out of it; I suggest a parody of the Mac-versus-PC ads with Google as the target.  The buzz would be priceless and the results would pay off throughout Live.com

Can Jerry Wang sell Vista?

I dunno, and we’re not likely to find out in the next few weeks.  Later?  Very possibly.

With its offer for Yahoo!, Microsoft might have pulled off one of the greatest moves ever, worthy of an NBA highlights film (where a drive down the court features a fast break, behind-the-back passes, hip-swiveling fakes, and an across-the-basket skyhook pass that’s intercepted and jammed).

Steve “Pistol Pete” Ballmer-a guy I’d love to work for-started the downcourt drive with a fast break, the unsolicted offer.  After a blind pass (in the form of appeals to Yahoo!’s board), he laid a huge fake on Yahoo! by raising MSFT’s offer…but not to what Yahoo! demanded.  Steve has scored big by withdrawing the offer, because now Jerry Wang has to deliver, and deliver big, on his promises of Yahoo!’s future.  He’s sold his vision to his board of directors once; they won’t give him another chance.  Let’s see what happens to YHOO tomorrow; we’ll find out if the market believes JW.  He’s likely to have a fistful of stockholder lawsuits on his desk in the next few weeks.

If Yahoo! doesn’t show substantially better results, the stage will be set for another MSFT bid at a much lower price.  Yahoo!’s board must act in the interest of the shareholders, and it will be an “I-told-you-so” moment when a lower offer comes from Redmond.  While I still believe Microsoft’s long-term interest is not served (I don’t think Yahoo!’s technology or culture will play well with Redmond’s) by acquiring Yahoo! at any price, I don’t think Microsoft takes “no” for an answer.

If Yahoo! does show better results, it will likely be due to its partnership with Google.  But that partnership may backfire, because Microsoft will have a legitimate antitrust issue.

At one point I wondered if part of Yahoo!’s hidden value was Jerry Wang as a possible successor to Steve Ballmer.  But I don’t think he’s played his hand well these last few weeks, and I suspect the fallout over Yahoo’s cooperation with the Chinese government will have a long half-life. 

Microsoft’s best option is to leapfrog the search engine advertising content and to focus on other advertising delivery opportunities. 

If I ran Microsoft

BillG, SteveB, and the rest of the gang in Redmond are super-smart, and they’re supported by a bunch of big brains.  So, it’s likely they know stuff I don’t…or they’re imagining stuff I can’t.  But support for Microsoft’s plan is not universal, and there’s one important consideration: much of the opinion is driven by the financial goals of Yahoo! stockholders and not by what’s best for Microsoft.  What’s better for Yahoo! stockholders (a higher price per share) is worse for MSFT shareholders.

If I ran Microsoft, I’d set a course away from Yahoo! at warp 9.92 and “Engage!”  (visualize emphatic finger pointing here).  Yahoo is damaged goods.

If Microsoft wants to invest for the future, I see two paths.

For the short term, Microsoft should step up its stock repurchases.  This pushes up the EPS and, in the long run, will benefit all shareholders.  Remember, the shareholders own Microsoft, and they run it through the Board of Directors.  Most shareholders (and employees) don’t want the MSFT brand diluted by Yahoo!.  And there’s still a body of thought that Microsoft would do better if broken up; adding Yahoo! to a big company like Microsoft will add drag.  Remember, Microsoft is about 80,000 people world-wide, but an enormous amount of labor is outsourced, so the effective size of the Company is substantially larger.

My long-term plan is less conventional: set up a venture capital/incubation fund.  Invest in the up-and-coming technologies and businesses that will, some day, out-Google Google.  The model is simple: give them money, help when asked, don’t meddle, and wait.  Think intellectual red wine: it has to age before it becomes valuable.

Imagine the return on a $10 billion world-wide investment in a several hundred start-ups, spread out over 10 years, leveraged through Microsoft’s research and marketing resources!  A significant investment in Europe would pull the rug out from under Neelie Kroes and the crybabies at the EU.   A significant investment outside North America would solidify Microsoft’s international markets and tap the huge intellectual capital developing in Russia, India, and China.

It’s worth considering.

Look who’s rooting for Hillary (follow-up)

My previous post outraged some and bored others.  So, let me be an equal-opportunity offender.

I should clarify my opinion of Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. O’Reilly, the skank Ann Coulter, Monica Crowley, Laura Ingraham, and their ilk.  They’re vile, lying weasels and I consider them to be the lowest form of life on earth.  Yes, even lower than that TV-advertising, ambulance-chasing-by-proxy personal injury lawyer James Sokolove.

If we’re talking about big fat liars, we have to include Bill and Hillary Clinton.  And we’ll reserve a special place in the Liars’ Club Hall Of Fame for the bloody-handed George Bush, Dick Cheney, and the other war criminals appointed to positions in the Cheney administration.  4,065 soldiers, sailors, and Marines have died so that Halliburton may live.

America is a great country with serious problems.  We need honesty, candor, and courage from our leaders; lies during a campaign are a telling indicator of what will come later.  How about the stories floated by the Bush campaign in the 2000 South Carolina primary about John McCain’s illegitimate black child?  And how about Obama’s out-of-context quote on the offered by Hillary’s campaign?  He said the Republican party “was the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time…” and her campaign claimed he said he “…really liked the ideas of the Republicans…”  For crying out loud: did they not think we’d figure this one out?  Apparently not.  And why would anyone think Hillary won’t break the truth again, especially in 2012?

We’ve suffered for the last 16 years, with the White House occupied by a pair of overblown egos with their direct lines to the Almighty and congenitally unable to tell the truth.  No, no, no…I’m not talking about Bill and Hillary.  Bush and Cheney?  Well, maybe, but we’ll split the difference and go with Bubba and W.  The moral leadership shown by these two should make the Southern Baptists cringe.  Where is the outrage?

My bottom line: the citizen of the United States deserve the truth.

Look who’s rooting for Hillary: analysis

Well, no, it’s not me…but that’s not the point.  I’m fiercely independent and I think the vice-president candidates will be extremely important this year.  I know politics is a bad topic but the human interest factor is just too powerful to ignore.

Here’s who’s rooting for Hillary: the amen corner of the Republican party, “led” by Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and William Kristol.  These guys are really pulling for her, in spite of the fact they were pulling the noose around Bill’s neck over MonicaGate.

I believe they want her to win.  Why are they secretly against John McCain?

1. The conservative wing of the GOP doesn’t trust John McCain.
2. President McCain will cut the conservation commentators off at the knees (temper, temper) if they get on his case.
3. A Republican president isn’t a good target.

Why do they want Hillary?

1. Three words: material, material, material
2. Three more words: Bill, Bill, Bill.
3. Any Democratic president is a huge target for the conservative press.

My bottom-line answer: the conservatives want Hillary to win because it will serve their financial self-interest and further inflate their egos.  Remember, these guys (and I include Laura Ingraham and Monica Crowley) are professional whiners and complainers.  They’ll have four years to make merry with the Clinton administration and to rake in big ratings. 

Now, I don’t know if they’d want her elected for another four years in 2012 or if they’d want a “real” conservative in the White House.  Here’s the risk: a change of party (particularly if the Democrats control Congress) offers the possibility of getting better results than another Republican administration could achieve.  When Bill Clinton entered office in 1992, who thought we’d have a huge economic boom, a couple of years of balanced budgets, and hummers (not the car) in the Oval Office (Orifice)?

What the conservative Republicans fear most is an Obama presidency capturing America’s spirit.  John McCain offers that possibility, especially if he moves to the middle, but it will never happen with Hillary. 

For the record: I have great respect for Pat Buchanan and the late William F. Buckley, Jr.  These two represent some of the best political and social minds in America, and both are devout Roman Catholics (not Southern Baptists, as you might have thought). 

Limbaugh, O’Reilly, and Fox News, on the other hand, need nothing more than red noses and big shoes to complete their costumes.  Before the flaming starts, here’s why: they bolster their “arguments” with lies.  Here’s one example from O’Reilly: he claimed taxes, under Bill Clinton, were the highest since Wold War II.  Unfortunately the facts don’t support Bill-O’s claim: the marginal tax rate in 1975 was 60%; the tax increase Bubba signed in 1993 pushed the marginal rate to 39.6% for married couples making over $250,000.  Spin all you want-just use the facts.  I don’t like liars-it’s one of my flaws.  The First Admendment is a wonderful thing…