Oh, and Kimberly’s is smashed together also.  Standard in the VoIP phone service we now have is the ability to set up multiple mailboxes, each associated with one of the sub-accounts on the internet service - and since I’d already set up e-mail accounts for all the family members with the prior AT&T DSL service which carried over to U-Verse, it was fairly easy to set up mailboxes for both me and Kimberly on our home phone, turn off the answering machine, and bingo - we each have individual voice-mail.

This is cool, but I think folks have been getting this same sort of magic with Call-Notes and similar VM service on Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS).  What’s cool for us is that we are able to link a cell phone account (on AT&T) to each of the mailboxes - so now whether someone leaves me a message in my mailbox on the home phone or on my cell phone - my cell phone beeps and tells me I have a message (and I get an e-mail alert as well) so I can pick up the message from my cell or home phone! 

If your household is like mine - this is a major convenience.   I’ll share more on the saga of getting all this wonderfulness installed and configured another day.   Cheers!

I contend the most apt construction analogy for software is residential construction because the overwhelming majority of projects represent a similar number of man-years of labor to complete.  The five criticisms of the construction analogy pointed out in the critical reference above actually are as valid to the construction industry itself as to the software industry.  As any homeowner who went through the pain of a custom homebuilding project can tell you - the Architect better not be sole creative influence, or all sorts of structural problems will ensue.  A good builder brings wisdom to the planning/designing process the architect cannot or will not provide.  Frank Lloyd Wright is renowned as a genius of design, but in fact many of his projects were plagued with problems because he didn’t have (or allow) a master builder to collaborate in a manner that might have mitigated some of those issues.

The fallacies in the comparison of software development to construction are really due to the pervasive influence of mass manufacturing as the sole model for low-cost production over the past few decades.  My in-laws live in a house built in the 1950’s that was a low-cost tract-home in its day, but in many regards is better built than the higher-end tract-home I live in today.  I believe this is a result of the “liquidation of labor” - which rests on the assumption that labor is a commodity - resulting in a one-way flow of information from those whose work is valued, to those whose work is not, resulting in shoddy work, higher cost of rework, schedule delays, etc.

Mass manufacturing trades consistent replicable processes for the skill in skilled labor.  The measurement of “quality” in mass manufacturing is a measure of consistent outcomes.  Somehow, we’ve been duped into accepting this devaluation of the concept of quality - which used to mean the intrinsic value or worth of a thing.  If we buy into the idea that a consistent outcome represents quality, then a hamburger at McDonalds is by definition a better quality hamburger than one produced by a brilliant but slightly inconsistent chef.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t ever want to be brainwashed to the point where I consider a McDonalds hamburger a high-quality food item!

Likewise in the software business, folks keep trying to invent (or repackage) processes that are supposed to generate quality (consistent) outcomes and thus allowing the devaluation of skilled labor (effectively “liquidating” labor).  Hmmmm. . . I sure hope they never figure this out!  At the end of it all, an ideal process might be able to produce a consistent (mediocre) outcome, but it will never arrive at the superior results of skilled craftsmen (I offer you Microsoft Vista vs. Linux as a prime example).

Thanks to my son’s history project this semester, I tripped across a term I think is relevant to what I’ve been seeing in the technical workforce over the past decade:  “Liquidation of labor”.

Henry Ford shocked many of his contemporaries by creating a program providing employees the opportunity to earn a higher wage (double the going rate), based on tenure, accomplishment, and (early in the program) personal character.

His company was suffering from 300% annual turnover - which seems unthinkable today, but gets at the heart of the notion that labor is a commodity with no uniqueness, and thus has “liquidity” allowing it to be bought and sold at the lowest possible price - just like grain on the commodities exchanges.

While we like to think of enlighted business practices coming much later, Henry was pretty avant garde - see if this doesn’t sound like something from the 1980s & 1990s: “It is not usual to speak of an employee as a partner, and yet what else is he? Whenever a man finds the management of a business too much for his own time or strength, he calls in assistants to share the management with him. Why, then, if a man finds the production part of a business too much for his own two hands should he deny the title of “partner” to those who come in and help him produce? Every business that employs more than one man is a kind of partnership.” [Henry Ford: My Life and Work]

Shazam! Now, I don’t think Ford was an exuberant altruist - but he certainly was hip to enlighted self-interest. Retaining workers increased quality and reduced the cost of production - and higher wages increased demand for the product they produced - which on the grander economic stage drives overall economic growth, which is very good for the captains of industry as well as the laborers.

Unfortunately, the wisdom exhibited by Ford and many others over the past century seems to be out of vogue in the technical world, where offshoring is just one manifestation of the flawed philosophy of “liquid labor”.

Every time one of us establishes a long-term relationship with a client (or a vendor/service provider) within which we can demonstrate the value of “partners” as opposed to commoditized laborers, we help counteract this destructive trend toward commoditized labor.

However, there’s plenty of good entertainment to be had on the subject:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuiGJ8hUWLc&feature=related

More interestingly, it references what may turn out to be a useful resource on consumer electronics, www.digitaltips.org - I’ll do some prowling around on that site and offer sage advice in a future post. 

While the DTV conversion in February may be of no concern, the bundled telecom offerings from phone & cable companies are pretty slick and a good way to save a little coin as well - more on that topic soon.

And the computers we think of as such are no longer an intrusion in the home, but an essential tool for our personal as well as our professional lives.  We’re not just running our personal money-management software and shopping online, we are creating publications for school fundraisers, e-mailing agendas for PTA meetings, using eVite to let folks know about a social event, and so much more.

Then there’s the whole communications thing:  Cell phones, regular phones, television/cable, internet service, roaming connections, wireless - Arrgh!  How are we mere mortals supposed to tame this increasingly large and tangled web of technology to serve us instead of being slaves to it?  As a technology professional, I do OK, but I wonder (aloud to my wife at least weekly) how households without a live-in techno-geek navigate all of this.  Poorly, it turns out in many cases.

I hear the stories on a regular basis, so this home-tech blog is a first step to do what I can to extend a helping hand.  My goal is to provide a little nugget of usefulness daily.  One day it might have to do with home entertainment systems, another with cable TV, another with how to better use the wealth of resources on the internet - there’s a lot of ground to cover.  And I’m going to focus on principles - not details.  You can get any teenager to obsess over the details and show you how to operate the controls of your latest gadget - so I’m not going to spend time there - I’m focusing on what we adults care about:  reliability, interoperability, ease of use, etc.  You can ask the teenager in your house or next door to interpret the user guides for you.

Today’s nugget is help for the organizationally challenged.  Some small percentage of the population is able to naturally self-manage with a system from Franklin/Covey, and then there’s the overwhelming majority that is the rest of us.  If you find yourself constantly reinventing reminder systems to make sure you remember those daily/weekly tasks you live in fear of forgetting - consider some good external “nagware”.   www.rememberthemilk.com is a free service that can nag you with text messages, e-mails, twitter, etc. - so it is great for setting up external reminders for you and the other members of your household or volunteer team.  I’ve been meaning for months to set up an account to use in my household, now if I could just remember to do it!

There are definitely two schools of thought on time management.  Those folks who are linear thinkers focus on daily discipline as the path to better living.  Many folks follow their muse on a daily basis, casting routine to the wind and bouncing back and forth between obvious herculean productivity and apparent vegetation.  I love the idea of structured time management - it is logical, comprehensible, and oh-so- structurally elegant.  Unfortunately, this doesn’t come naturally to me - and despite repeated attempts to remold myself over the past three decades, I am no closer to Stephen Covey’s ideal of self-discipline.

On the other hand, I get the bills paid on time (I hate late fees and penalties), I don’t spend more than I make, and I consistently meet deadlines for my clients.  I even manage to strike a good balance of time for God and Community, and my family.  So how does that work anyway?

I believe we need first to honor the principles of balanced priorities (like Stephen Covey’s 7 habits), but not to worship a particular methodology for enacting those principles.  I am reminded of Jesus’ rebuke of the Pharisees:  “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath”. 

I believe we must also not pedantically cling to a particular way of living out those principles.  I’ve tried many organizational systems, and while I was able to follow some better than others, none fit completely - and most were very burdensome.  What works for me seems to be an ever shifting array of external reminders.  When a reminder stops working, I can replace it with a new one.

Software now helps more than it used to.  I set reminders in Outlook; I flag contacts and e-mails for follow-up; I get reminder e-mails from others;  services like www.rememberthemilk.com  will nag you by e-mail, twitter, and text message.  My wife has a daily reminder in her calendar asking “what’s for dinner?” so she’ll stop to think about it in the morning instead of having a creative panic attack at 5:30pm.  The tools are out there  for us to create our own “extended conscience” so we unorganized people can function (and even thrive) in a world that worships organization.

With all of my external “nag-ware” handling organization for me, I’m much more free to let my mind operate in the intuitive fashion that is most comfortable for me and generates the best outcomes in all that I do.

How could writing a blog post be more important than a down server?  Several reasons, here are two: 

• consistent practice of any daily discipline reinforces commitment to all daily disciplines, including those that help prevent emergency situations from arising (think checking in your code every day)
• Blog entries must be fresh and frequent, or your blog won’t attract or retain an audience

Socrates perhaps said it most concisely:  “An unexamined life is not worth living.”  Taking time to write, to think about ourselves and how we relate to others and the world around us is never urgent, but it is important.  In fact, how we respond to the urgent matters that arise can be traced back to the health of our contemplative life - the folks I know who are most thoughtful about their own place in the world are the ones who are best able to keep a cool head in a heated conversation, and are best able to calmly assess the best course of action when circumstances are most difficult.

So take a little time today to think about what is important in your life - it probably isn’t the latest urgent emergency.

While we’ve all come to expect and put up with the advertisements of free services, the internet has gone one better, giving consumers the privilege of paying to NOT have advertisements - they really don’t care if the consumer pays, or the advertiser pays, just as long as someone does.  Thank you Cable TV with HBO and TCM!

The great thing is that the cost of distribution is now carried by consumers paying their ISP’s, including phone and cable companies, so the infrastructure for information-based deliverables is covered.

Free deliverables come from many sources, including high-minded open-source projects, academic endeavors, “gimme’s” from companies giving away lightweight versions of products you can then upgrade to “professional” versions, and “gimme’s” that are just pure advertising from a company (if you like product A for free, imagine how great product B will be at just a modest cost per month).

Here’s my rules for finding and testing free software to ensure it works and is not malicious:

This last point is illustrated by my experience seeking a site mapping utility.  I found a nice ASP.Net freeware product called Sitemap.net.  They produce a nice sitemap.xml  file, BUT it only works for a “flat” site.  By that I mean that although it simply looks for file names with particular extensions (.htm, .html, .php, .asp, et cetera).  So if all your files are in one directory, and you’re not generating dynamic content from a database - this works great.  Unfortunately, it didn’t suit my need for indexing a database-driven site (I wound up writing a stored procedure myself that did the trick), but it worked well within the limits of its functionality, and the price is right.

Unfortunately, time is money - so if you’re shopping on your own behalf, you may want to pay for something that will clearly do what you want - or turn to a trusted service provider who can help you select a solution that fits. ]]> http://triactassociates.com/blog/2008/10/07/free-can-fit/feed/ http://triactassociates.com/blog/2008/10/02/who-builds-better/ http://triactassociates.com/blog/2008/10/02/who-builds-better/#comments Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:43:24 +0000 Steve General http://triactassociates.com/blog/2008/10/02/who-builds-better/  Because I’m in the software business, I frequently get asked if our company works with a particular tool or technology - and often these questions are litmus tests to qualify my company for work with a client.  In a day of automated screening of resumes by keywords, I fear we are losing our way.

In an earlier post, I referenced what I call the “Home Depot effect” - so I’ll now explain what I mean by that.  In the world of construction, retail chains like Home Depot and Lowes have made it easy and affordable for the average weekend warrior to buy or rent tools, take classes, and attempt home makeover projects that would have been beyond the reach of most folks just a generation ago.  As with any sea-change, the effects are not always good.  When the tools are accessible and usable by more people, the quality of work goes down (just look at the average television shows now that there are hundreds of cable channels instead of just a few broadcast ones).

Accessibility and usability of tools doesn’t translate into better outcomes - on average it means poorer outcomes.  The offset is simply a larger volume of outcomes.  On the surface, this appears to be a good trade-off, because work that wouldn’t be done at all if a pricey professional had to be hired wouldn’t be undertaken at all.  Sometimes the work is so shoddy that perhaps it would be better to have none, but on the whole it seems like a good idea to have mediocre results rather than none.

This works great for building a dog house, and certainly many software applications for individuals and organizations wouldn’t exist if not for the ease of use afforded by spreadsheets and access databases.  In theory, there is still the same amount of professional-quality work being done, even though the volume of amateur work has mushroomed so that the average quality of construction has declined.

But what happens when the only experience most people have of a particular discipline, like architecture or software design, is born from these easy to use tools?  The old saw (pardon the pun) was “measure twice, cut once”.  This is the fundamental paradigm for quality in manufacturing - getting it right the first time produces a better quality outcome than one or more rework cycles.  How is it then that in both the construction and software industries the new paradigm is to slap it up quick and rework as necessary.

Don’t get me wrong - I understand the differences between designing/building a house and designing/building software - but I also understand the similarities.  The more important contrast is between commercial and residential construction - which has an analog in the software industry as well.  Residential construction is generally undertaken with the premise that what you see is what you get, and the lowest cost to deliver means that the outward appearance drives the overall design - so that the underlying foundation and framing match exactly the “skin” of the house - so internal walls are load-bearing and all the plumbing is sunk into the concrete foundation.  Essentially the path to lowest cost of construction is to design and build from the assumption that nothing will ever change.  In contrast, (good) commercial construction starts with the premise that the building will be in use for decades, and the needs it must serve will change.   The expectation is that interior walls, electrical wiring, plumbing all will change over time, and the building is designed and constructed accordingly. 

This difference is often invisible for the first years a building is in service, but when the first major renovation comes along - it makes a difference.

What does this have to do with the Home Depot effect?  Well - architects and builders putting up large commercial projects didn’t just learn to use the tools building dog houses and then put up high-rise buildings.  Many of the tools are the same, but the principles and approaches are different.  Commercial construction is more expensive up front, but in the long run - where it is a good fit - the total cost of ownership is lower.

Unfortunately, most folks never have a chance to understand why commercial construction is different or more expensive - they just enjoy the benefits of it from time to time.  Even fewer folks ever understand why commercial software construction is more expensive - and many businesses suffer from ill-fitting software as a consequence.

That’s a long winded way to make my point - which is essentially that a skilled craftsman can more easily become proficient with a new tool than a proficient user of a particular tool can develop the skill to deliver large, complex projects.  More on the long view of balancing experience and skill in another post.

When setting priorities for using limited resources, ROI analysis provides a clear and objective approach to determining where to use those limited resources.  During go-go economic good times, ROI may focus on upside potential of adding new accounts.  Today, many companies are taking a look at the gloomy forecasts for revenue growth, and seeking to boost profits by reducing cost of operations.  Either way, the same ROI logic prevails, because the Returns calculated by a proper ROI analysis can come from increased revenue, reduced costs, or both.

Many folks think reduced costs means layoffs to lower labor costs - and this may be a valid place to look for savings, but many times - especially for smaller businesses - core staff cannot be cut without causing more damage to the business than might be gained from the lower labor costs - not to mention the cost later to train new personnel when staffing back up.

Here are some ideas for projects with cost-reduction-based ROI you might want to consider:  auditing parcel shipment charges to catch overcharges;  shopping telecom contracts;  installing energy-saving devices and monitoring systems;  use telecommuting in place of travel  and to reduce office-based energy expense.

If you’re looking at staffing cuts, consider using a service provider to fill the gaps left by staff departures - and don’t rush to hire again when business heats up.  Take advantage of the learning curve the service provider will have climbed up and evaluate their cost of services against the full cost of adding back a full-time staff person, including benefits, office space/supplies, and training.