Iain’s Blog

I’ve discovered one thing over the last year. Writing a blog is difficult! Or rather, consistently writing a blog is difficult. It’s not that I can’t find things to write about … or that I don’t enjoy writing … it’s just nearly impossible to find the time!  In the words of my last post “I regret often that I have spoken; never that I have been silent” … not this time!

But more than that it’s increasingly difficult to find the time for lots of things. Mark Evans is on a similar topic here … “So Much to Do, Not Enough Time!“.

Of course I have a time (or should that be life!) consuming job and other organisations I’m involved in, but lots of people have much busier lives than I and yet seem to accomplish more. I’ve read lots of books over the last year about time management, prioritisation etc but the implementation of theory isn’t always easy. What I’d like to know is how the people who run countries or large companies manage to do what needs to be done!? We’re often disenchanted with our politicians & leaders but my goodness these guys must be on top of their task management game in order to do what they do.

We’re increasingly juggling a world where there are just too many things trying to steal our attention: bombarding us with information, and demanding our time by email, SMS, phone, mobile, facebook, twitter etc. Manager Tools dealt specifically with the topic of Email in a podcast a few years ago and identified email as a major cause of interruption in the workplace.

All of this makes it increasingly difficult to actually concentrate on doing useful stuff - the desire to multitask is enormous and it’s so easy to flit between things during the day and end the day having accomplished little. I often find myself having to take a mental grip and focus on one thing at a time.

With a new baby in the house (3 days!) it’s perhaps more on my mind that a 70+ hour work week + my non-work activities just isn’t sustainable. The answer I know in theory is to do less “average stuff” and concentrate on the really “important stuff” - defining what is the important stuff - that’s the difficult bit!

We use a Voice over IP telephone system at work. This gives us a lot of flexibility - we have 2 main offices and also extensions at home. We can effectively control our system from anywhere - and if I’m working at a client’s site for a couple of days I can even take my office phone and plug it into their network.

We’re using Voipfone as the provider - there was some reliability issues back last year but since then they have proved to be pretty solid. Four lessons learnt early on if you want to use Internet based voice over IP in any kind of professional capacity :-

1. Buy a decent low-contention business grade broadband package. Headline rates don’t mean anything. A £50 per month business grade broadband is better than a £9 one. Period. And a cheap-ass broadband connection will break your heart ….

2. Buy a decent router which understands VoIP/SIP traffic and can prioritise - and if you don’t have in-house IT expertise to configure it find someone who does. Otherwise your calls will get cut up every time someone tries to download or upload a big file. You don’t need to spend a fortune - we’re using an Intertex IX68 which is about £150 or less.

3. Buy decent phones. Cheapo phones will give cheapo quality and reliability. We’ve been using Linksys 941’s which are reasonable. The last two phones are Snom 320’s which seem a bit nicer - albeit a bit more expensive (had some problems getting them to work but that’s a blog article for later!)

4. Have a backup plan. The reliability of ADSL broadband is improving all the time but it still can be a bit shaky at times - and the lack of a proper SLA is still a problem. Make sure you know what you’re going to do when (not if!) it fails. We have some redundancy with multiple office locations - and also have failover to PSTN & Mobiles in an emergency. Depends on your business but we could quite easily operate like this for a few days if we absolutely had too,

Are we happy using internet based VoIP for our business? Yes. The flexibility & ease of expansion is great. For a 7/8 extension phone system across two offices it’s VERY economical. And we can live with the lack of a SLA agreement and potential difficulties with getting problems sorted quickly.

The acid test though - would I install it for a client yet? Truthfully … probably not …

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/157026/typo-causes-7500000-mistake.html

This is a classic personal productivity book by David Allen. It’s now available on audio CD and is well worth a listen (or read) - it’s a year or two since I read the book so I’ll probably buy the CDs for a bit of a refresher course! I’m also currently reading “Total Workday Control using Microsoft Outlook” by Michael Linenberger - Michael’s system borrows quite a lot from GTD but concentrates on implementation of a similar system in Microsoft Outlook … not sure how good it is yet but we’ll soon find out!

I’ve been spending some time over the last few evenings playing with a Wiki application from MindTouch. It’s an open source Wiki which is available free of charge. There are also a whole range of commercial support and service options available. (A VERY interesting way to make money out of software - but that’s for another blog!)

I’ve looked at 3 or 4 of these now and am quite impressed with this one. So why do I like it?

• Neat VM Appliance download makes setup a doddle - fire it onto our VMWare Server - allocate some RAM and away we go!
• It seems very fast in operation - albeit with no real data in there yet
• Nice scripting options to auto generate table of contents, insert dates etc
• Decent historical versioning & a pretty nice comparison feature
• Very cool integration with Flickr, Google maps etc - which is probably not that useful for us - but still cool!
• REST based API which gives us lots of scope in the future for integration with other systems and for pulling out data
• Nice hierarchical structure
• Easy linking between pages & a fairly decent WYSIWYG editor
• Nice chronological views and ability to “watch” certain articles for changes
• And it just looks slick and does what it says on the tin! I like that!

I think we’re going to go with this for our in-house knowledge capture system so no doubt I’ll have some more to say on the topic after a few days trying to make it work in a real world environment!

Here’s a neat trick for Microsoft Word - a keyboard shortcut to move paragraphs or list items up & down. Just have your cursor flashing on the appropriate paragraph or item and use Shift-Alt Up/Down to move the paragraph up or down. Very quick and easy.

Taken from the How To Geek - which incidentally is a blog well worth following for some useful tips.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/microsoft-office/use-the-keyboard-to-move-items-up-or-down-in-microsoft-word/

… especially when you’re the government it would seem!

Chief among the culprits is the Department for Work and Pensions, which the Guardian claims has spent around £1.6 billion on three computer projects which never saw the light of day: a benefit card scheme, the CSA upgrade, and a new benefit payment system, which cost £140 million and never worked.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/152124/government-runsup-2bn-failed-it-bill.html

If you’re interested in the “IT space” you should be reading this blog! For those who don’t know Marc Andressen was co-founder of Netscape - the first Internet Browser that was widely used on the Internet.

This is a new blog and Marc talks about the first 5 weeks here :-

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/07/eleven-lessons-.html

Insightful stuff and a blog worthy of a place in your aggregator! 

When you develop complex IT systems it’s inevitable that things will sometimes go wrong, not work as expected, or very occasionally blow up spectacularly in your face! And like every IT company sometimes our software doesn’t work as planned .. only very occasionally you understand …

So if we accept the inevitable then how do we manage the situation to ensure that our clients feel good about us, and continue to have confidence in our systems?

1. Answer the call quickly & politely. As consumers we are used to getting rubbish technical support from large (and small) companies with endless menu systems, queues, on-hold music, and know-nothing support “muppets”. The simple act of having someone answer the call within three rings will set you apart from the majority of companies your client deals with.

You have the opportunity to impress your client before you’ve even opened your mouth!

This is not always easy to do - especially if your company is very small or very large. And it’s something in our company we are continually trying to improve upon.

2. Gather as much information as possible. This serves two purposes. First, the client believes you are taking them seriously and are interested in their problem (which you should be!). Second, you now have lots of information!

3. Investigate the problem to determine if it is an IT problem or not. If it’s user error - ask yourself is it really? Perhaps the software is not doing enough error checking,  or perhaps the User Interface is not as blindly obvious as we thought! If so, then this is really a software error and not user error at all. So don’t just fix the superficial - fix the root cause of the problem and you’re less likely to have it again.

4. Accept the blame! If it’s genuinely a software problem then accept the blame. Holding one’s hand up and accepting responsibility happens so infrequently in modern society that it will stop a ranting customer mid-rant! And don’t worry about getting sued - happy customers don’t sue people - and you’re much more likely to have a happy customer if you take responsibility.

5. Fix it! If it’s a software or systems failure then we need to fix it.And this is were as IT people we so often go wrong. Head down. Fix. Fix. Fix. Fix. We don’t communicate with the client - often believing that because we’re no closer to a solution that we have nothing to say. This is a mistake. It is infinitely better to call and say “we have no news yet” - than to avoid the call. Nothing will rattle a customer more than not being kept in the loop - or not getting called when you said you would call.

Clients will in general put up with huge inconvenience if they believe you are sincerely working on their behalf to sort it - and you are explaining things (at some level) as you go.

Ironically we see time and time again that clients who experience the occasional bug which is professionally, methodically, and quickly sorted, will think more highly of us than the client who has got some software which has worked flawlessly for 5 years and never had need to call.

We need to stop treating our support calls as routine inconvenience, and start treating them as an opportunity to show our clients how absolutely wonderful we are!

Off now to write a few bugs so we can keep a few more customers happy  ….

I.

Here’s an interesting & useful PodCast from our friends at Manager Tools on hiring staff. I listened to it twice this week as I think they’re absolutely spot on with the advice. Basic premise? … “Set the bar high!”

And if in doubt - say NO!

http://www.manager-tools.com/2007/04/effective-hiring-set-the-bar-high/