A Typical Day ... In The Life Of An IT Project Leader

When talking with friends and relatives, a question that I'm asked quite frequently is "... and what exactly do you do at your job?". Answering that somebody decided to give my current job the title "IT project leader" wouldn't help too much.
First, because the majority of people don't work in IT and consequently don't have a clear picture about daily business.
Second, because I've come to realize that even within the IT industry there is a huge variety of possible "project leader" responsibilities and tasks.
And third, as you might know, job titles don't mean too much anyways.

Thus, I've decided to describe what a typical day in my current job looks like.

Background

Some background information first: I'm currently working on a project in a Bosnian-Herzegovinian administration. The project is funded by the European Union and the main goal is to bring the country closer to EU standards in the field of VAT and customs legislation and procedures, and with regard to the IT systems used. I'm in charge of the IT part of that project.

So, my small team and I normally start working at 8.30. We are not particularly strict on the working hours, however we do not allow flexitime nor tele-working. I'm strongly convinced that there is no replacement for sitting next to each other and discussing face-to-face.

Mondays ...

On Mondays, we get the week started with a short review of the previous week's achievements, problems encountered, and questions arisen. We also discuss this week's main tasks, technical questions and make key decisions together.
Among other reasons, I think this is an important team building measure, helps to develop common knowledge, and represents a platform to encourage team members to share what they are proud of and improve their communication skills.
Apart from that, we call for a meeting spontaneously at need or simply discuss informally with each other anytime.

Source: actupinc.com

Daily Business

On other days, I might have meetings with representatives of the local administration. We talk about their exact requirements for certain IT programs we are about to develop, testing and training for these programs, knowledge transfer to local employees, hardware issues and administrative stuff.
Unfortunately, my local language skills are still far from sufficient to discuss important matters, so half of the time is lost in translation.

Depending on which stage we are in one of our sub-projects, I would typically spend some time on planning activities then. Which additional information do we need to make the next steps? Whom do I get this information from? Which technology should we use for that project? What should that program look like? How busy are my colleagues at the moment, and which of these planning or pre-development tasks should I delegate to them? Which sub-tasks should be done for that project, how are they related, and until when should they be done? On which hardware infrastructure will we install that system, and whom do we need for that? When are the meeting rooms for testing available, and whom should we invite to it?

A scrum board, similar to the one used by us. Source: nicoulaj.github.com

As we are that small a team, I do some programming too. Sometimes, that comes as a nice alternation to all these meetings and planning stuff, which are not always particularly amusing. Furthermore, it helps me to better understand what's going on beneath the surface of our programs.

Every now and then, I grab a chair and sit with members of my team directly to check their progress or problems encountered. Even though I try to avoid micro-managing as much as possible and sit with them only when they call me, I sometimes take the freedom and check spontaneously when I feel that circumstances demand it. For example, when we agreed that a certain user interface form should be provided within two days, and I haven't heard anything from him for four days.
Again, I want to give them the possibility to show what they are proud of, and establish and maintain trust between each other. In case somebody is stuck somewhere, I like to ask such basic questions until they have broken the problem to such small chunks that the solution comes inevitably to them (that is, I take the role of a rubber duck).

Since I'm responsible for the products that we deliver, I also test the software before any of our clients sees it. This is the moment when all the various parts that my colleagues worked on are connected, and potential design or usability issues show. Sometimes I have to turn colleagues down on their proposals, because they would not be do-able in reasonable time, or would not make sense to the final users, even though they might be nice from a technicians point of view.
Part of my job prior to delivering a product is to write guidelines and handbooks for the users. Not very entertaining, but necessary.

Challenges

However, there are also some challenges that are out of our control. For example, sometimes expectations from the EU and the beneficiary are not quite in line with each other; we act as an intermediary between them and have to find some solution.

A huge obstacle for progress in Bosnia-Herzegovina as a whole is politics. No government for quite a while, no key-decisions made, budgetary problems, ... These impediments have a negative impact on our work, too, because by the end of the day, whatever we do and provide is subject to legal boundaries.

Personally, I strongly believe in all my colleagues' intrinsic motivation, and do everything I can to remove all potential barriers, in order to enable them to do their best job.

Working Environment

Our working environment is a little bit suboptimal. Our chairs might have been acceptable some 15 years ago, but are definitely not any more now; in our office, there is no real window to the outside world, and for weeks we have been suffering in the heat, because the one and only guy who would know how to fix the air condition is on vacation.

Well, at least our office is not in the basement. Source: notesondigital.com

Once a quarter, I meet with representatives of the European Delegation and assistance directors of the local administration to discuss the overall progress of our project and obstacles encountered. Quality of and participation at these meetings varies.

Fridays ...

By the end of the week, I have to provide a report for the European Delegation in Sarajevo, which monitors the progress of our project against certain performance indicators.

Conclusion

For the non IT guys among you, I hope that I managed to create a rough picture of my work. For the IT guys, I hope that I made you smile at least once or twice when recognizing certain things from your workaday life ;-).

Generally speaking, it seems to me that most people (including me) have no clue what most other people are actually doing in their job. Some "typical days" I already found on the web include:

• A cashier at a car wash in Chicago
• A Personal Support Worker (PSW) in Ontario
• A marine biologist in Brazil

Still, more "typical days" would be totally interesting - so why not share yours in the comments below?

Why I Try To Avoid News - Part II

A few days ago, I outlined what made me trying to avoid news. Today, let me tell you why I stuck to that approach.

First, I think it is important to realize what makes journalists, news agencies and TV stations provide news at all. While there are of course some with the best intentions, I'm quite convinced that the majority of news is broadcasted for mainly one reason: entertainment. Consequently, you cannot expect to be purely informed about certain issues, when TV stations generate their profit out of your entertainment.

Second, have a close look at the composition of news. I'm not aware of any scientific studies on that topic, but I claim that most news are of the type: "X said Y about Z", where the source information is only the actual event Z. Technically speaking, the signal to noise ratio is quite high. Why would I care what any self-proclaimed expert thinks about a certain topic? Even more, when her today's opinion is rejected by another self-proclaimed expert the other day.

Third, I strongly sense that following mass-media draws your attention to certain events, for example, robberies in your neighborhood, suicides or plan crashes. People who follow media regularly tend to over-estimate the likelihood of such events. Nassim Nicholas Taleb refers to this perception as "ludic fallacy". The only way to escape this deception is simply avoiding news altogether.

Forth, as much as I try to filter all information I'm exposed to and to take it with a "grain of salt", and as much I would trust all journalists to do a faithful job (which I don't), there is still no way to protect me from shaping my mind in a certain direction.
Imagine reading a newspaper which reports about the great successes of a political party every day. I bet that if you keep reading that newspaper for a year, you will be more inclined to believe that this actually is a successful party, even though that is contrary to your initial beliefs.
And now think about reading a newspaper which focuses on the negative aspects of that party only. Again, I bet your perception will be totally different.
The only protective measure I can think about is avoiding this kind of news altogether.

Fifth, I wonder, what would I actually gain by following news? Does it make any difference in my daily life whether this year's rice harvest in China was a successful one? Will the supermarket around the corner stop selling beer, because the Higgs Boson was found (or, in accordance with #2 from above, because somebody said that the Higgs Boson was found).
Things that are likely to have an impact on me I will hear about sooner or later anyways, so no need to seek for them actively.

I understand that this position sounds pretty rough and ignorant. After all, you are still a human being and should care what surrounds you, right? I totally agree; but that doesn't stop me from deciding how I want to spend my time (which, according to some, is the most precious resource you have). I think you can care for others and be genuinely interested in the people around you - and still try to avoid news.

Why I Try To Avoid News - Part I

Until February 2011, I used to follow news frequently. Reading teletext, watching news on TV in the evening, constantly hitting F5 on my favorite online news pages, waiting for updates in Google Reader ... I think I was close to being news-addicted. But then something happened that instantly gave me a tremendous amount of additional free time, plus a new perspective to perceive certain things. While the world passionately followed the events surrounding the Arab Spring, I kept my TV black and stopped following news for good.

Some people are quite surprised when I tell them about this decision and cannot imagine a single day without news. But how do you know about the latest elections? Don't you care about the poor child that was killed the other day? How will you know that the oil price is about to rise, we will be on the border to a collapse of the financial system, and the USA will attack Iran?

Well, there are a couple of reasons, so let me elaborate.

First of all, let me tell you why I initially started that experiment with myself. In the upcoming days, I will outline why I stayed with it ever since then.

It was in 2009 when I first got in touch with the idea of not following news, when I read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's generally inspiring, mind-provoking The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Even though his works deeply shaped my way of thinking about probability, randomness and other aspects until today, the idea of not following any news any more seemed quite rigid to me back then. However, the seed had been planted.

When in January and February 2011 the Egyptian masses started assembling on the Tahrir Square daily, I was totally bought by the happenings. Just nine months before, I had had a great time there myself, and now I followed the events from far away. Al-Jazeera live stream, Facebook, Blogs ... I was totally into this stuff, several hours a day. Eventually, the peaceful demonstrations where interrupted violently.
It is not too surprising that there were contrary reports about the reason for the both-sided violence. One side claimed that the protesters had started throwing stones; the other side claimed there were shots from the army, and the protesters had to defend themselves.
How can I verify one claim or the other, from a 2.000 km distance? What if both of the reporters are right, not only because politics demand the according report, but because they report what they really saw and experienced from their point of view?

Frustrated and depressed, I turned off Al-Jazeera, and didn't open it or any other news page ever since then again.

In the upcoming days, I will explain why I stayed with this approach, and what I think I gained from it.

When Your Boss Calls You, It's Never A Good Sign

My high school teacher in bookkeeping was a nice person, with our well-being in mind all the time. Even though she was a little bit inconvenient occasionally, I'm inclined to think that she did also that with best intentions.
And similar to many of my teachers (I attended a high school for IT and business administration), she had worked in the private sector several years before becoming a teacher.

Thus, she would tell us innocent students a story from the "real business world" every now and then.

"When I still worked in that company, we were afraid whenever the telephone rang and the display showed the extension from our boss.", she began one day.
The story-telling attitude she showed now awoke some of us, as it was known already that at times the bottom line of the story could be interesting. Yes indeed, sometimes even more interesting than continue playing Counter-Strike.

So, one of the motivated dudes in the first row devotedly asked: "But how's that, why were you afraid? Maybe he just wanted to inform you about something?"
"Wrong", she replied, holding her breath for a second. "For it was known, when the boss calls you, it's for one of two reasons: Either he has some nasty task for you ... or he rants at you. When your boss calls you, it's never a good sign."


I'm still surprised about the purity of Management 1.0, Theory X attitude shown in that one sentence.

Do you remember #4 of the 13 top habits of how not to manage?

"4. Only contact them when something is wrong, but never praise them" (me)

I think common sense tells you how wrong that behaviour is, so let me propose something else instead:

Respect and credit what somebody is proud of! Do it frequently, at least by showing genuine interest. (me)

It doesn't matter whether it's a co-worker, a child or your parents - all of them will appreciate your interest. Even if it's something small which might seem insignificant to you, for them it's maybe not, so it least praise their effort. Maybe it was done better than the time before?

Whatever it is, let them know ... and mean it!

My Top 4 (Work-Related) Mistakes

When I wrote about my motivation to write this blog a few months ago, among the reasons I described there was the possibility to reflect upon my mistakes later and learn from them.

A crucial part of learning from mistakes is acknowledging them. While this is rather inappropriate for some mistakes (say, having cheated on your wife, especially when she doesn't yet know about it), others qualify for being announced publicly.
I think there are two main functions of such a public confession:

1. You show that you are past the point where you feel ashamed, and are ready to move on.
2. You allow others to learn from your mistakes, which not only helps them, but also establishes a certain level of trust among you

In the light of the above, I will today share my biggest work-related mistakes so far. Maybe I'll share some non-work-related ones in the future as well.

Please note that due to my IT-background, some of these might sound a little bit nerdy. I'll try my best to cover the IT-stuff as much as possible.

My biggest mistakes:

No. 4, Shopping carts

When I was in high school, I was short of money all the time. So, imagine a big shopping mall. On the entrance, dozens and hundreds of shopping carts are available for customers. However, once the customers return with carts full of stuff they don't need anyways, and loaded more of these items into the trunk of their car than fit into it, they obviously don't feel like walking those fifty meters back to the entrance of the mall. No, instead they prefer to leave the shopping carts directly where they parked their car.

So, the shopping carts have to get back to the entrance, in order to be filled with new customer's wishes. The carts being unable to move themselves, somebody is required to push them. And that somebody was me, every Saturday afternoon.

Naturally, you don't only push one cart at a time, because the continuous stream of customers would simply overwhelm you. Instead, you are required to take multiple carts at once, say, 20 to 25.
Strangely, the 25th shopping cart in the front of the queue develops something like its own will, which might be contrary to the young lad pushing it.

Thus, I once lost control over it, and the carts crashed into a brand new, golden BMW, which was parked innocently over there, and leaving a nice scratch along the driver's side.
Now, that would still be understandable; that's not the mistake I want to talk about. Yet, to make it even worse, I thought that nobody had seen me, and simply moved on without informing anybody.

However, when I was called to the information desk five minutes later, facing a rightfully upset customer kind of falsified my former assumption.
Taught me an interesting lesson about honesty, tough!

No. 3, Broke the Build

During my time as an intern in the first software development company I worked for, the senior developer was preparing a presentation of our software to some key-clients the other day. Therefore, he told us to hold back with our most recent changes, in order not to introduce new bugs that close to the presentation.
However, me still being simply inexperienced with version control systems, I could not see the potential harm of a small check-in.

Useless to say, that "small check-in" was not quite compatible with the rest of the repository, and obviously broke the build.

Cost the senior developer half a day, and me a beer :-)

No. 2, Test it faster!

Later on in my development career, I noticed that one of the systems we were developing became increasingly slow the more data we added. Initially, it was fast enough (remember, everything is fast for small n), but the more data we added, the slower it became; to the point, where it was not test- and usable at all any more.

Now, instead of searching for the root-cause of the performance issues, I simply introduced a debug-switch which would prevent loading more than 25 entries from the database at once. Bang, problem solved!

I think you can imagine what happened once we turned that switch off again to test in a real-world environment ....

No. 1, Ignore the need for feedback

Being entrusted with managing my first IT-project on my own, we had to re-develop a legacy system, plus adding certain features. It was agreed that in a first phase, the features of the existing system should be copied, the data migrated into the new system, and the users start working on it in order to give feedback about usability issues. In a second phase, the new features should be added.

However, once we were close to releasing the first version, the client changed his mind and did not want to go to production without the new features.
In strict violation of a very important principle, "version 1 sucks but ship it anyway" (see also here), I was too weak to resist him back then.

Of course, once we finally introduced the full new version including new features, there were still several glitches, because it was the first time users started really working with it. The resulting changes caused a big delay in the project schedule and consequently, it was not quite "on budget" anymore either.


Dear former colleagues and current co-workers, bosses and clients, please excuse both my mistakes mentioned, as well as all the big and small ones I forgot to mention. If you think there is a nice complementary to this list, feel free to leave a comment below ;-)

So, these are my biggest work-related mistakes (so far) ... and what are yours?

The Long And Winding Road Of Funding A Business

A couple of weeks ago, I boldly announced that I'm claiming my share of the mobile market. As much as I already could imagine back then how naive that calculation is, I thought that if I could convince only 1% of the mobile clients, I'd make a fortune overnight. Quite surprisingly, though, this did not yet happen. What had I screwed up?

In the meantime, I started attending an online course about "Technology Entrepreneurship", provided by Stanford professor Chuck Eesley and hosted on venture-lab.org.

The course is split into two main parts: First of all, two "warm-up" activities, in order to learn first basic steps, and to build a team for the second part, in which we will perform further steps to bring a "business idea" to actual execution.

As the first part is done, I will quickly summarize what I learned up to now, and how this shapes my overall perception of founding a business.

The first warm-up activity was simply brainstorming business ideas, disregarding whether they sound anyhow promising or not. There are several techniques that help you coming up with ideas, but if your mind is on fire already, ideas of all kinds pop up automagically all the time anyways. I was outright amazed by the overall eagerness shared by all colleagues, and the funny ideas we came up with! Retailing alcohol to Saudi-Arabia? A sex shop for religious people? Or a stove made of wooden?

The next step was to agree on the five "best" and the five "worst" ideas, and create a business canvas model for it. The idea I had chosen was about a mobile application for automatically recognizing the current state of a physical chessboard. Using the business canvas forces you to think about certain aspects of turning this idea into a business, e.g., customer segments, marketing, core activities, partners and revenue streams.

Already in the course of doing this, we found that even an apparently bad idea might have certain positive aspects as well. Going even further, the second task was to take any "worst" idea of another team, and try to promote it as good as possible. Check the result:

Not that bad, after all, is it?

So, first key finding for me is: Each idea can turn into a promising one! (Chuck Eesley provides more comprehensive thoughts on the topic here.)

Next, Chuck doesn't get tired to stress the importance of team composition. Lacking experience in that field, I cannot quite judge on it, but it makes perfectly sense to me. Founding a business without knowing whether your co-founder snores would be kind of similar to marrying after a heavy night in Las Vegas.

But most of all, I'm getting more and more convinced that simply having "a killer idea" is not enough. Far from it. To be clear, it is an important prerequisite. But it is not enough, it is the actual execution that matters a million times more.

So, I don't yet know what it takes to fund a business. At least I know now that it's nothing enough to have an idea. Still, everything starts with an idea - even the long and winding road of founding a business.

P.S.: Already now, I'm very thankful to all my colleagues for the great experiences and good brainstorming made up to now. Looking forward to continue working with you guys!

Neophobiac Or Neophiliac ... And What Are You?

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." -- Henry Ford (despite the questionableness of this quote)

As some of you might have heard already, the upcoming incarnation of Microsoft Windows will offer a completely new user experience called Metro. It is expected to look roughly like this:

Source: microsoft.com

Apparently, they are trying to create the same experience on all devices in the future - be it a desktop PC, a tablet, or a smartphone. As for all things newly invented or changed, the press, current and potential users, bloggers, ... are pretty divided into two groups: 

• The ones defending what is today, opposing change, willing to stick to what they've come to know over the past decade.
• And then there are the others, who are outright nuts for the new style, ignoring it's potential glitches and shortcomings

In psychology, two technical terms are used to describe the two extremes of the spectrum:

• Neophobia is "the fear of new things or experiences", on the contrary to 
• Neophilia, which describes a person with strong affinity to novelty.

However, a person is not always purely the one or the other, but might be rather neophile regarding certain questions (for example, enjoying the new immediately iPhone once it's released), and rather neophobe regarding other (for example, denying that humans are descendants of apes). Also, one's attitude towards novelty is most likely to change over time. Who might have been wildly seeking for change and revolution in early years might take exactly the opposite stand once he's older (and in some rare cases, vice versa).

I'm quite convinced that each society and organization needs both types. People who drive innovation and change on the one hand, but at the same time, others who do not follow them blindly, but see to some reality check every now and then and throttle the craziest ideas.

All in all, this makes me wonder, which stand you should take? Should you promote change and new ideas? After all, you will not be able to stop change anyways ... like it or not, your children will not even know what this VHS was back then, so better get rid of it now and start adopting new things accordingly!

Or should you rather wait and see what happens, for many new ideas and technologies are doomed to disappear after a couple of years anyways, so why adopt at all? Something in between? If so, when and under which circumstances?

As you see, dear reader, I cannot come to any conclusion on this (maybe there is none). So for me, the question remains, neophobiac or neophiliac ... and what are you?