I’ve been in new new role with Xtravirt now so seven weeks or so now, and it’s interesting at this point to take a quick checkpoint and look at what I’ve observed already. I’ve been in the End User Computing game for some 14 of the 16 years I’ve been in the IT industry, in fact, it wasn’t even called EUC back then. I think the euphemism was something like “bloody end users!”, but of course we live in enlightened times these days, and we have to give them a more businesslike moniker.

The point is that EUC now is primarily a virtualised environment. Since I started my new role, I’ve been exposed to XenDesktop, XenApp, Login VSI and a whole raft of other tools. The interesting thing about the “new” EUC space is that it forces you to turn traditional desktop approaches on their heads. For example, Windows is written based around the fact that it usually has a local disk all to itself, that it can thrash to it’s heart’s content, without having to worry about running into other resources trying to land grab from it. In a virtualised EUC environment, this is no longer true. There can be several dozen virtual machines booting at once, logon storms, anti-virus scans and a whole batch of other processes going on simultaneously that are competing for the same disk resource.

Additionally, in the days of server consolidation (the phase 1 of mainstream virtualisation, if you will), capacity planning tools such as VMware Capacity Planner or PlateSpin Recon would be set up to capture performance metrics from physical servers, to essentially baseline what CPU, disk and memory resource was being used, so that the virtual equivalent could be appropriately sized for performance. In the EUC space, this is no longer sufficient. As well as capturing the previous metrics, we also need to look at additional detail based around the end user experience. If logon to a server console is slow, generally no-0ne but the admin would notice, and as frustrating as it might be, it’s generally tolerated and goes unreported. In the EUC world, when several dozen users logon at the same time and experience is degraded, IT will get to know about it pretty quickly.

As such, the likes of Login VSI help to determine the performance of the EUC experience using real world examples such as Outlook, Flash and manipulation of large spreadsheets. Traditional capacity planning tools are very useful for obtaining basic figures on specifications, but lack the insight to analyse application performance and the impact on a virtual desktop environment.

Away from such matters, it’s also interesting to look at applications. As I remarked at a BrainShare event presentation several years ago (before iPads and VDI in 2007), the apps drive the platform, not the other way around. Generally, users don’t care if it’s Mac, Linux, Windows, iPad, Android or Etch a Sketch, as long as they can get access to their line of business applications in a usable manner. The underlying layer of the OS generally just becomes another commodity item. I didn’t think I was being particularly visionary back then, just a pragmatic view based on the way I approached things as an end user.

Whilst enterprise applications such as Microsoft Office come with tools for the virtual environment, many core business applications are written in house and are proprietary to the business. As such, they tend not to have enterprise deployment tools, have extensive user communities or knowledge bases, and are written on the “good enough” principle. Again these apps are written with the assumption that the endpoint is a largely static thing, that the hostname doesn’t change and that it never moves around the network or across continents. In the virtual EUC space, this is no longer true and we must now be creative into fooling the app into thinking it’s still living in the traditional desktop environment.

It’s been seven weeks of change, steep learning curves and a change of thinking, but I’m enjoying every minute and it’s certainly the challenge I was hoping for.

Yesterday was my last day at NDS8. I can’t believe it’s been a little over two years since I decided to have a go at life on the road in consulting. It’s been a fun and tiring time, and I’ve learned so much. Not just about technologies, but about project management, business process, other people and mostly myself. I’ve managed to get customers out of some of the strangest of scrapes. I’ve worked late and travelled during my own time at weekends, just so I can turn up bright eyed and bushy tailed at 0900 on Monday morning so that the customer is left with a positive impression.

So why the move? Well it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a couple of months and an unbelievable opportunity came up that I simply could not turn down. From Thursday, I will be employed by Xtravirt Consulting, who are VMware’s EMEA Consulting Partner of the Year 2011. As I remarked to them at my interview and without being sycophantic, this to me is the Champions League of virtualisation jobs. It will take me in a direction far beyond where I am now, making me a far better consultant and giving me some real cutting edge technical skills.

It’s no great secret that the Novell space is shrinking and I’ve been really into virtualisation for years, cloud in the last 6/9 months. I’ve had the privilege of attending VMworld EMEA, and just seeing what a vibrant community of partners, vendors and customers has sprung up around VMware just made me want to be a part of it. It’s where all the innovation is happening right now, and the pace of change is electric. It also means I’ll get a lot more involved in things like storage design, which up until now, had only been at a high level.

In this business, if you fail to evolve you soon get left behind and I’m determined that won’t happen to me. I’m excited, nervous and slightly intimidated about my new role, but that’s how it should be as it will put me on my toes and keep me there!

 

For those looking for it, here is my response to Virgin Media’s “Did we answer your question? How are we doing?”, which was too long to publish on Facebook, Twitter or anything else pithy :-

 

It’s usually a joy to ask a question as one finds the customer service representative doesn’t read it before ploughing headlong into an answer. I’d love to engage them in some badinage and spend three hours re-iterating my initial (simple)question, but I worry life is too short. I still feel that offshoring customer service to India is a fundamental mistake. 

 

They’re polite and courteous, but don’t understand spoken English nuances and it’s a problem that won’t go away until CS returns to the UK. You may think you’re saving company pennies doing this, but it doesn’t help customer loyalty and despite everything, has not improved customer service. I’d wager your budget would be better spent hiring a few of the millions unemployed in the UK to provide a better service at probably the same cost.

Of course I open myself to accusations of racism, but we know in our heart of hearts this isn’t true. It’s generally an excuse peddled by the lazy, who don’t wish to engage in meaningful discussion on the topic. I’ve been to India and they’re wonderful people with a fantastic work ethic but offshoring customer facing operations has been fundamentally flawed from the outset, a fact only a handful of UK companies have grasped.

I’ve opined similar sentiments on previous occasions only to be met by a standard corporate response. I’m happy you’ve read this far, so there is no need really to follow up further. Hopefully it’s entertained as well as informed. This is my raison d’etre!

 

Much has been said and read about Cloud Computing in the last few months, I think my over reaching comment on the whole scene is that it’s the usual IT Jedi mind trick  – one solution/one vendor/both can solve all your IT problems. I believe it pays to retain a degree of cynicism around anything IT people say, as they usually mould a technology and then wonder how best to fit it around you, rather than the other way around.

I think there’s also the automatic reaction from CxOs that shifting IT costs under a single “outsourced” line on the profit and loss sheet makes sound fiscal sense. I don’t believe that’s true for a second. There is room for Cloud based services with no residual business value (a University’s student e-mail is a fine example, or maybe a corporate blog), but in the case of commercial data and intellectual property, I’m no more likely to park my car on someone else’s driveway than I am dropping gigabytes of data onto someone else’s data warehouse a couple of thousand miles away.

The single point I want to make in this posting is that shifting your core IT services into someone else’s domain is fraught with problems. Recently there have been high profile outages with both Amazon and Microsoft BPOS, leaving customers with a degraded (or non existent) service for hours, days and weeks. Let’s be clear about one thing – when IT services are kept “on prem” (yuck) or in house, outages happen all the time. Even with SLAs, SLSes and the like. Shit breaks, it’s a fact of life.

Now then, go back and re-read those articles I posted above. What do they both have in common? The fact that customers were not kept informed about what the issue was, when it would be fixed and what they would do post mortem to mitigate similar failures in future. I believe this is the one area where in house IT triumphs. In a previous life of running centralised, high profile IT services, I always tried to communicate what was happening during failures and how long we thought it would take to fix it. I didn’t always get it right, but I made a big effort and I’d like to think people appreciated it.

With in house services, there’s always an arse to kick. You always know specifically whose arse to kick and the buck didn’t stop with a faceless multi national company with a call centre out the back of beyond. You can call a mobile number and speak to the technical person who’s standing over a smoking server. You can offer your support (however limited that might be). You can pat them on the back when they recover the service against all odds (server rooms with 3 inches of water on the floor, power cables hot to the touch) and you can sit them down to talk over how to prevent happening again.

Much is said about communication. Less is said about the lack of it. I think the inherent strength of in house IT is the ability to directly communicate with the people who build, maintain and in some cases, love the services they provide. As soon as you sign the contract to put any of that infrastructure out of the door, it’s an automatic slap across the face for your IT people. As a result, they’re less likely to go that extra mile to love that cloud based service, not least because getting to it is obfuscated by layers of bureaucracy at the vendor end.

Yes, cloud computing has it’s advantages. We’ve been using the cloud before we started calling it that. Hotmail, GMail, Dropbox, X Drive. etc. There’s nothing new here, someone just invented a fancy name for it. Remember though that once you’ve opened the door to cloud based core services, you’re making a fundamental shift in your philosophy. Just make sure you’re fully informed before you do that. In house IT may cost that bit more, but some things are worth more than just a few hundred quid.

I hadn’t realised it was so long since I last blogged. I feel the need at the moment due to my recent trip to India with work. I’m often on the road as part of the job, but every now and again fate deals you a great hand and you get to see things most mortals don’t. As such, I was invited to Novell’s India Developer Centre to meet the guys and gals who write ZENworks. For those not in the know, just be aware that it’s the vast piece of software I go around installing and cajoling the most 😉

I was extremely apprehensive before I went. I’ve only been outside of Europe a grand total of three times, and that was to head strictly west to North America, not east towards countries less well off than our own. That said, the journey did start with a trip on an Airbus A380, the largest passenger jet around. I was excited about this, as there aren’t too many around. Don’t think I’m being glib when I say it’s just like a plane but a lot bigger. I was a bit underwhelmed by the whole experience, but it did have really cool touch screens in the back of the seat with movies on demand, so I decided to watch “Unstoppable”, “The Expendables” (much better the second time around, though butchered for sensitive Arab audiences) and half of an amazing documentary called “Inside Job” (more about that later).

As you can’t get directly to Bangalore from Manchester, we had to go via Dubai. We got there about 1am local time, and I was surprised to see much huge crowds of folks around the terminal building. Apparently the place comes alive at night, and this was true. I also got greeted by the VIP service, who got me through a security fast lane, which was a total blur. Both times they met me (going out and coming back), the lady greeting me called me “Mr Chris”, which I found amusing in a cute kind of way!

The thing that struck me most during the week out there was that the Indians are lovely people who are almost congenitally nice to strangers. I don’t like talking down to people and I don’t like them talking down to me. I like to treat everyone as equal, but it was an odd sight to see hotel staff stop in the corridor as you approached them, put their hands behind their back and say “Good Morning/Afternoon” etc and not move until you passed them. I’ve stayed in hotels all over the UK and been called all kinds of things – “mate” “pal” (my least favourite, it has to be said) and I think I even got a “Guv” once in London, but in India it was always “Sir”.

The other thing that struck me is that although there is a lot of squalor and under privileged living, people just seem to get on with it. The roads are barmy, and lines are very much for illustrative purposes only. We went to the Bull Temple, which is a big deal for Indians. When local kids in there saw that we were UK and US tourists, they treated us like rock stars, wanting to shake our hand and say hello. All very affable, and not threatening at all. We did get besieged by beggars outside, and giving them 10 rupees made them eternally grateful. When I say that it’s 70 rupees to the pound, this gives you a bit of an idea of what the standard of living is like.

Kids play on mounds of rubbish and the rubbish trucks drop their loads on the side of the road wherever there is a gap – no separating paper, bottles and garden waste here!

There’s a lot more to tell, but if you’re interested in the rest, head over to my Flickr set…

I often remark that in order to be a good photographer, you have to have an eye for a good shot. I don’t think I have this, but every now and again, inspiration strikes. I’m especially pleased with this shot of a Scottish sunset, taken earlier this week…

What makes a good leader?

I thought long and hard about this post – many miles rode on the bike and many laps of the swimming pool. I felt inspired by memories of Churchill speech anniversaries and somewhat conversely, the many digital column inches in the IT press dedicated to the HP/Mark Hurd saga. It got me thinking, what makes a good leader? I’ve also become unashamedly addicated to Undercover Boss on Channel 4!

It’s true that if you ask 100 people that question, you’re sure to get 100 different answers, because every employee or group member responds to a different personal stimulus. Some people are “kick up the backside” people, and some are “arm around the shoulder” people. Of course there are all kinds of subtle shades of grey in between. That said, you’ll probably find a number of places where a wish list of leader’s personal attributes overlap between one person and another.

I’ve worked for all kinds of leaders so far in my career. Some were hands off, some were hands on. Some were calm and collected, others edgy and moody. Some were great communicators, others you literally didn’t see for weeks on end. I personally prefer the “hands off” approach, because I’ve enough self motivation and discipline to get on with it, but others prefer to be pushed. Let’s take a look at some of the things I’ve observed in my career so far…

“My door is always open”

This is a corporate favourite. The CEO or other C-Level executive tries to connect to the wider workforce by giving the impression that their office door is always open for employees to come in and express their views on how things can be improved for the greater good. This can and does work well in smaller companies, say 70 or less. A company of this size is still small enough to be relatively personal, and generally you find most employees know everyone in the company, so this can work.

However, in larger companies, my experience tells me that this can be potentially divisive. In organisations upward of 500+ people, there are teams, organisational divisions, layers of middle management that can vary in depth. The point here is that a low ranking member of the workforce strolling straight into the CEO’s office with some blunt recommendations for improvement (or to voice concern over some middle management decisions) can mean that already the chain of command has been circumvented. The next thing the middle manager knows, he’s in the CEO’s office being grilled as to why productivity or quality levels are falling, or personal relationships have become strained.

By “leaving the door open”, the CEO has created  a perfect storm of giving an unhappy employee a direct route to the top and cutting out the very structure that’s put there to ensure issues are dealt with quickly, quietly and informally. If you’re going to use this ideal, be careful how you use it, and don’t create additional problems when you’re trying to nip them in the bud.

Go back to the shop floor once in a while

If there’s one thing leaders can be guilty of, it’s that they can end up being enclosed in a management bubble. That’s usually through no fault of their own, but they tend to look at the much larger picture. How do we fit into the market? How is the quality of our product or service? Is our marketing message getting through? How can we reduce costs and improve cash flow?

By going back to the shop floor, CEO’s can gain immediate respect from their employees because they roll up their sleeves, get their hands dirty and see what the daily issues are. I’ve always said that a company’s #1 asset is it’s employees, but it’s unfortunate that sometimes organisations see their employees more as a hindrance than the engine that drives a company. Undercover Boss has shown me that workers at the “coal face” generally have great pride in their work and have pride in the brand they’re representing. They often go over and above the call of duty for the customer by working longer unpaid hours, performing additional tasks to make the customer happy and generally developing personal trusted relationships with the customer. Latterly, this removes the layer of “us and them” and the customer sees the supplier as a friend and not someone to be treated at a distance.

I remember several years ago, my head of section promised to spend time on the shop floor, just to see first hand what happened at each site on a daily basis. This would remove him from his bubble, promote positivity within site staff and also mean that he could speak to customers face to face and find out what they liked and didn’t like about what we did and how we did it. I noticed several interesting things from this commitment:-

– Site manager’s initial reactions were one of scorn. “He’ll never do that”, “he doesn’t have a clue what we’re faced with” etc

– The section head was visibily nervous at the prospect and did not inspire confidence he would follow through on the commitment

– He gave off the impression (to me at least) that his “bubble” provided a security blanket he could not live without

– He did not provide firm dates for visiting sites, did not interface with site managers on what his tasks would be and did not outline mechanisms for how he would feed back what he saw

From the above, we can learn a few key points:-

– Make the commitment to work on the shop floor, wherever that might be (even if the site is not a commutable distance)

– Provide firm dates on when you’re going to go (preferably within the next quarter, not “sometime early next year” etc.)

– Ensure the time period on the shop floor is sufficient to see many different customer/employee scenarios (ie. a week, not one or two days)

– Notify site/middle managers of your intention to feed back your observations at the earliest available opportunity, detailing the framework you’ll be using to do this (one to ones with managers, larger meeting of all managers, written reports and feedback of wider issues up the management chain to the board, if appropriate)

– Don’t be afraid to criticise failings if you can do it constructively – no-one wants to hear negative comments, but if the ultimate goal is improvement, employees will buy into the process very quickly

– Provide praise where appropriate too – you will find stories of individual excellence where you least suspect it

– Keep an open mind, without this, the whole process is a waste of everyone’s time

– Rewards need not be massively financial, think about structured training plans using in house resources or give someone a job title that reflects better their experience, skills and responsibilities

– More often than not, organisational or operational tweaks are more appropriate than wholesale changes to make improvements

In my particular example, this section head (to the best of my knowledge) never did follow through on his commitment.I’d like to think that had he done so, it would have been a rewarding experience for all concerned and we would have made organisational changes that would have benefitted all.

“Communication breakdown..it’s always the same….”

Ah, communication. Often talked about, often stressed as vital, often missed completely. But then again, communication is a very expansive term, can we distill it down to make better sense?

We often think of communication within an organisation as flowing from the top down, from the board to the coal face and on things such as “how is the business doing”, “changes we are making”, “why the CEO has a new BMW”. OK, maybe the last point is erroneous,  but think about it, is that what an employee on the shop floor is likely to be thinking about you? Do they feel disenfranchised?

The above example is a common mistake in business. While it is vital to have an information flow from the top down on such matters on how well the organisation is performing, future plans and more, it’s equally important to ensure the flow of information is bi-directional, not uni-directional. How can management improve services without feedback from the delivery mechanism? Some of this refers back to my initial point of “my door is always open”. In a large organisation, ensure your workforce has an up to date organisational chart, so they know exactly who they are responsible to. Middle management is there for a reason, make sure you use it. Otherwise, it becomes needless bloat that reduces efficiency. Should structure changes be made, new divisions or teams created,  make sure the organisational chart reflects this. This way, an employee on the shop floor knows exactly who they should be speaking to.

One company I worked for had a quarterly “all hands” meeting, where all staff came to the head office for presentations from each section head and also from the CEO. I think this worked very well, and for those not present because of holiday or customer commitments, the session was recorded and made available for playback on the corporate intranet. This idea is brilliant and should be used where possible, because:-

– It is regular, and employees know exactly where and when the event will occur

– It is permanent. Even if it’s been a slow quarter, there’s always something to talk about

– Every department knows what the other departments are doing. Sometimes cross-pollination of skills and ideas can occur in an organic way

– It provides employees with an identity of who they are within the company as the engine that drives the business and if their department has had notable success that quarter, the whole business gets to hear about it personally and the section head and CEO can provide praise to those who deserve it – always a massive morale booster

However, on the other hand, there can be pitfalls:-

– Don’t regularly concentrate on particular departments for praise, this can lead to instant divisions (i.e. “This has been our best Sales quarter ever, aren’t Sales great?”)

– Remember the unsung heroes, without whom the organisation would not function. More often than not, these are the internal, unglamourous departments the customer rarely sees, such as the stores department, payroll, development etc.

As well as quarterly “all hands” meetings, it can often be useful to provide something more regular, such as a monthly e-mail or newsletter or a blog from the board that’s updated on a regular  basis. If you’re going to commit to something like this, make sure you do it regularly and you keep it up – employees will come to rely on it.

Remember the small things make a difference!

Whilst company barbeques and white water rafting expeditions are nice, it’s often the small things that make a bigger difference to your employees. To keep them motivated, reward such things like attendance with an £20 Amazon gift voucher (it needn’t cost the earth). Have an “Employee of the Month” scheme where excellence is rewarded and publicised, even if it’s an “internal” employee that customers never see.

Employees often react well to regular performance reviews – if all targets are met over a quarter, why not reward them with some personal improvement time? Or even an extra day’s holiday? Be creative – often the small things make the biggest difference.

Hopefully in my next blog, I can provide some thoughts on middle management and what techniques can make you a better leader. But for now, this blog entry has been by some distance my biggest ever. Please leave any and all feedback, I’d be interested to hear the experiences of others.