Oracle Partner Network

Was at the OPN ISV forum at the ballroom of Taj Coromandel, yesterday. The forum was hosted by Oracle, Sun and AMD. Lot of presentations on why one should partner with Oracle and the benefits of OPN. For one, I finally got a clear picture of "GRID COMPUTING" that Oracle talks about when it markets 10g. Looking forward to the 10g workshop and 3 day ISV tech forum scheduled for mid Jan and March next year.

Minimum "New Work" ... SurvivalSkills2005

Tom Peters author of "Liberation Management", "In Pusuit of WOW" etc offers his Survival Kit for 2005.

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Amazed Tux! 

Business Proposals

Every time I read a business proposal to a potential client I am amazed by the amount of overhead (bullshit) we add in the document - A lot of stuff about your company's history (Nobody cares), the clients history etc. I am a little taken aback by the client's history part, I wonder which joker would want to tell a client about themselves. I dont know who started this practice but its definitely funny. Some really very cautious sales execs put in a lot of riders to cover their backsides. So essentially you'll end up with a proposal that will tell you a lot about what you will not do for your client rather than what you will do.

Now that brings us to what should be contained in a proposal. For one I believe that you should assess what the client wants to accomplish. It may be business targets like - increase customer base, improve turn around time of tele callers, increase the number of credit worthy customers etc etc.

You should highlight in your proposal that you have understood this busiess need; The solution you propose to achieve this; The mechanism you'll implement to facilitate achieving this business objective and the infrastructure you have to support this implementation. PERIOD. Nothing more nothing less. All this in about 10 - 12 pages including all title, revision history and everything else that your quality procedures require. Every other legal clause can be saved for the contract.

My recommendation would be to have the following contents in your proposal.
1. Situation Summary
2. Objectives
3. Value provided by you
4. Measure of Success - How will you measure that the objectives have been met
5. Methodology
6. Scope and Timelines
7. Critical Success Factors - A disguised way of highlighting accountabilities of the client
8. Compensation

Never title your proposal "Proposal"! Write a title that states the benefit to the client. E.g. "Increasing number of positive prospects", Highlight the key points using bullets or by emphasing text, eliminate jargon and quantify your benefits. You are sure to strike GOLD.

Getting Things Done

Been practising the art of "Getting things done" (David Allen). See my earlier post on the book. Over the last two weeks I've found that I am able to do a lot more, close the open loops and never visit them again. Did the weekly review second week in a row. Decisions are quicker and made with greater confidence. Projects move forward. Head is clear. No lapses in my Yoga routine.... All this without implementing the "Tickler File" system, not having an industrial strength stapler and an electronic labler. Looking forward to acquiring this GTD accoutrements! Wonder what else is in store for me.

My Yahoo!

If you havent seen the latest My Yahoo then I suggest that you rush to the portal and have a dekko. Those of you who already use the service you'll be in for some pleasant surprise. There are some really cool features.

For one My Yahoo now allows you to add content syndicated from other sources on the web. It allows you to create multiple pages instead of one so that you can add content based on the context - Professional, Personal etc. You can change the background theme if you wish. You can add all of Yahoo's services - mail, briefcase etc as content. Combine this with Yahoo Geocities for your personal home page. Now this is what I call great personalisation.

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The Great Arc

1600 miles, 50 years started circa 1800, no fewer than 700 men, few tons of equipment, Lethal Climate - Insects, Dense jungles, Malaria, Typhus fever, Tigers, Snakes etc.

Colonel William Lambton, Superintendent of the great Trignometrical Survey of India and later his successor Lieutenant George Eve-rest, inspite of the casualities (entire teams of about 150 were wiped out at times), mapped India.

Model of accuracy and the maps which it yielded faithfully....indicating 'the position of every town, fort, village.. all rivers and their courses, the roads, the lakes, tanks [reservoirs], defiles, mountains, and every remarkable object, feature, and propert of the country'

Inspite of the combined assault of climate and local prejudice which contributed to wiping out survey parties in single season, they carried on relentlessly sometimes taking long sabbaticals to recuperate from exhaustion and sickness.

Nothing gives a better idea of his passion for shaving tolerances to an infinitesimal minimum than this pursuit of a variable amounting to just seven thousandths of an inch.

But at times the measurements made by zenith observations could not be reconciled by triangulation.

It was said that if experienced observers, taking all possible precautions, found rhemselves confronting an anomoly for which they could not account, they were probably 'on the vergeof some important discovery'' - The fact that mountain masses exercise an attraction over the plumbline

Finally in 1857 the "Great Meridional Arc of India" was completed, The heights of the major himalayan peaks (Nanda Devi, K2, Kanchenajunga) were ascertained and Mount Everest was named (obvously in honour of Lieutenant George Eve-rest) . During this period Surgeon Ronald Ross discovered the source of Malaria at Begumpet (Hyderabad)

In the land of rope tricks, snake charners, superstions, spirituality and sadhus; This sweat soaked odyssey was the largest scientific endaevour known to man. It was one of the most stupendous works in the whole history of science.

An Awesome Project.

My laws on Software Project Management!

Here is a look at the lighter side of software project management. ENJOY!!!

1. The silliest bug will find your best customer.
2. If a software code has been found defective, its author has just embarked on a plane to the US.
3. After improving quality from 95% to 99%, the remaining 1% defects will find its way to your regular paying customer.
4. The moment you disciver that additional testing is required, the software code has lareday been FTP'd to your customer.
5. The number of Quality Control Procedures followed is inversely propotional to the number of programmers who folow them and the number of project managers who understand them.
6. The number of testing cycles that an application undergoes is directly proportional to the number of defects it is shipped with.
7. The best product that marketing wants to sell is the one which 'Product Delivery' is least interested.
8. The product in which both marketing and 'Product Delivery' agree upon is th eone in which the customer is least interested.
9. A mission critical application is likely to break down because of the smallest unit of code.
10. The probability of an application failing increases rapidly as the warranty period is about to expire.
11. A random sample in a Customer survey will not include a disgruntled customer.
12. The project manager who complains about quality the most is the one who understands quality the least.
13. If a company has just obtained its quality certification (ISO/CMM), customers have recently complained about the numerous bugs in the application.
14. When your client asks about a missing business requirement in the specifications, its probably the first time you ask the same question yourself.
15. When you conduct a training program, the person who needs it most will be firefighting to attend it.
16. During the arer times a manager enquires about a certain project, the projectmanager is on leave.
17. 90% of the software defects are discovered by your client, the rest by your testing team
18. The client who demands the most prompt delivery is the least prompt in payment.
19. The intensity or length of a company's celebration in launching a product or obtainig a project is inversely proportional to the life of it.
20. The more eloquent or impressive a presentation to a prospective cleint is, the more bleak is the chances of them buying the idea.

Cathedral and the Bazaar

A couple of days back I had blogged with comments on the book by Eric Raymond. This is what he has to say.

1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch
2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)
3. ``Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.'' (Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, Chapter 11)
4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you
5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor
6. Treating your users as co-developers is your lest-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging
   
7. Release early. release often. And listen to your customers
8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone
9. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around
10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource
11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better
12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong
13. "Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.''
14. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected
15. When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible—and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!
16. When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
17. A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.
18. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to yo
19. Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.

If this makes sense then read the full book. If this doesnt make sense then you must read the book, Better still get some formal education in software engineering.

Resource Marshalling

20 People in 5 days. Thats the number of prospective new hires I spoke to this week - in person, telephonic.... Guess I was down on luck got to shortlist just a few of them. Found one thing common amongst all of them - lack of passion, They are here just to land their next job. There were Project Managers who were not aware of (and hence obviously did not practice) Requirements management, traceability; Design was limited to drawing a few rectangles and arrows in MS Word or Visio; Estimations and scheduling were based on prior experience (mystical I guess!) and not on Function Points; No reports to management, no phase ends, no schedule monitoring, no quality plans, no risk identification and hence no mitigation; no histograms, no pareto analysis, no formal defect prevention mechanisms other than probably yelling at the team!; and so NO LEARNINGS. Yet all of them draw fat salaries that would be the envy of neighbours and friends. WHY?

Now Reading

Its been a good week. Completed reading "Cathedral and the Bazaar" an essay by Eric Rayomond on software development more specifically on the methods. The "Cathedral" style followed by most software development organisations and the "Bazaar" style followed by a cohesive set of volunteers like the Linux Kernel Project, Mozilla, GNU Cash etc. He goes on to disprove a lot of conventions that we have as project managers on motivation, resource marshalling, schedule, budget and time, and proves very convincingly the superiority of "Bazaar" style development. Which in hindsight is true considering that most of us have a contempt for documentation and quality processes. But we still believe that the "Cathedral" style will provide that magic cure to all our software development ills. Such Shortsightedness. Well now on to another masterpiece

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Resumes

Aesthetics and presentation seems to be a lost art in our country. That explains why most of our students struggle to find jobs after completing college. The company I work for needed to fill a few positions and had posted these opportunities on a Job Site. Over the last few days I have been receiving resumes from prospective hires of varied vintages. Occassionaly an opportunity for software engineering students to do their semester projects arise, the lucky ones get wind of it and I have been receiving resumes from students trying to impress the hell out of us to secure a place. The problem however is that I am unable to figure out who's applying for what? because the resumes all look alike. YES, unless you read it thoroughly and get to the end you'll not be able to judge who got the expertise.

Every resume should and does start with an objective. So here is one that as arcane as possible .

Lead a career to enhance my skills and to create innovative strategies to flourish in the field of information technology to grow with the organization in good spirits.

Here is another one that beats me

An Engineering graduate with MBA, desires of pursuing a challenging career in innovative e-business where application of knowledge, skill and creativity is looked for.

The resume is then followed by a set of technical skills usually written like this

• Programming Languages

C, C++, Visual C++.....

• Database

Oracle, MS Access .....

• Front End Tools

VB 6.x, PB 8.....

• Design Tools

HTML, Macromedia.....

Makes life difficult for the interviewer and the prospective hire, more so for the latter because there is no way anybody can figure out the level of the candidate's expertise. During discussions the person asking the questions usually starts with, what in his opinion, is an imaginary mid -point in the technical expertise spectrum and tries to place the prospective hire appropriately and score him/her. Very often questions are asked and there is no answer. The discussion ends up being a one way street of interrogation. After several swings on the specturm the prospective hire manages to blurt a few answers. But at the end the number of unanswered questions will be a lot more than those that were answered. So what could have turned out to be a pleasant experience turned out to be hostile and bitter and the prospective hire feeling that he's been singled out for the onslaught, the interviewer blaming the state of education or the screening process. Pity.

There is a way out though? The least people can do is write their resume in a way that others understand. Its not enough if only they understand it. Detail technical skills, dont be abstract. We are not doing software design here. Don't just write Oracle 9i say what exactly it is that you know - Is it that you wrote just SQL statements or do you know joins, stored procedures, or worked with java on the database. Dont write J2EE - Write Servlets, JSP, Session Bean, Entity Bean and so on. Gives the necessary weight to your resume and paradoxically it moves up and receives all the attention. Here is an example of a good resume.

Articles by Shashi Tharoor

I like reading Shashi Tharoor's column in "The Hindu", its carried in the Sunday supplement every alternate week. His conversational style of writing makes you feel, for a fleeting moment, that he's present to get his point across. Added his books to my reading list. Take a look at his Archives.

Software Estimation

The whole of today I spent reviewing the estimation of size and effort; and the schedule for extending the capabilities of a software application. My first disappointment was when I saw that it was done in Microsoft Excel. Project Managers dont schedule business critical projects using Excel you do it in Microsoft Project. Excel doesnt provide a facility to create recurring tasks, level resources, specify holidays, plot the critical path, mark the milestones, choose calendars etc Its not that you can't or shouldnt use Excel its just that its cumbersome and painfull. The Project Manager should make sure that all the above activities - critical path, recurring tasks etc depicted when Excel is used. Which is not easy considering the kind of interdependencies involved. Infact its a pain. To provide an anlogy its like tilling 2 acres of land using a pair of bullocks and a plough rather than a Tractor. Project management is more than just driving a bunch of programmers you need the right kind of tools for the job, Excel is a spreadsheet used for financial computations and is not suitable for scheduling.

Bookkeeping!

I seem to have a great tendency to accumulate things. Or thats what I realised when I opened the carton boxes that contained all my stuff which my dad (not wanting to have anthing to do with it!) conviniently shipped it off from Bangalore to Chennai. All these stuff accumulated over the last 15 to 20 years were tucked away in my house in Bangalore. When I moved to Chennai and bought an apartment dad thought that I would miss all the stuff and had them shipped to me. But accomodating them in an apartment was out of question as space was very limited. So I took the rather painful decision of giving away almost everything except the most precious stuff. So with this in mind I went about opening the boxes one after the other. Among other things I found

• A file containing literature on Shortwave listening, Dxing
• A first edition of "Applied Electronics" by G.K Mithal (My dad's copy when he was in Engineering College, incidentally 24 years later I used a updated edition for my engineering course)
• A lot of newspaper articles on subjects ranging from the English Language (Know Your English, The Hindu), Gardening, Art, Collecting, Movies, Literature, Computing, Tea, Insurance, Treasury, Numismatics, Philately, Personal Finance clipped and filed neatly.
• IPO prospectus of mutual funds
• A lot of catalogues for pens, shoes, audiophile equipment etc
• Clipping of my name in Print (Know Your English, The Hindu)
• Course material for Unix, C, Oracle, and CAT (IIM's!) etc
• A lot of Books mainly Enginnering text books.
• A lot of Business Today, Chip magazines
• All my notes and Journal entries right from the very first job to my most recent

I painfully parted with most of them after having one last look at each. I just retained a few first editions, the Onkyo Catalogues. At about 7 in the evening after about 12 hours when I finally wound up I felt hungry and realised that I forgot to have lunch. My wife who has been a mute spectator all along, said that she was glad that I finally got rid of all the junk. Didnt want to tell her about SPURL and FURL the electronic clipping service! I still have about 4 boxes to go!

Testing Times!

Haven't blogged the past week, been busy getting a software application tested. Lot of sleepless nights trying to fix broken pieces or things that didn't seem right. We had instances where something that worked the previous day did not work now. Infact most of these hours were spent by developers scanning the code to figure where things went wrong. A wrong strategy to follow especially when you shouldn't keep the testing team waiting. Any waiting team is a wasteful expenditure. We had a team of three waiting while a team of four developers and a project manager tried to locate the cause of the malfunction. Wonder what's happenning to software development. A better startegy would be to check the data first before delving right into the code. But very few software developers consider this necessary or even look at it as the starting point. Their notion is that something must have crept into the code! And once they open the program source there is no stopping them, Hours and sometimes days pass before a solution emerges while the team that arrives for testing keep themselves busy makeing phone calls, going for long tea breaks or gossiping about the hottest scrip on the stock market. The root cause has been the attitude of developers towards testing and sometimes to application development as a whole. The prerequiste for the test cycle are not laid out in the test plan and sometimes there is no test plan! Even if there is a plan its hapazardly laid out. Testing is always relegated to the end of the cycle and not a continuous activity, so bugs are dicovered only at the very end when there is very little that anybody can do. As for the attitude most developers are content being technical (Java, VB) experts and know very little about the solution that is being developed. Things will change once developers stop being coding drones and instead focus on providing solutions.

Getting things done

Over the last two weeks I have been frantically trying to bring order to my "To Do" lists. Its just got a bit out of control, thanks to, me diverting energies to focus on rather more important matters like getting my house furnished. Which thankfully after a long time is coming to an end! My obesssion with lists dates back to my college days when time management meant writing down a list of things to do in a pocket sized spiral bound pad. I have come a long way from a since then - I moved on gradually to prioritising my tasks with categories - 'A', 'B' & 'C' with obviously 'A' meaning high priority. Then after having read Dale Carnegie and Stephen Covey's 7 Habits I categorised based on my interests and roles (Son, Spouse, Project Manager etc) and gave more easily recognisable names to my lists - Sharpen the saw, What matters most, Social, Family, Spiritual, Health etc That was sometime in 1999. Five years later, sometime in January this year, when I reviewed my lists I had more than 20 odd lists - Objects of desire, Hobbies to pursue, Projects, Spiritual, Health, Templates to create, Books to buy, Books to read, Professional, Sharpen the saw, What matters most, Social, Family, Travel, Packing, Courses to take, restaurants to visit etc. It was becomming increasingly difficult for me to spend time on all of these and at times I would miss out completing tasks, added to this was the problem of the lists growing over time due to newer tasks getting appended in addition to shifting tactical priorities in deciding on which were the most important ones. I knew I need to do better but did not know how. During this time I saw David Allen's Getting Things done on the "Business Week's best seller list. It took me six months to locate a copy (on FabMall). Strated reading it a week back. I have begun practicing David Allen's workflow management and have brought some order to my lists. Though the number remains the same I have found a mechansim to identify the "Next Actions" and prioritising what goes into your planner. For the last two days I have been feeling an elevated sense of contenment of having accomplished something. Aiming for the Black Belt in workflow management!.

What matters most

Had about 15 minutes before a scheduled meeting with a client. Thought I would check out on FranklinCovey's site. Found nothing new except for the Fall catalogue. Sometimes I just like to browse catalogues it gives me some kind of thrill and does have some snob value. The author of 7 habits of highly effectieve people, Stephen Covey in addition to his books has planners, software and other tools that help you achieve optimum productivity. If you have read the book and heard of phrases like "Sharpen the saw" and "What matters most" you'll readily relate to the planners whose pages are structured on the principles outlined in the book. These are available on the web store. But what I like most are the various assessment tests. Take a look.

• A stress assessment test
• An Urgency Analysis
• An article on how to manage information overload
• Time management skills
• Productivity Tips
  

If you are into some form of management (financial, human resources, project...) then you should take these tests. The score is usually accompanied by suggesstions giving you valuable insight into the price you have paid for your professional accomplishments.

Though Stephen Covey's planners are not available in this part of the world, his books are. If you plan to savour life, Suggest you pick up one today.

The Hindu : Edgy Enthusiasms

Its early Sunday morning, its been raining all night. The fine drizzle doesnt seem to be yielding and the streets are wet but the newspaper boy has managed to deliver my copy of the "The Hindu" crisp and dry.

With a mug of hot tea, I went for the "Literary Section", usually supplied every month. I enjoy the book reviews and author profiles especially the obscure ones. I looked for Sashi Tharoor's column and was dissappointed it was not carried this week. I found Pradeep Sebastian's column, This week he wrote about Ron Rosenbaum, whom he calls the shakespeare of investigative journalism. I like his narrative style especially the way he conveys all that he has to say in light prose. Any book that he mentions in his coulumns makes it to my "Must Read List". I specially like two other pieces that he has written in the past - The Book thief and the piece on "Literary accessories" (4th July 2004). Visit the archives of The Hindu to read his other pieces.

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Switch to Firefox now

I have been a Netscape user since 1997, when the war of the browsers had just begun and Internet explorer was to be downloaded and not part of Windows 95. I have used the initial releases of Netscape and the improvements made thereafter 4.73, 4.78, 4.7x... and then Microsoft decided to bundle IE with windows; that changed the browser landscape. Netscape was taken over by AOL and the browser engine, Gecko was open sourced to the Mozilla project resulting in versions 6.0, 6.1, 6.2..7.0, 7.1 and so on.. I have used the preview releases of 6.x in early 2000, provided feedback on features that didnt work and continued to use Netscape which today is in version 7.2.

Contrary to popular opinion, a mozilla based browser offers a richer internet experience. It renders web pages faster, has tabbed browsing, a mail client with junk mail controls - add POPfile and spam is history, a address book, AOL chat, IRC, composer, form manager, password manager, cookie manager, pop-up blocker etc. There are several extensions developed by fans of the mozilla project - Google bar, Spiderzilla (to download entire websites), bugzilla to report bugs , calendar etc. You can download the extensions from Mozilla Update :: Extensions - Add Features to Mozilla Software. All these goodies are accessible at an instant, no switching between various applications. This defnitely improves my productivity at work. No matter what others feel I am extremely comfortable with Mozilla.

There are a lot of unofficial Netscape sites on the internet offering Help on using Netscape. There are several user groups on Devedge, a site dedicated to Netscape development i.e. Sidebar Tabs, skins, XML, CSS, JavaScript etc. Lot of tools to aid development are hosted on the site. You can subscribe to the RSS feeds if you like. (Newsmonster is an RSS reader for any Mozilla based browser)

The mozilla project has also spawned off other browsers like Firefox. Its been reviewed in Forbes, Wall Street Journal and USA Today. So if a site is mozilla standards compliant (which I guess most websites would soon be), it would look the same whether viewed with Netscape or Firefox. Its time all of used a standards compliant browser.

Not convinced to switch? Read CNET's review of FireFox Security Watch: Why you should switch to Firefox now - CNET reviews. Not convinced as yet? visit United States-Computer Emergency Readiness Team for IE vulnerabilities.

Convinced? Want your friends to use a mozilla based browser add a button like the one you see below, in the signature for your personal mail account. Its available at Spread Firefox

Help!

Discovered this web site rather by accident. The other day, being a gadget freak that I am, I was researching some gadgets on CNET when I stumbled upon CNET Help.com. Looks like that they had just started this. I Found some rather interesting course topics - Digital Music Made Easy, Build the Ultimate Gaming PC, Retool Your Home Office. Took all of them. The one on Digital Music is great. Infact I managed to create my own MP3 CD mixes using Audacity. They now have several other courses - choosing your Home Theatre, Digital Photography, Home networking etc. I am back for more and hope to complete three of them by tommrrow. In fact I blogged this while listening to the mix CD that I created!

Hello World!

This is my first blog! Just this morning I received the weekly newsletter from Tom Peters (.com) in my mailbox and was amazed to see his blogging. He has given his site a complete makeover. It looks fabulous and that's what encouraged me to start my own blog.

Hope to make this a regular habit.

Regards,

Sridhar Pandurangiah