I’ve been spending the past several years turning the lessons I’ve learned as a manager into a set of courses for IT professionals who want to make the leap in to management.  I’ll be presenting some of these lessons as full-day seminars.  I hope you can join me!  Details below:

• March 29, SQLBits in London
• May 8, SQLRally in Dallas
• May 26-June 2, SQLCruise – Seattle to Alaska
• July 20, SQLSaturday in Louisville

Some of them I learned (fortunately) through reading, training, and extensive coursework before I ever experienced them in person. Some of the lessons, I learned through a kindly mentor who helped me see problems coming just over the horizon.  And some of the lessons I’ve simply learned the hard way.  Maybe your career path is headed in the same direction as mine…

An Oft-repeated Career Path…

Here’s how mine went, and it’s a rather common refrain among IT pros.  It goes like this – you’re outstanding at your IT job.  You excel.  You have a lot of credibility.  Every few years, you get a promotion.  But eventual, your boss (or your boss’ boss) tells you that you’ve topped out as a technologist.  They simply can’t give you any more raises.  And there are no higher level technology jobs you can get promoted to.  You couldn’t even get a better job at another company.  Ah, but there’s more to the corporate ladder than just IT.  There are all of those juicy management positions that =DO= offer potential for more raises.  So you say to yourself “Why don’t I just jump over to the management track?  I excel as an IT guru.  I can do that management stuff easily.  In fact, I’ll be better than any of my bosses ever were!”

…Leads To Oft-repeated Mistakes

But if you’re like many IT pros, it starts to sink in that all of those skills which made you ‘the awesome’ as an technologist are =NOT= transferrable to the management work you’ve now got on your plate.  Successful IT people, by their very nature, often succeed because they enjoy “the machine” more than personal interactions – and that’s what good management is all about.

Here are some common behaviors I’ve seen from IT people once they get into management that can cause lots of problems.

• Answering a simple question via email, Twitter, or IM when the person asking the question is in the cube a couple strides away.
• Spinning up a long back-n-forth email thread when a phone call could settle the issue in 10-20 minutes.
• Spending many hours on research to justify a recommendation for an important decision, sharing the research with other stakeholders (via email, usually), and then being surprised that no one supports the recommendation.
• Failing to convince the boss into spending money on important ideas, like training or tools, or increasing headcount.
• Even after extensive interviewing, hiring someone whose a poor fit for the team.
• Thinking “We’re way behind on our projects, so I’ll just spend today hip deep in the technology helping the team get back on track.”
• Puzzling over why team members are demotivated and unproductive, or that they are motivated and productive but to their own purposes.

Can you name a few more? Add a comment!

But Why?

Problems like these are simple issues of human nature.  We all, naturally, try to do things according to our preferences and experiences.  But their two very consistent built-in preferences of IT pros that these mistakes keep happening again and again are:

1. Choosing the computer interface over the human interface: We got into IT because we like computers.  We thought of them as at least a little bit cool.  As we spent a bigger percentage of our day clacking on keyboards, clacking on the keyboard became our preferred way to interact with other people.  In fact, as IT people, the computer is our work.  But when we become managers, the computer is, at best, only a tool for our work of managing people and, at worst, an outright impediment and obstacle to our work.  Many problems in leading teams have their origins in choosing a computer-based method of communication when another form of interperson communication would be quicker, yield better results, and improve team interaction.
2. Smart is as smart does: A very common element of human nature is for people who are successful and smart to believe that success and smart applies to pretty much everything they do.  In my own family, I recall family reunions where one of the more successful cousins, who was in the insurance business, enjoyed giving everyone else advice about personal finance, stock and investing, politics, religion, parenting, animal husbandry, and who-knows-what else.  He basically believed that because he’d done well in other areas of his life that he was right about everything he had an opinion about.  Ah, but pride comes before the fall, does it not?  And of course, he was tripped up several times by his own limitations.  We see this same sort of pattern repeated when the IT Pro begins to manage a team in the same way s/he managed her IT resources.  The only problem is that machines deterministic. They yield consistent results when provided consistent inputs.  People, well, we could say that people are non-deterministic, but it might be more accurate to say that people are plain ol’ chaotic.

Of course, I’ve just touched the tip of the iceberg with these two points.  I’ll be talking a lot more about this in future posts and fixes for these common issues.

Comments? Thoughts? Experiences?

I’d love to hear your own experiences either as the IT pro seeking or working in a management role, or as an employee watching another IT person learn the management ropes.  Add a comment here or drop me an email.

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-Kev

I worked for a firm as an IT manager when it was going through a relocation project.  We migrated from a shoddy IT infrastructure in a shoddy, unsecured server area (which had water pipes running around the back of the servers to the coffee machine with rodents visibly running around) to a shiny new office with a shiny new server room with a big door.  This new server room door had not only a normal key lock but also a swipe card reader.  

Unfortunately, the Director of Administration (really the Office Admin) wanted to allow access for all to the server room, so people could help themselves to toner cartridges when their printers ran out, without bothering to tell us so we could order more. (I’m skipping over the obvious horror of them having access to the servers and network)…  And we were told that using the keys to lock the room would be a disciplinary offence.  We tried to point out obvious security issues and were shouted down.

The important assets of the company were subject to constant pilferage and, come to think of it, ended up resulting in an eventual Employment Tribunal.  All of my “I told you so’s” came back to haunt them as details of their it in full in court, as the justices had read all of these details read in court and factored them into their ruling.

In a separate case, another acquaintance named Barry proceeded to tell me:

Our firm brought in a new Director of IT.  This individual wasn’t satisfied with overseeing a mere IT division.  Soon after coming on board, she set about systematically isolating and debilitating other managers in other functions, like the finance and accounting department.  If one of these managers didn’t align themselves with her, they sound found that office life was getting harder.  Service was taking longer. New installs, updates, and repairs were excruciatingly slow.  Meanwhile, those who played her game got all the support that they needed.  Most chalked it up to the simple ebb-and-flow of the business, not to premeditated planning.  But as time went on, it become more evident that she was employing a divide-and-conquer tactic to win higher level strategic battles in the executive suite.  In short order, she’d taken control of both IT and the money functions.  Turnover started to go up quickly and before another couple months had past, most of the old guard was gone.  Even these event seemed to be pre-planned, because the next thing we knew police officers were boxing up her office and taking her away.  The six-figure salary and frequent bonuses weren’t enough, so she’d evidently moved into to outright fraud or embezzelment.  We’re not sure which it was, but it landed her a multi-year sentence in jail!

Wow! Once again, I’m reminded of the value of checks and balances, in the second case, and the high value of listening to your team, in the first case.

I fricken HATE iTunes.

There, I said it.  I’m already starting to feel better.

Playing on Elisebeth Barrett Browning and her fantastic poem, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”, I’m going to count some ways that iTunes is filling me with inhuman, Hulk-like rage:

1. Ridiculously frequent updates. Not the “Update Tuesday” sort of thing we get from Microsoft, but the “I’m going to interrupt you all the time, any time sort of upda…” – hold on, iTunes wants me to update it.
2. Genius. You’re an idiot.
3. Shuffle. You don’t.
4. Home Sharing. If by “sharing”, you mean making it impossible to get music onto other devices without copying and moving it manually, you’re perfect.
5. Relentless Focus on Making a Buck.  Yeah, I know that Apple is the biggest capitalized company since the Iron Age and that they had a better Q4 in 2011 than the rest of humanity combined.  But couldn’t you give it a rest for plain ol’ music, especially if you’re a user who still uses CDs?  It seems like they’d monetize punctuation marks if they had the opportunity, for Pete’s sake!
6. Duplicate Songs in Library. Take a few minutes and Google on ‘Remove duplicates from iTunes library’. (See it on Let Me Google That for You). People are about to grab torches and pitchforks on this one. WHY ISN’T THIS BUILT IN?!?  WHY DOESN’T THE TOOL HANDLE THIS?!!!?  Someone please make an app for this!
7. Duplicate Songs on Disk. So my last disk backup took a lot longer than usual.  Hmmm, I wonder why? So I looked at my backup info and saw this (image).  Just in case you don’t see what I saw – 70.3 GB of hard disk sucked down for music.  Keep in mind that I actually have only about 6 GB of music files.  So, in the vernacular, W-T-F?!?

I’m now going to spend hours of precious time burning down iTunes and rebuilding my library.  And I must’ve already done this two or three times in the past few years already.  Look, Apple, I don’t fricken need this.  I need troublefree music that doesn’t require an IT certificate to manage.  Didn’t Apple used to be the company where everything was slap-your-mammy easy?  Well, it ain’t so now.  And it’s pissin’ me off.

I’m sure that there are other things about this product that makes your blood boil.  Lay it on me!  I want to hear your rant!

Enjoy!

-Kev

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I hate to admit it, but I’m a hoarder.  Yes, like those insane people on the A&E TV show.  Only my hoarding is all virtual.  For example, take the image above.  That’s just a tiny part of my Google Reader home page.  That’s a tiny part of my Google Reader home page AFTER reading most of the day on a recent Sunday. I still had thousands of entries to go after hours of reading.  On top of that, I subscribe to some technical e-newsletters.  I’m a member of quite a few LinkedIn discussion groups, each of which produce daily and weekly newsletters. (I only subscribe to the weekly versions).  Then there’s Twitter too.  In all, there are THOUSANDS of interesting floating through the ether which I’d been trying to collect and, occassionally, read. Bah humbug!

The Downside of an Information Hoard

You might think that, as an IT professional, hoarding information is good for you.  After all, the more you know, the more effective you are at your job, right?  Uh – no.  I’ve discovered a few downsides to keeping all of this information around.  First, I lose time on administrivia, uh, I mean administration.  I can’t think of a time when a search on Google has not produced the information that I’m interested in.  So by spending time keeping up with my blog feeds, adding new blog feeds, deleting old ones, and so on, I lose time administrating something that really doesn’t need to be administrated.

Second, there’s the time it takes to read all of these entries – many long hours to read thousands of entries per month. I’ve actually figured out a little trick to make this go a lot faster. What’s that trick? Well, previously, I used to start reading my entries and then clicking “Next Entry” each time. Even when I skipped a lot of entries, just slogging through them all was a big time drain.  Now, I simply select large swathes of entries that I’m not interested in and click “Mark as Read” without ever opening them. Works great!  I’ve also gotten a lot more aggressive about dropping bloggers and RSS feeds that offer low value.  A lot of bloggers have popped up who only recount things which are available in Books On-Line.  Why spend any time on that at all?  I’m looking for strong insight, experiences, and analysis – not simple technology facts.  (A follow on thought to this tip is that “Bloggers Should Write Meaningful Article Titles!”)

Third, and more importantly, information hoarding takes a big emotional toll on me.  Maybe it’s a factor of just how my brain works and is completely inapplicable to you.  But in my case, I always carry a subtle nagging feeling when I have unread entries in my various accounts.  Even when I know that these entries are optional and that it’s not necessary for me to read any of these things, I still feel like I should read them. Basically, it makes me feel like I should be working all the dang time and that makes me feel anxious.  Anxiety makes me less productive and more prone to burn-out.  And anxiety bleeds through my work hours into my home life.  It makes it hard to enjoy a movie with the kids or some gardening in the yard.  All because there’s that feeling that I haven’t gotten the hoard processed yet.

The Solution to the Information Hoard

I mentioned a couple specific techniques for thinning out the hoard in paragraph two.  To summarize, first, subscribe to only those bloggers, feeds, and newsletters which add actual understanding to your life.  Second, open and read only those entries that matter and skip the rest. Those are techniques for dealing with lots of entries to read.  But my last problem, the anxiety issue, was a little bit harder to solve.

Like a lot of internal ways of handling life’s problem, the answer is simple but not easy.  Similar life problems with simple but difficult solutions might include feelings of guilt (the solution is confession) or anger (the solution is forgiveness, either of yourself or for the other party).  So what’s the solution to anxiety? Here’s my thought process – the answer to my information hoard is about values.  What do I mean?   I value these various things because they make me better at my job.  Losing things of value causes me some anxiety.  My anxiety has its roots in the feeling that I’m letting things of values (these various blog entries) slip through my hands.  Why would you ignore things of value, or even worse, get rid of them?!?  On the other hand, if you asked me what I really and truly valued most in this world, I’d answer with “my family and loved ones”.  But again, do I actually demonstrate this priority with my time? Not nearly enough. Therefore, the answer is to properly appraise the value of my time.  When I think about it rationally, I think that this sort of reading is worth about 30 minutes per day, maybe a full 60 minutes when there’s something really important to learn or someone really significant to listen to.

That’s it.  After 30 minutes, I can walk away from any sort of reading guilt-free.  So what’s my new solution to the information hoard and the anxieties that it’s been producing?  A quick check on the writers and topics I care about the most and then “MARK ALL AS READ”.  Yes, there will be more to read tomorrow.  But now I no longer carry an ever increasing load saying to myself “Someday I’ll get to that”.  I feel better already.

Feedback Requested

What’s your strategy to dealing with your information hoard?  Are you still keeping everything you ever produced or read digitally?  Does my approach sound reasonable and workable to you?  Or am I off base?

Thanks!

-Kev

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A while back at a SQL Saturday in Indianapolis, I was enjoying the WIT panel discussion listening to the panelists discuss their  upbringing and how they became a success in the field of technology.  Their stories were, in some ways, similar.  They were smart.  They weren’t scared of math.  They had an important mentor who supported them and encouraged them that they could accomplish any goal.  They endured struggles such as financial hardship that, while difficult to overcome, also refined their desire to become successful in their careers.  Some of the women who had to deal with men of the previous generation even had to overcome blatant chauvinism.

But then another similarity among the panelists, just a hunch really, struck me.  I had to ask, to confirm my idea. “How many of you were a bit of loner or at least weren’t heavily influenced by your friends’ opinions before your professional career?  Because with my own daughters, it’s their friends who they want to please.  And they’d punt right away if their friends teased them about being good at math, or choosing a technical career, or anything else I can think of for that matter.”

It was pretty much unanimous.  All of the panelists were loners or had a very small social circle during their formative years.  Now perhaps I’m speaking from an inaccurate assumption, but most of my daughters are tight with their friends.  And friends mean a lot to them, perhaps more than any other aspect of their social lives (like their family).  So if their friends tell them that being interested in technology will “geekify” them, then they’d drop it like a hot potato.

So I wanted to put this question out to my female friends in the IT world.  Were you in a big circle of friends during your developing years?  What importance did you place on their opinions?  Did they give you any flack for going in to IT or doing well in technology related classes?

It seems like the days of overt chauvinism are behind us here in the US.  But I wonder if we need to start earlier with our daughters among their own peer groups to support them for a future in technology.

Thoughts?

Thanks,

-Kev

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[READ MORE ON DATABASE TRENDS & APPLICATIONS ]

In this podcast on the uber-popular podcast “RunAs Radio”, host Richard Campbell asks me about what topics are of particular interest at Tech-Ed 2011, focusing the discussion on cloud and SQL Server “Denali”

You can download the MP3 version of the podcast or the transcript here.

I had a very interesting conversation recently with a good friend of mine.  She’s at the top of her game as a first class enterprise DBA in a major medical institution.  She was interested in my career advice because she’d recently received an unsolicited invitation for a higher paying job in the business intelligence (BI) field.  While I won’t talk much more about the specifics of that conversation, it’s not a unique conversation.  In fact, I gave an interview to SearchSQLServer.com a while back about how DBA career paths are more and more leading into an even better paying career in business intelligence.  Check out the interview HERE.

I’d like your opinion here.

Follow my logic here for a moment as I walk through a couple rhetorical questions.  Have you ever had a friend developed an application entirely on SQL Server Developer Edition?  (Not that YOU would ever do such a thing, but maybe you know someone who has. Right?) And has your friend’s IT department actually deployed said application only to discover that they’re only licensed for Standard Edition in their production environment?  And then was your friend’s IT management team is horrified to learn that they’ve either got to go through the very expensive process of extracting all of the Enterprise and/or Datacenter Edition features for the production application in order to remain in compliance, upgrade to the more expensive SKU licenses, or risk a potential future audit?

I’m not saying that this has happened to any of us.  We’re too smart for that, after all.  But have you ever known anyone who’s had this experience?

Having worked with a lot of customers another commercial RDBMS platforms (which I’ll euphemistically call “SEER” from Redforest City and “IB4” from Upstate City), I can tell you that auditing is a fun and exciting way for those platform vendors to make a LOT of money.  This is especially true because a production application, once successfully deployed, tends to be too valuable to disable or otherwise compromise because high-end features slipped in to the development cycle even though the production environment only a “standard edition” SKU in place.  Ouch! Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place.  Now, keep in mind that this is a strategy used by SEER and not by Microsoft.  But Microsoft could implement the same sort of licensing audits if they wanted to.  (Please leave a comment here if you have ever been audited.  I’d love to hear your experiences, at least as much as NDA’s allow).

So if you use SQL Server Developer Edition (DE), of any version, would you like to see a feature that enables you to run DE not in its default “full featured mode” but at another SKU level, such as good ol’ Standard Edition?  I know I would.

If you’re on the same page as I am, there are a number of suggestions logged on Connect about this very feature!  Make your voice heard!  Check out:

https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/496380/enable-sql-developer-edition-to-target-specific-sql-version

Of course, the more skeptical reader might say “Hey, that’s their tough luck. Developers should know the difference in the SKU licensing options and feature sets of whatever SKU they’re developing on compared to what they’ll deploy on.”  And I wouldn’t fault you for saying so.

But I would go on to point out that much of Microsoft’s success in enterprise IT settings can be traced back to their very strong relationship with developers.  And anything that Microsoft can do to empower developers to save time, money, and resources during the development phase of an IT project in turn energizes that relationship between developer and Microsoft.

It also makes the life of the DBA that much easier, because they don’t need to imply that those cowboys on the development team went off half-cocked again.  So what’s your opinion?  Should SQL Server Developer Edition include a feature that sets the SKU-level of the database engine?