simondelliott

Justifying ROI on a wiki.

How to help your boss make a decision to buy a wiki or
Which line do the curly braces go on?

We used to have a big problem with quality, simply put we spent most of our time fixing bugs on old code rather than innovating new products, the problem was code standards.

My team was in 3 countries and we had 3 different sets of coding standards, any collaborations were plagued by technical differences in the code. I wanted to merge the codebase for the main products from all three countries and there for had to get the team to agree to a new set of standards.

I took the traditional approach, got one dev team to make a word document, distribute to all the parties etc … we held meetings to discuss feedback, had reviews and revisions of the document.

After about 3 months we managed to get agreement, and some people started using the new standard ….

However within another 6 months there had been so much change that the standard was out of date, and only a few were following it. Obviously my management team and I tried using the stick, but it just made everyone hate the standard even more. The code was not getting any better and the programmers were still behaving as little teams, rather than as a whole.

So, I copied and pasted the coding standards into our “trac” wiki, which is a free product. I told every one that they must follow the standards, but I also told everyone that anyone could change them. If there was any disagreement then I would make the decision. Over the next couple of months they deleted about ½ the standards, then they had a big row about a whether the curly braces were on the same line.

The end result was that all the developers subscribed to changes of the standards and took an active interest in a) whether they were good and b) how best to follow them.

The difference between wiki and the old “document and versioning” approach was that it allowed standards compliance responsibility to be devolved to a level in the product development team where something could be done about it. I was freed from the mindless task of telling developers to implement the standards, the code was significantly better, there were less bugs and the whole company started making the same products faster.

The investment in installing the wiki (1 day) me adding the standards ( 1 day) the huge row about the curly braces (a lot) was far far out weighed by the reduction in testing and fixing time and the increased revenue by having a better quality product that consumers loved.

About two years after that we started using the wiki for far more important things such as interface specifications, functional specs and architecture documentation.

Why waste time on categorization?

If you store your information in folders or on a network share or even in some document mangement systems then you may be at a disadvantage …

Filing behaviors such as tagging, categorization and placement within a hierarchy are a cost on your time and therefore a form of waste.
However, If the time to recall the item being stored is reduced by more than the cost of filing then it’s a worth while activity.

Hierarchical solutions to information storage have a high upfront investment in waste (the hierarchy itself), where as denormalized “broad and flat” solutions have a low initial investment in waste.

The reason that there is a swing towards the later solution is because modern search engines have a greater semantic understanding of the content and can recall faster, offloading the manual input needed by the operator onto a machine.

If you look to the future you will see that there is a massively increasing number of web based features for authoring and collaboration. These are either very low cost or GPL products. The idea that we would choose not to use this functionality and ignore efficiencies and cost reductions that it offers is unrealistic, the idea that a single supplier can meet the demand for all this new functionality is also unrealistic.

To have more business agility and lower costs a company must embrace a heterogeneous environment.

The death of the desktop

It is not news that nearly every application is browser based (notable exceptions are high power games, and desktop apps like word). Another trend is that browser applications are becoming more highly functioning. When preparing content for the web most people use a combination of google doc and wordpress.

Printing a document is becoming seen as socially unacceptable and is more often than not more inconvenient than reading on the screen.

Do these different forces spell the end for MS Word?
and if word dies will the rest of the desktop software also die?

How to size an online community

Following the success of my thoughts on online comunities Ive decided to coint my own unit of mesure.

The Internt Gram or ig is a measure of the information in a website, discussion board or onlien community.

You can read all about it in my page on the subject here How big is an online community.

order vs chaos & who will win the recession

Imagine two hypothetical companies,

Spick & Span
This company is organized to the maximum efficiency
Their data is in the most normalized form (no one piece of data is repeated)
Their process are perfectly efficient and no task is ever repeated.
They do have redundancy in their system but this again is perfectly sized.
Their people are hardworking, intelligent and enjoy their jobs.

Splat&O’Messy
This company is not organized in any way nothing is written down
There are no job titles, roles and responsibilities or appraisals.
Their data is literally strewn around the office.
Loads of tasks are repeated, there are teams that are entire duplicates.
Their people are hardworking, intelligent and enjoy their jobs.

If you place these two companies in a stable environment then Spick and Span will naturally be the most profitable where as Splat and O’Messy could make loads more profit if they were organized, but they are all so busy they never get round to it.
Now imagine moving these two companies into an unstable environment. Suddenly Splat and O’Messy comes into its own, its own instability allows it to react faster than Spick and Span, also because information and resource is strewn around the whole company, vast parts can be cut off or become inaccessible and it can still function.

Companies are made up of lots of different types of people, during stability the organizers (project manager types) bubble up and start to run the company. On your P&L this will look great, but you must be aware that every process they implement or orgchart they publish is a nail in the coffin of your agility. You must balance this type of person with the type of person who is not well rounded, and who sometimes goes against the flow.

In short, a little mess is a good thing,

PONG is more than just a game … its a way of life

Have you ever wanted to learn a new programming language?
Have you ever had to introduce a student to programming?
Have you ever had to teach a team how to code for a new platform?

Well if you have you will know that all these are difficult jobs, most seasoned professionals will have done them many many times.

Its difficult to learn these things straight from books, infact to get the real experience you neeed to professionally make software quickly when you dont have the skills inplace its downright impossible.

I have a standard approach … and too keep it all fun it involves pong
.

When Im setting up a team using a programming language that they dont know, I ask them to make pong, without using copy and paste.
Pong is a simplistic game that involves very few computing tricks. However it is also very challenging for the platform. You dont need a functional spec before you start codeing as everyone knows pong.

The ball has to travel quite quickly.
The bats have move slowly enough to make it a challenge
The AI of the computer opponent can not be too good.

If they can make a good imitation of the game on the platform then you know that have a good grasp of the programming language. It teaches them how to structure the code, the repository, the build procedure and also how to get the most from the platform. You would be surprised just how many platforms Ive worked on that simply cannot run a good pong game.

If you love pong / programming and working in a team then join my Facebook pong group

Media Industry trends 2009 and beyond !

Ive made a few predictions for 2009 and would love to hear what you think.

In 1993 there were 50 large US media companies. Acquisition and merger have consolidated this number down to just 6 very very very large media organizations (such as Time warner, news corp, disney, viacom, and so on).

All of these organizations are heavily investing in web technology and Internet media distribution. We can expect to see of these companies merge with an online provider.

Google revenue is derivative from advertising placed on or around media consumption and is a revenue share with the content owner or distributor. However this is a limiting revenue source; we can expect to see Google acquiring content or content companies thus allowing them to derive 100% of the revenue.

Google is also investing in cable TV and mobile operating systems possibly as frameworks for them to hang advertising business. Interestingly Microsoft are giving up their content provider aspirations and are adopting Google like advertising business model.

The sony book reader is the must have Christmas gift of 2008 (possibly a little overpriced in the UK) . This new media device will open up a new platform for the sale of electronic books. Sony’s and Waterstones hope is that this will be to books what itunes is to music.

Broadcast and post-production automation is high on everyone’s agenda. This goes hand in hand with the exploitation of the back catalog and provides a new high tech market for production and broadcast companies. This is offset by the production cost dropping massively with new cheap cameras and open source software leading to an exponential increase in the amount of content.

Think Bandwidth! Bandwidth! Bandwidth! all this content and content consumption is driving demand on bandwidth up and up and up.

Is Interactive TV dead? the answer is no. far from it.
It just that’s its not on TV its on the iPlayer or VOD instead. And guess what … all the old iTV patents are still applicable. Acquisition of a failing iTV company that owns patent in this area is now being seen as an investment for the future.

Advertising is the engine of the media industry, so with the users being able to fast forward, skip and generally avoid the adverts where is the revenue going to come from? A short term solution is advertising pretending to be content, either in the form of product placement or in the form or well made watch able adverts.

The amount of community generated content has exploded, and this explosion has only just begun. In the near future we can expect to see every piece of human art, cometary and information in video, audio and written form. The number of undiscovered but talented directors, artists and actors is vast. These people will find that youtube is the simplest route to their audience.

The evil overlord of the media industry is the “Minimum Guaranteed Return” if you buy content from a studio, then they will set you a MGR that you have to meet when reselling the content to the public. These MGR’s are falling (mainly due to the change in audience behavior). This will make a big difference to the VOD offering of the content aggregator.

Home shopping channels are dying if not dead, people that have the internet … don’t home shop.

The days of the closed platform are over, mobile operators, cable TV companies games console companies are working how they can open their platform and still derive revenue.

The media market in China is now opening up. It is not uncommon for a TV Show to have 100 million viewers! figures that are unheard of in Europe and USA. Traditional mass media companies that are trying to avoid the change to new media are venturing into this new market.

The 5 core presentation skills

An important aspect part of an architect, business person or innovators role is convincing other people that your ideas or your teams ideas are worth investing in.  So in good technical fashion ive been breaking down what makes a good presentation into its 5 elemental components.

copyrighting
This is the art of writing good strap lines, titles and points. You can learn this from advertisers and poets. Think about simplicity, delete pointless words.

typography
How you place words, emphasize them and where you place them in relation to other objects is important. The basics of graphic design can be self taught from the many books on the subject. I found that the story behind the helvetica font was an interesting starting place.

performance
This is showmanship – at the end of the day you have to present, if you are nervous, mumbling and faltering it will detract from the content that you are trying to present.  Actors and presenters have techniques to help you concor these

composition
This is basic artistic composition, look at how the diagrams you use flow. Imagine yourself looking at the diagram or graphic as an audience member. What does it mean to you? Art history is a good way to learn about composition, and you get to spend some times looking at some really good pictures.

collaboration
Ideas are fragile they need support, the best way to get this is to collaborate with others. Know your collaboration tools well  (wiki, svn, google doc) and use them to get the most out of your friends enthusiasm.

It is important to know these skills well. How can you inspire someone else if you have not been inspired yourself.

Check out my christmass themed graphic !

Technical architecture solution diagram – make it BIG

If your presenting a technical architecure diagram and you want to involve the audience, then

Make it BIG!!!
make it REALLY REALLLLLY BIG.

print it out on A0 – infact print it out on 2 A0′s and stick it to the wall.
When you talk about it give your audience pens and pencils and ask them to draw on the diagram. Stick postit notes onto the diagram to highlight certain points.

Should I invest in my Next Generation Network?

As more and more entertainment is offered over the internet, the importance that the consumer places on the TV offering will diminish. The primary decision will be on bandwidth; how much, what price, is it capped, what reputation does the telco have. The global recession will mean that in the short term it is likely that infrastructure investment will be cut and will only happen where cost can be recovered from operational expenditure. Longer term investment must primarily focus on providing higher bandwidth, rather than complex telephony or TV features.