The secret to success is having no shame and not following the lemming marketing tips.

Turns out, people are so fed up with traditional SPAM assault and they would rather do business with people they can read and understand the whole agenda.

Note to foreigners not familiar with US TV: We have a hit show in the states where adults try to will million dollars by answering 5th grade (or lower) questions with a help of a fifth grader. Play on words title..

I’m on a little vacation in New York City and have been doing the usual tourist stuff. Now its no news that New Yorkers are the most inhospitable and rude people on the face of the earth and displaying that arrogance even in tourist destinations is just incredible.. but this weekend I learned more about my ignorance and showcomings than about NYC. It has been a very ugly mirror to say the least.

Empire State Building: Typical line ride, more lines, rooms, stairs and elevators than you’d imagine Indiana Jones would take while raiding a tomb. So here is what I’ve noticed – the area is under construction. They obviously have a solution. But it doesn’t involve signs!

They literally had two guys that walked back and forth down the 10’ hallway to yell at tourists “You don’t have to take an elevator, you can take the stairs. Way to go genius. How many times are you going to do that before you figure, hey, maybe I’ll put up a sign.

Irony: I have seen at least 8 tickets opened up during the light weekend about items that we knew about! Routine maintenance stuff. Is it on the blog? No. Is it in the Shockey Monkey? No.

Statue of Liberty Double-Play: I made reservations online for a ticket that included a visit to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Awesome! But wile picking up the tickets this morning I am told that they can’t give me Statue of Liberty tickets. “So sorry, they stopped selling tickets to third parties so you’re going on a cruise.” – Ok, did they stop selling them yesterday? Last week? Month ago? Oh, no, they stopped doing it in 2005!!!! I made a reservation last week. Think they could have told me that one?

Irony: I announced last week that we’d be closed for business this weekend. But a global company never sleeps – maintenance still goes on. We worked on the ExchangeDefender reports, worked on the backup server, worked on the SharePoint 3.0, worked on ExchangeDefender portal.

And aside from the folks who were doing maintenance, who else knew or was told about it?

Point being – the better I get with the communication with my customers and partners, the more holes I see in the practice as well. What’s worse is, people that get excellent service do not expect anything but. The first time you slip up you lose all the credit and are second guessed for a month. Makes sense – If they didn’t bother to announce that I better check with them again. 

Back to the lab…. Nothing like a mirror to show you how everything you’re up to is nowhere near where it needs to be.

Let’s face it, projects are what IT is all about regardless of whether you manage 5 workstations or 5,000. If you’re successful to a good degree you’re likely running several projects at the same time and tracking those can become difficult. Fear not, Karl Palachuk comes to the rescue with his latest e-book: The Super-Good Project Planner For Technical Consultants.

What’s in it..

Let’s hope that the picture is indeed worth a thousand words..

And there you go – 133 pages of The Project Book, telling you how to manage the 20 pages of the Project Binder word document. The Project Book is broken down into six chapters covering introduction, project management for SMB consultants, project binder, binder forms, “running” a project and finally sample projects and some closing thoughts. If you’ve never seen any of Karl’s work before he is really good at simplifying exactly whats at hand:

A project is any undertaking that requires more than two steps that can’t be completed at the same time.

 I assure you that the other 133 pages employ the same level of simplicity to make even the most complex projects easy to document and most importantly, easy to control. In chapter four Karl wraps it all up into the actual process of defining and starting a project. Included are plenty of forms, documents as well as questions and actions you need to consider at each step as you move through the project. More specifically:

1. Project Description

2. Define Goals of the Project

3. Define Where the Project is Today

4. Define Where You Want To Be

5. Define All Stages and Steps Needed

6. Final Check-Off for Project Plan

7. Project Evaluation

Of course each of those points could take you hours or days to complete but they serve a very important purpose - they let you control what you do, how you do it, when you do it, at what time you’re complete and knowing exactly where you happen to be at a time. The art is not in the obvious (above) the art is in having all of this put together in a way that you can manipulate it a la carte as you go about your day to day job.

What is perhaps more important than anything else is the steps above are accounted for, so you bill exactly for what you do and it is clear to both the client and the consultant/contractor/employee where the project is.

More projects, more pre-filled templates, more suggestions and ideas on how to go about project management.

The cherry on top..

Half way through the project guide, which at this point shows you how to manage web site moving projects and Veritas projects, Karl departs into sample projects. For example, moving a web site from SBS to a hosting service. Then off to switching to a new ISP. Bringing email in house…

Do any of these sound like the projects you’ve done a few hundred times already?

Now quick – how many of those went off perfectly and exactly as you expected them?

There you go. That is the whole point. The more successful you get, the more busy you get, the more employees you end up getting involved in your day to day operations, the more important project management becomes. Actually, the more important the act of establishing your project management process becomes, and this is why Karl again knocks it out of the park for the SBS consultants.

The Price

The incredibly outrageous $79.99. Believe me, it’s worth it. I am not just telling you this because I get $0.00 commission from selling this book, I am telling you this because I am trying to help you save your time and your effort and get your business more organized.

What is the cost of dropping the ball? Looking like an amateur that is just winging it?

The Bad & The Ugly

Before you get your hopes up about this e-book being all you will ever need to know about projects, management, documentation and more… slow down. There are no chapters in this book on how to manage a project with your favourite PSA, there are no excessive references to implementing this in Microsoft Project, tying it into accounting…

… it is simply a guide on how the projects are established, identified, documented and managed. Which tool, which accounting practice, what language or approach you take is up to you. Karl just gives you a kick in the butt and an awesome starting point to use NOW. Open the project_binder.doc, change the names to fit your company and start filling in the blanks.

Conclusion

I often talk about being a professional. The core of professionalism, aside from honesty, is accountability. How can you be accountable for a project if you don’t have it clearly defined? How can you tell where you are in the project if you don’t know where you started, where the end is and what the next step will be?

This is what Karl and the Super Good Project Planner (lets face it, project management guide) are about. It’s $80, the best money you’ll send this week, it will pay for itself the first time you use it and I’ll be darned if you don’t find more billable time with it or at least save yourself time providing ongoing support for that project down the road.

Pimping.

Over the next two days I’ll be offering you my take and my review of the two books being published by good friends of mine, Erick Simpson and Karl Palachuk. Both have a history of comitting thoughts of great value to paper and I’m going to let you know about the newest and the latest things these two have come up with.

In a separate note, what should be the starting bid on a video of Erick shooting a swag slingshot at Karl’s butt?

Been quite busy lately with all things OWN, SM, TW… but even I took a moment to blow $0.89 on a shiny new DRM-free mp3 from Amazon’s MP3 service. It’s about as simple and effortless as it gets, works, and doesn’t need much more than a browser.

Now, what to do with it? Microsoft’s “Windows Media” player sucks and thats putting it politely. What can I use, aside from WM, to get those songs seamlessly onto my iPod? It seems like 99.9999999% of people out there have a very simple requirement:

1. Easy to buy

2. Easy to add to the device

3. Easy to add to the playlist

Neither iTunes, nor Windows Media Player currently have this, at least in my opinion. But songs are songs, and I’ll be getting my future ones from Amazon.com. Try it out folks, its super easy.

I’m back in the world of living for a few hours before I go back to sleep to catch up on a few things but I wanted to share a few words of wisdom with you. They actually come from Rich Walkup:

“Fuck me running” – Rich Walkup, 2002

I don’t know if he came up with the saying or if he just repeated me but you have to admit, picturing that phrase does make for a very funny situation. Until it’s happening to you. Nothing makes an allnighter hit you in the face faster than holding two PowerEdge 1800’s on your shoulders while people around you chant Hercules, Hercules..

Anyhoo, the topic of rackmount ergonomics. I am convinced these solutions are designed with intent to hurt people. I was looking at a brand new PowerEdge 2950 yesterday that had at least 6 places that you could cut yourself on the side edge alone. Front and the back as well. I am not sure which data centers the designers toured before coming up with these solutions but I assure you that we don’t use a hydraulic lift to rack and unrack servers. Is it too much to ask you two things:

Smooth out the server edges at least in the front and in the back.

Provide a handle, separate from the mounting handles, to lift the server off the ground.

Just because the server has $8,000 of engineering ingenuity in it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t spend 15 cents on its form functional benefits.

Last night / this morning I saw a shade of red on my eyes that was unbecoming of even a white rat at Pets Mart. It was ugly. Being a Floridian and having gills to live in such a humid place… I \was not prepared for spending a few days on a floor of a data center that had 0 humidity. There also ought to be an X-Games category for unracking and racking heavy equipment. Rackin’ ain’t ez..

Everything is back to normal, we did everything that was on the agenda and aside from several hundred things that happened in a way that we didn’t expect them to, it was all good. Mind you, this is why we did the whole thing in the first place – to be prepared and more responsive for these issues when they come up in the regular course of business in true emergencies.

I’ll update you on this process later this week, at the moment there is some memory foam waiting for me. I am a lot more confident about where we are going and what this maintenance cycle has prepared us for. However, just about everything hurts and I am dead tired. No pain, no routing…

I don’t write about politics on this blog but watching tasering video of an annoying little entitled prick really made me proud of my alma mata, University of Florida:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqAVvlyVbag

Why is it so hard for people to show some respect for the law, comon decency and decorum? You are a student at the University of Florida. You are in a classroom. You are attending a speach by a US Senator. Show some respect, this isn’t a football game and you aren’t yelling at the Chief Osceola after he spikes the war spear into the Gator logo at the 50 yard line, you’re in an academic setting and expected to behave like a student.

It is a damn shame that a taser is needed to teach people that…

As for my young, proud white civil rights brothers fighting the oppression.. How very Martin Luther King of you.. No, wait… I’m thinking about the wrong King. I meant Burger King – like the place you’ll be working 3 months from now after you drop out of college because instead of going to class you’re laying on a field with a sign strapped to your back. I hope the back of that cardboard is still blank, you’ll need it to write tearful slogans that will make people throw change at you from their cars.

What… a… waste.

I wrote about this a few months ago but we had to step back a bit and look at the picture a little bit differently. In just about 24 hours we’ll be shutting down the NOC, systems, networks, PDUs and effectively simulating what would happen to our network if Dallas disappeared from the face of the earth.

We get to do this twice, maybe three times a year if we’re lucky. You see, operating even the smallest of networks involves documentation nightmares out of this world. Even one server can change drastically over the course of one year. Not to mention new gear, new computers, new network equipment, new business processes. When you put those into action you usually do it quickly, do it at best-effort basis, test it, check on it eventually and hope for the best or at least a good fallback. Despite the size, we do the same damn thing except with slightly more expensive gear (for example, my network cards probably cost more than your entire server, pardon the arrogance) – but we need to get it working – now – along with 50 other things. And about two to three times a year I try to take a breather and make sure we are doing it right.

Planning, projects, management… as Amy says, are not about the tools. They are about the approach, about the plan, and about the process. Karl, whose presentation I hope you guys go see if you’re in Redmond, is releasing a project workbook towards the end of the month. What he’ll undoubtedly tell you is that planning is easy. You’re not an idiot. You look at your facts, look at your options, you throw a bunch of shit at the wall and then organize it before it hits the floor. You’ve got a plan! Excellent. Easy. Now, Execution… followthrough… evaluation… those are the details that make things either work or not. Those are the differences between a dead SBS server at 9 AM on a Monday morning and one that has been up and running for the last 5 months without a second of downtime. Ever met someone that complained about how their computer or server was suddenly slow after change XYZ? You know my first question – Slow as compared to what? How do you know? And 9/10 times they don’t know but have some anecdotal reference making the solution impossible to diagnose. Because they never established a baseline. They never bothered to stop and evaluate the performance impact of the changes they made. That is the key to running a phenomenal IT company – that your baselines, your key performance indicators, your data and your intelligence on the network continues to evolve. I deal with a lot of folks who think that $20,000 on a tool will fix it and answer it – it never, ever does. And a year later they are stuck with a huge bill, no way out, renewal fee – and the problem was in front of them, for free, all along. When you’re prepared for your failures you don’t need a tool to tell you about them - you can call them out before they happen. Quick, how many of you can predict total data loss on a server that has a single IDE hard drive? How do you know? Saw it happen - thats how.  

Here is how I justify these exercises. Pick a critical piece of your infrastructure. Go ahead, any piece. Server, Switch, NAS. Pull the plug (if its dual, pull both). What happens next?

The answer to that question is what happens professionals from amateurs who can read the manual. I feel our job (and our goal) is to be able to prove we have an answer to that question. Not “we think”, not that “we’re pretty sure”, not “i believe” – but I know, here is why and this is my evidence.

You know that saying… been there, done that? I want my network to show a track record = we did this, this is what happened, and this is how we improved it. One of the biggest challenges of 2007 for Own Web Now Corp has been overcoming the stupid things that were in place an we just couldn’t get over ourselves. Things have been changing, I can see the results already.

I write this open letter as a CEO, as an IT guy, as your partner, as your vendor, as your client – you ought to expect me to fail. I expect to fail, I expect our decisions to eventually be proven wrong. Thats not pessimism, thats just the worst case scenario. And it’s not something I lose sleep over every night. What I lose sleep over every night is over things I think I know, about the things I don’t expect the network to fail on, over things that I arrogantly believe we have solved - but nobody bothered to update the baseline and assure validation.

What is of absolute importance to your company? What do you do to provide with absolute (and audited, confirmed) certainty that what you’re doing has been tried and tested? When was the last time you established your timelines? When was the last time you looked at all your “quick fixes” and “get it to works” and really focused on delivering what you know in your heart you owe to your customers? Thats what we’re doing over the next 48 hours, I hope it motivates you to do the same.

Wow, finally some good news hit on a Friday! Google is talking about laying fiber under the Pacific to Asia and Australia.

That is remarkably good news for me (well, I suppose for Australia as well) as we have a ton of customers down under and they have been far more receptive of SaaS than the American’s have. Then again, I’ve also noted that they are a lot more business savvy than we are and aren’t as cheap as we are either – so if this fiber ever makes it from San Francisco to Syndey..

P.S. I know this will excite at least a dozen people for all the wrong reasons so I’ll make your  day – If this pans out, you may just see us open a data center in San Francisco. Yes, I know, I know, what kind of an Internet company doesn’t have stuff at 316 Main, uveee, uveee, uvee – Drive to San Jose you lazy bastards