cazh1: on Business, Information, and Technology

The short answer, as you know, is that it's impossible to tell you how to be insightful and imaginative in a single blog post. All I can do is point you in the general direction, and (hopefully) ignite a little spark.

What's the Goal? and, Where to Begin?

I previously talked about the growing calls for effective data visualizations; we have access to all this great information, and there are insights in there somewhere - but we need just the right point of view to rise above the cloud of data and see the real opportunity. It helps if you have experienced that rush of insight when looking at a particularly impactful graphic; not just a good looking slide, it calls out something important in a particularly effective way. Haven't we all watched that earnest TV lawyer pull the winning argument out of the blue [right before the final commercial break] and win the big case?

Of course, it's not enough just to want it - you have to have a little reverse-engineering in your soul. You need confidence & bravado (I can and should be able to create those killer pictures), hunger & curiosity (how did they do that?), and confidence to know that you can - with a little hacking. It also helps to have the blissful ignorance to assume that it's within your technical grasp.

Step 1: Find Someone who Knows - and Follow them Around!

I'm a big fan of the "follow him around" method for learning new technology - not classroom instruction, more like a series of specific examples of applied technology. I had seen plenty of examples of presentations that I thought were very effective, but I didn't understand what was happening, what exactly was making them so effective. I had to find someone that could talk about putting together effective presentations - and had the good fortune to attend a seminar by Edward Tufte. Sure, you get some nice books, great to page through - but like most technical manuals, they don't really make sense until you've watched Tufte deconstruct the graphics. I learned the importance of taking extraneous ink off the page, and how scale, color and shape can illustrate and/or obfuscate. I didn't walk away from that experience with specific skills as much as clarified ideas - and a hunger and curiosity for more.

Step 2: Find Lots of Examples - and Steal some Inspiration!

Over the past few months, I've been following a number of blogs dedicated to ideas around information visualization - more skilled practitioners to follow around! The links below to take you to particularly interesting examples; your task is to subscribe to them all and regularly scan for ideas ...

Information is Beautiful

• Great Visualizers: Mike Deal charts The Beatles - I don't know exactly what that graphic is that shows the keys of Beatles tunes, but it looks cool - I want to figure out what it's showing, and how to build one

Cool Infographics

• The Caffeine Poster, How Much Caffeine Are You Drinking? Made all the more interesting by this follow-on post, The Making of The Caffeine Poster
• 16 Infographic Resumes, A Visual Trend Resumes done in graphics? Well, maybe not for me, but these are great examples of packing a lot of information in a small area - and, making the message stand out in the crowd!
• Pink Floyd Timeline of Band Members
  

Flowing Data

• 11 Ways to Visualize Changes Over Time – A Guide It's not always about examples of applied data visualization - there are plenty of mini-tutorials gettin published, like this one
  

EagerEyes.org

• Understanding Pie Charts Another techniques post, this one deconstructing peie charts. I never knew why I wasn't a big fan of the pie, but this article points out a lot of stuff that's pretty obvious (now that you mention it ...)
  

Chart Porn

• Haiti This blog is just a non-stop source of interesting examples
  

New York Times

• Another common source of terrific information visualizations is the New York Times - many folks blog about the most effective examples, even our friends at Ask ET
  

Step 3: Get Your Coding Hands Dirty!

Remember, after you are done being wowed by the presentation - figure out how you could build one.

• The old stalwart Excel comes with an ever growing list of graph types. Can't find the one you want? Try to hack at the standard stuff using VBA!
• Sometimes a blog post will point you to some utilities. No, I never heard of Gource, but you can bet I'm looking for a project to use it with!
• Open source has a lot of interesting tools out there - from jQuery addins to full-blown BI suites - lots of tools to load up with your data.
  

Remember - get inspired, find some starting points, and get building! the only way to really understand how to create insightful, impactful visualizations is to do a lot of experimentation.

Previously ...

• Stretching Your User Interface Design Muscles (April 16, 2008)
• Data Visualization: 'Life' of Open Source Projects (June 16, 2008)
• Another Take on Enterprise Open Source (February 18, 2009)
• Practical Innovation Lessons from Software Vendor R&D (April 16, 2009)
• A Company is like a Sphere (September 15, 2009)
• Why Corporate IT Fails when Competing with Consumer Tech ... and How to Change the Game (January 5, 2010)

Technorati Tags: data visualization, design, development, hands on, innovation, presentations

Invisible Technorati Tags: cazh1, James P. MacLennan, jpmacl, MacLennan,

I've been working with internal developers over the past few weeks, experimenting with a treemap / heatmap-style visualization that is quite interesting / insightful when loaded up with data, but very tough to configure and manipulate. We are also struggling with a presentation layer (surrounding this data control) that doesn’t adapt to the size of your browser screen, or behave well when placed inside a frame set or table.

I suspect our primary challenge - typical thinking for most corporate IT departments - is that we only work with the tool we know. The only way to display information in a browser from XYZ's data warehouse is to use their particular Web portal platform. We need to switch focus; let the data warehouse provide beautifully aggregated and accessible data, but go elsewhere for the presentation layer.

Corporate IT needs to develop a sense of adventure, a thirst for new and different ways of doing the same thing, and a curiosity about different presentation architectures (ie. there's more than one way to skin a cat). Manufacture some spare time, and get down to some serious "play", with CSS, HTML, and SharePoint (as previously noted, our target intranet platform); learn all you can about the level of control you have. Note that you probably have more flexibility than you think … but now we're playing with JavaScript, VBScript, or any number of client-side technologies.

Unfortunately, we all seem to get to the same creativity-killing question: "how do I charge my time?". Full disclosure: I'm a big fan of the timesheets and reasonable chargeback systems, quantifying IT alignment with the business - but therein lies the subtle yet significant difference with "the IT guys" and the iPhone / iPod / Kindle / Nintendo / Best Buy expectations of our business partners.

Rewarding Different Behaviors

Corporate IT is measured by and rewarded for projects - specifically, getting things done. In most organizations, that's where it ends; IT is usually not rewarded based on the ongoing use of the project deliverables; in fact, ongoing support ("maintenance") is expected ... a cost of doing business ... overhead ... part of baseline costs ... and, in a manner of speaking: free (no premium is paid).

It’s the exact opposite on the Internet and consumer IT; you are expected to build the stuff for free, and just give it away. You will get your rewards when people come to your website, click on your ads, buy your products, become sales leads. You’re rewarded after the build is complete – but (if you are good), you are rewarded over and over again.

• Corporate IT – metrics for success stop when the project is complete
• Consumer IT – metrics for success start when the development work is done

This also helps explain why Consumer IT delivers "stuff" that people like, that is intuitive, easy to use, and just works. Witness the apple iStore – developers earn cash only when they sell their apps, long after the build is complete. But it's not as simple as that - note that even though there are a huge number of apps out there, less than 5% are big successes (>100,000 users). Competition and market dynamics drive quality and innovative, creativity is rewarded when an app rises above the fray. Check out the disturbing collection below; how many different ways can you write the same, silly, popgun program? You'd be amazed ...



... yet five minutes of playing with each of these shooters, and you start to see the subtle variations and evolving methods that applications that get the most return visits.

Hope for Corporate IT - the Anti-PMO

The iGun story tells us about the darwinian action that comes with large amounts of repetition, duplication, and failure. Success can be quantified by your failures - how many failed experiments have you thrown out there, just to see what sticks? On the internet, preferably a lot - because that’s how you learn what works, and how to make the “really cool stuff”.

Corporate IT might stand a chance in an environment where experimentation and failure is encouraged (but not necessarily rewarded - we need to learn from our mistakes). In essence, we need to build an anti-PMO and give permission for folks to do stuff that has no apparent value.

What will it take for you to facilitate a more creative environment? For more ideas on establishing an innovation environment, check out this old post ...

Previously ...

• The Innovation Generation and User Interfaces (April 9, 2008)
• Stretching Your User Interface Design Muscles (April 16, 2008)
• Low Tech SharePoint Hack: Project Status Indicator (March 14, 2009)
• Five Stages of Twitter Relevance (April 21, 2009)
• Failing Faster (June 14, 2009)
• Real Business Users and SharePoint (July 14, 2009)

Technorati Tags: business value of IT, design, development, entrepreneur, innovation, PMO

Invisible Technorati Tags: cazh1, James P. MacLennan, jpmacl, MacLennan,

I've received input from ten companies so far - large and small, with all sorts of ERP systems. If you care to add some information, I'll thank you in advance, and add it (sufficiently anonymized) to the summary results document (download from here).

Here are some of the findings / observations from the summary ...

Master Data Domains

The types of Master Data called out included the usual suspects - Customers, Vendors, Finished Goods, Employees. Others mentioned include Metadata, Packaging / Tooling (components), and Indirect customers (like Payors in managed care, or Buying Groups in B2B). The primary systems in scope included SAP, Oracle, JDEdwards, and QAD, joined by an eclectic mix of legacy systems and point solutions. Secondary systems called out included Siebel, JDA/Manugistics, and ADP (payroll) - plus more legacy / home grown / departmental apps.

Master Data initiatives varied, based on where the "current pain" is - R&D / engineering, CRM / Customers / Contracts / Pricing, and Finished Goods / Logistics were named by different companies as their particular focus areas. Other important considerations were things like geography (North America vs. ROW), and business structure (Enterprise vs. business unit vs. local plant).

A significant determinant of how folks thought about this problem was how their ERP is implemented - in a fully integrated "enterprise" (Finance, Order Management, Supply Chain, etc.) - and/or how the instances are divided (all enterprise, by location (geography) or by business unit).

Note, however, that relatively few respondents are concerned with synchronizing data across multiple instances - a popular callout / feature of some MDM solutions. they will speak of "integration", but a focus of the conversations were all around quality and process, not synchronization.

An interesting frustration from some of the respondees; the ERP system(s) do not capture all of the required attributes for an item, so these additional details are kept in a separate, siloed system. Easy examples would be specific attributes (like shipping material specifications), but there were multiple instances where [so-called] Master Data is calculated with complex formulas / rationale, so an Excel component is required (typically in the area of pricing / quoting details).


Size & Scope of Master Data

Predictably, there was a great variation in the responses - 100s to 1000s of customer, vendors, finished goods. However, the interesting trend was the notation that 10s of people (relatively large numbers, based on size of the company), were "responsible" (i.e. "did some of the data entry"). Could this be why there is interest in MDM and an MDM organization? Apparently, Master Data is often managed like a wiki - everybody is an editor.

Most organizations have no metrics in place; a few can speak to "data police", folks that actively monitor the data looking for issues. Best examples cited included "Health Check measures" (does data fit set of established guidelines / tolerances); vendor audits, and [results of] scrubbing (ex. Name And Address data against external sources).

When asked about the business benefits of a Master Data Management effort, most companies left this blank or said "none". I generally got the sense that hard benefits are difficult to quantify; notable exceptions seem to come from past pain. Some organizations spoke to inventory reductions and transportation savings - both derived from more accurate supply chain data, which is facilitated by clean, consistent, complete Master Data.

Master Data in the Organization

Many companies keep control / accountability at the functional area. However, companies with "enterprise ERP" implementations (full integration of Finance, Order Management, Supply Chain) typically call out ownership at the Enterprise level. It's not about the size of the company or the recency of their implementation - it's the degree of integration within the primary ERP.

Organizational specifics were tougher to get at - depending on how the company managed their master data. Generally speaking, companies that manage Master Data at a functional level (Customer Service, Purchasing, Finance) have organizational clarity. However, folks that say they manage at the Enterprise level had the wispier definitions for Title and Accountability

Of note: centralized MDM teams rarely manage the bigger projects (implementations, acquisitions, or special projects with large MD components) - but they will (out of necessity) participate. None of the respondents look to these organizations / people for project management skills. However, there were some good callouts for the communication / change management skills required for the role, especially where the group has to review implications of adds / updates [of Master Data items] with multiple groups that will/may be impacted.

Scope of Responsibilities

An interesting, consistent set of answers in this area; "Yes, we take ownership and accountability - but no, we can't measure it". To be fair, not all companies had that clarity of ownership, but the lack of sharp, clear quality metrics is noticeable. Content, Quality, and Governance are consistent in all of these companies … consistently not-well defined, not well measured.

Positives & Challenges

Funny how best practices in one company are challenges in another. There are two recurring themes throughout the responses; Quality and Complexity. The latter is interesting; this was the first point in the survey where the difficulties of Finished Goods Master Data were raised. Many companies call it out as a large challenge; all of them cite the complexity, the multiple facets (manufacturing, packaging, warehousing, transportation, pricing, costing) and the cross-functional nature

Full Results

The summary results document is available for download from here; I will add a version date on the page and keep it up to date as additional surveys come in.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Let me know ...

Previously ...

• Three Business-Case Arguments for Agile, & The Moose On The Table (January 14, 2008)
• Five More Realities for Driving Business Value from Technology (January 30, 2008)
• Success, Failure, and Insights after 12 Months of Internal Web 2.0 (March 10, 2008)
• Optimizing the Wrong Part of Knowledge Management (March 16, 2008)
• The Right Web2.0 Tool for the Audience (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook) (May 9, 2008)
• Facilitating Innovation: Establishing an Environment of Possibilities (August 22, 2008)
• Location, Location, Location: Terminology Confusion in ERP Projects (April 11, 2009)
• Who owns Master Data in your company? (May 30, 2009)
• Bootstrap Market Research: Master Data Management (What, Who, How) (November 30, 2009)

Technorati Tags: best practice, collaboration, CRM, documentation, ERP, hands on, Knowledge Management, SAP, supply chain, tech management, wiki

Invisible Technorati Tags: cazh1, James P. MacLennan, jpmacl, MacLennan

I'm doing a little hacking in SharePoint that is pulling together a few ideas from the past:

• Keeping my tech skills sharp
• Knowing when to search for the answer (vs. stubbornly sticking with DIY)
• Communicating status tersely but effectively

Apparently, I'm also trying to answer a question that is meaningful to many others, as it is used as an example in the Help files for Microsoft's online SharePoint guides, the add-on Web Parts we use here, and many other places. Why doesn't Microsoft make something like this a standard feature?

Note that I had some fairly specific requirements in mind for something that I would consider "low tech". this should be an approach that the average (read: non-IT) SharePoint site admin could use. I don't want to require third-party controls, nor do I want to require the use of SharePoint Designer. I'm also shying away from image files - little GIFs to show red, green, and yellow icons; I have established a style for displaying project status in that works great with PowerPoint and Excel, and I want to use the same images consistently on the collaboration space.

Of course, I wanted to get to a solution in a reasonable amount of time (ie. Speed to Value, or being proactively lazy). A few Google searches turned up a number of resources with different approaches. The best resource was this site, loaded with excellent SharePoint hacks - including one simple concept that requires me to tweak my ground rules, just a bit. To get this to work, I have to include a JavaScript routine on the page; however, I learned a nifty trick, one of those things that is fairly straightforward, but still has to be pointed out to you before you "get it".

The JavaScript Trick

You don't need SharePoint Designer to install JavaScript routines or special CSS on the page. All you need to do is install a Content Editor Web Part (CEWP) somewhere on the same page as your list. You can bring up the Source Editor and insert any scripts, you want, nothing will display about the routines will be available to the other controls / web parts on the same page. I'm not going to copy the code here - these guys deserve the web traffic for their work, so, go to this page to copy the script.

A Lot of HTML for a Little Indicator

The actual HTML for the "green" indicator (~) looks like this: .

Unfortunately the font changes based on which indicator you need - this table shows the various components for all of the status indicators.

Status	Code	Font	Color	Result
Green	˜	Wingdings 2	green
Yellow	p	Wingdings 3	#FFCC00
Red	n	Wingdings	#DC143C
Complete	ü	Wingdings	black

My solution adds three calculated columns to the list. Why three? Well, yes, you could do the whole thing with one computed column, but the nested IF statements would be brutally complex, and I was hoping for something "self-documenting" (ie. clear and simple).

The SharePoint list in question is a typical Issue Tracker - and the first step is to define what the different statuses (statii?) are going to be. Here, I am only allowing Open (Red, Yellow, Green) and Closed - nothing like resolved or in process or proposed - we'tll keep it simple.

I then added three Calculated columns, and defined the formulas like this:

Status_Char = IF([Issue Status]="Open - Green","˜",IF([Issue Status]="Open - Yellow","p",IF([Issue Status]="Open - Red","n","ü")))

Status_Font = IF([Issue Status]="Open - Green","Wingdings 2",IF([Issue Status]="Open - Yellow","Wingdings 3",IF([Issue Status]="Open - Red","Wingdings","Wingdings")))

Status_Color = IF ([Issue Status]="Open - Green","green",IF([Issue Status]="Open - Yellow","#FFCC00",IF([Issue Status]="Open - Red","#DC143C","black")))

I've tweaked the colors - standard yellow and red don't look good with a white background. (I burned at least 30 minutes fiddling with the color tones, to make something that was visibly yet subtle. Gotta know when to go fast and when to dither over the details ...).

Add a fourth column for the actual status indicator; we use the CONCATENATE function to build the HTML string as specified above. The surrounding <DIV> is used by our borrowed JavaScript function to signal the browser to turn this little bit into true HTML.

Status_Color = CONCATENATE("<DIV><font size=4 color=",Status_Color," face='",Status_Font,"'>",Status_Char,"</font></DIV>")

Effectiveness Testing

Yes, this could have been done with a single calculated field - it's just a little bit easier to debug this way. In any event, it s a relatively large amount of code for a fairly simple effect - was it worth the effort? The ultimate test came when reviewing the list of open issues with the project team - and folks understood what was being communicated immediately. No explanation necessary - the conversation focused on the item marked "red" right away. If we just displayed the words "green", "yellow", or "red", it would take a bit more mental effort to understand what was being communicated. I really want folks to think about the solutions, and not waste brain power trying to understand the problems. A little extra effort in the code is just right.

Previously ....

• The good and the bad about being a hands-on tech manager (January 25, 2005)
• Continuing Education Pareto Principle (50/30/20) (February 13, 2007)
• Project Status Dashboards Best Practice (and a PowerPoint trick) (May 3, 2007)
• Excel 2007 is a BOB system (Bag'O'Bugs) (October 5, 2008)
• Is SharePoint WSS dangerous to SharePoint contractors? (February 4, 2009)

Technorati Tags: development, hands on, PMO, presentations, project management, SharePoint, tech management

Invisible Technorati Tags: cazh1, James P. MacLennan, jpmacl, MacLennan

Today's best conversation was with Christopher Young, of B2BSX, a startup software exchange where corporate IT departments can buy and sell their development efforts, and make a little cash to offset stressed budgets. It's an interesting idea, and spawned some ideas in a couple of different directions.

Andy Hardy, IT Director

Every company I've worked for has toyed with the idea of selling some of their custom-developed stuff - well, every company except the first one, since it was a software development house (we weren't playing around). My "growing up" years as a developer have really jaded me on the idea of selling the deliverables from IT- or business-funded projects, typically for one simple reason - everyone underestimates technical support.

Operating systems change, DLL or JVM dependencies must be managed, and no one reads the manual - they all want support over the phone. Unfortunately, wide-eyed project sponsors or IT directors with dreams of P&L responsibility see COGS limited to the price of a CD, and revenues that match their ERP packages - it's not that simple.

Vertical Open Source

A solution, as presented by B2BSX, is to tweak the open source model a bit, offering source code for specific customizations, at low cost (well, much lower that building it yourself, I would assume). No long term warranties, no 1-800 support lines, you are on your own - but you are getting pre-built solutions that you can adapt into your own business, jump-starting your efforts with a basic shell, and adding your own refinements later.

I think of it as highly verticalized open source - sounds like they are limiting things to SAP right now, and I'd expect to see very specific solutions listed. By vertical, however, I'm thinking about reports / queries / wrappers that are very specific to a particular type of industry - the "long tail" of software niches, where most IT departments really do need to tweak that "collection of best practices" you were sold. I'm expecting to see stuff that is too specialized for a global software company to bother adding to their product.

<aside> Maybe the "long tail" of ERP requirements is where the untapped value is for those guys ... </aside>

Custom Often Means Really Custom

Of course, there are still predictable hurdles for this model - not the least of which is the fact that this stuff is written by corporate IT. Hey, most of us have short deadlines and long backlogs, and little experience developing flexible software architected for iteration and flexibility. "Hard Coding" stuff is an academic Bad Thing that is often required to git 'er done (yes, I went there ...). Chris characterized this as software with tentacles, reaching all over your portfolio and gripping on tight - makes it tough to pull out and wrap into a nice package.

There may also be IP concerns - something to work carefully through with your legal department. Note: don't think that Legal has little to offer here, because every company should have some concern about IP and competitive advantage, even if you are not in the software industry. You should be maintaining control of your software IP when you customize COTS or contract work out - now might be the time to leverage it!

We're All from Missouri

I have no idea yet whether this exchange idea makes sense - but it could be just the time to look into this. We're all under budget pressures, and Mr. Young tells me that once you get the basic relationship set up, putting software out there takes very little effort.

Maybe this is where the real future of ERP is going. What if our maintenance fees kept increasing, but the acquisition costs plummeted - all the money is in the add-on services? The Xerox model, where you give away the copiers and sell toner and paper? Gives a whole new meaning to the term "copy protection" ...

Previously ...

• Driving cost savings with packaged software vendors (February 23, 2005)
  
• What should "open source" really mean to me? (1/2) (October 22, 2005)
  
• What should "open source" really mean to me? (2/2) (October 24, 2005)
  
• Open Source as bargaining chip - driving business value of IT (October 30, 2005)
  
• Open Source Insights on Enterprise Software Business Models (March 14, 2007)
• Integrated Supply Chain Benefits Go Beyond the Internal Stuff (November 11, 2007)
  

Technorati Tags:
business value of IT, design, development, entrepreneur, innovation,
SAP, tech management, technology,

Invisible Technorati Tags: cazh1, James P. MacLennan, jpmacl, MacLennan,

Firing Up Internal Opportunity

It was true last year, but even more so now; SharePoint is very important for corporate IT, both strategically (medium- and long-term) and tactically (short-term). Sure, it's a terrific way to iterate on collaboration, internal portals, document management, etc. - "enabling innovation" in every buzzword-compliant sense. But there is solid benefit for even short-sighted, plodding, tactical IT - and it's all about staff retention.

SharePoint WSS represents a nice opportunity for folks in IT to get some hands-on experience, building relevant (if small) applications with some "cutting edge" technology. Staying "cutting edge" is important for most IT folks, but let’s face it – most of us don't work in software development houses. The typical manufacturing company spends <3% of revenue on IT; on top of that, the current economy has everyone focused on cash flow. I was speaking with a vendor yesterday evening, who told of his interactions with IT management in multiple companies over the past few weeks - and the primary concerns all had to do with system availability and cost cutting.

This nuclear winter environment, freezing spend on training & tools, would typically drive all your best IT talent away - we all want to work on latest and greatest, and experience non-trivial growth in our skills. So, how might you feed this "edge mentality", with little or no cash?

SharePoint provides both sizzle and steak ** - it’s got market hype, it looks and feels significantly different than your current, boring green screen stuff, and it’s fast twitch (small projects, lower priority, low risk if something messes up). With all that going for it, it should be easy to get internal folks to work on the new, quick and dirty stuff that the business wants.

** Ok, maybe not Morton's, but it's not Steak and Shake, either!

Drying Up External Demand

Unfortunately, I think this leaves SharePoint consulting houses bereft of good opportunities. Cash-hoarding businesses turn inward for their development needs - and this time, they can get good-looking results!

I remember when .Net came out a few years ago - had a very enlightening conversation with a typical small-firm rep. Microsoft's new technology platform was great for sales, the story went, because the projects all took 30% less time than before (such a deal!) Unfortunately, the other shoe soon dropped, and the sales team had to generate 30% more business just to keep the pipeline full and billable hours flat to the previous year. The downward pressure on rates wasn't a help, either.

Stable [end-user] companies may not fear large turnover in the current economic client, but the good ones will continue to stress internal training and new technology skills. I see plenty of SharePoint interest (and resulting bandwidth) from internal IT - where will this leave the contractors?

Previously ...

• The Best Way to get Web 2.0 Into the Enterprise (March 3, 2008)
• Stretching Your User Interface Design Muscles (April 16, 2008)
• Facilitating Innovation: Establishing an Environment of Possibilities (August 22, 2008)
• Agile Methods in a Waterfall World: Speaking In Code (September 29, 2008)
• Field Notes: Lean Times for IT Services (November 29, 2008)
• Hacking the Google Chart API from Excel (January 17, 2009)

Technorati Tags: application, collaboration, design, development, hands on, innovation,
SharePoint, Social Networks, technology, Web 2.0

Invisible Technorati Tags: cazh1, James P. MacLennan,
jpmacl, MacLennan,

I've heard from a couple of friends about some "classic" project requests - dilemmas they have recently faced. These unreasonable requests can be turned into something achievable and, potentially, more relevant / meaningful to the requestor, by approaching the problem from a different direction.

Request for Data: the Analytics Project

Classic scenario #1 arrives courtesy of the external Experts, analytic genii (sic) promising to reveal secrets of profitability and sources of revenue buried deep within our data sets. Their "simple request" is to pull all data from the system - customers and orders, vendors and payments, items and inventories - all classified by OBC; the Obvious and Brilliant Categories that, when summarized and sorted, will unlock our Big Opportunities.

Pulling data from the system is easy, but the desired attributes often do not exist in the system - or, they exist, but we have not (to date) filled in those details on our orders / payments / inventories. So, IT is asked to coordinate the bursting of data into separate spreadsheets, and distributing data sets to various areas of the business, to the people who know how to categorize the uncategorized.

Sound familiar? It should, I've seen it at many companies, many functional areas of the business. There are some Obvious Truths that jump out when you think about this for a bit ...

• The Data is not Missing - we just never collected it before. Truth is, if we were already categorizing data this way, we'd probably be paying attention to the Big Opportunities already!
  
• You're Just Moving the Work from the analysts to IT. True, internal IT will probably know the quickest way to get the most accurate data, but why push off the communication / explanation stuff?
• There is a Hint of Diminishing Returns here. If 100% of the data is categorized, a simple pivot table will elegantly show all the data, totaled by attribute and sorting the Big Targets to the top. However, most of the time spent is getting the "long tail" of special cases categorized; wasted work, because they won't make the Pareto cut.

Aha - that last one gives us a hint on how to slash the amount of work required to get actionable data in a reasonable amount of time. Haven't the external Experts seen data sets like this a million times? They are, after all, selling their experience in the problem space - why not engage in some targeted research? Based on experience, for companies of our type and size, what do you expect the answer to be? 

What cross selling opportunities are the most common?
What aggregate buying typically get the most bang for the buck?
Which product families are typically the slow movers?

Jump start the data categorization by guessing the Pareto sort, and target that data for characterization ...

• Download 100% of the data – must always be able to do a hash total to prove we have it all
• The download / work files have blank columns for every requested attribute
• Scan through and mark all the data for the target category
  

Battling What "They" Say

A similar problem is often faced when proposing system and process change. A classic refuge of the change resistant is to stand behind an Unassailable Truism with a potential for problems ...

Not all of Our Vendors are ready for EDI ...
A great idea - but how will this impact The Customer?
You can't apply these changes to All Products ...

Well, yes, but this isn't helping us get to the benefits represented by this Cool New Thing; you are just defining Problems, not Solutions.

Still, this one can be fairly easy to defeat, by getting a bit more specific. Which vendors / customers / products are we talking about? Usually, there are just a few key instances where critical relationships (vendor or customer) must be maintained, or important product attributes will guide decisions / changes. Target these specifics, and don't try to develop solutions / rule sets that will work in all imaginable cases (diminishing returns, again).

News for Wombats

The phrase comes from an old Monty Python show, where a series of terribly redundant news programs, specific to parrots, gibbons, and wombats, pointed out that in all cases, "no parrots / gibbons / wombats were involved". (Hey - it's funny in context. Not everybody appreciates Fibber McGee, either). The point is - when time is of the essence, and you are looking to balance a complete design with relevant action, it helps to focus on the specifics.

Previously ...

• Interesting Design Sessions (October 21, 2004)
• Of course we can pay for that ... if it makes business sense (November 7, 2005)
• Misapplying the Pareto principle (January 7, 2006)
• Continuing Education Pareto Principle (50/30/20) (February 13, 2007)
• Five Key Skills for Successful Project Managers (June 18, 2007)
• Tactics for Controlling Project Scope (January 5, 2008)

Technorati Tags: best practice, collaboration, design, Knowledge Management

Invisible Technorati Tags: cazh1, James P. MacLennan, jpmacl, MacLennan

a bit of code on a Saturday night ...

I've written before about a simple way to measure and report IT value to the business - quantifying alignment with strategic initiatives  project spend in context. It all culminated with a single, simple slide - numbers, with some Tufte-esque Sparklines thrown in.

Click on the picture for a full-size image!


Well, technologies come and go, and without going into the boring details, I've had to come up with a new way to generate the mini-bar charts along the left side there. It ended up being a relatively straightforward task in Excel VBA - yes, of course the table of data is being driven from a spreadsheet.

Here's the macro that does the trick - I just create a little HTML file that generate the bar charts in series (please excuse the hard-coding) ...

Sub CreateSparklinesDisplayFile()
  
   Dim sOutFile As String
   Dim iStartRow, iStopRow As Integer
   Dim iStartCol, iStopCol As Integer
   Dim i, j As Integer
   Dim sDataString As String

   sOutFile = "C:\Temp\BizUpdates.html"
   iStartRow = 45   ' First row of data to be graphed     <<< Evil hard coding!
   iStopRow = 51    ' Last row of data to be graphed
   iStartCol = 12   ' First column of data to be graphed (includes column of series names
   iStopCol = 24    ' Last column of data to be graphed

   Open sOutFile For Output As #1

   Print #1, "<html><head><title>BizUpdate Sparklines</title></head>"
   Print #1, "<body>"
   Print #1, "<p>Sparklines for last 12-months spend, IT Projects, by Initiative</p>"

   ' Loop thru the lines in the table to generate the separate sparklines

   For i = iStartRow To iStopRow
      Print #1, "<P>" & Cells(i, iStartCol).Value & "</P>"
      Print #1, "<img src='http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?"
      Print #1, "chs=100x35"       ' Size (length x height) of final graphic
  
      sDataString = "&chd=t:"
      For j = (iStartCol + 1) To (iStopCol - 3)
         sDataString = sDataString & Cells(i, j).Value & ","
      Next j
      sDataString = sDataString & "0,0,0|0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0"
      For j = (iStopCol - 2) To (iStopCol)
         sDataString = sDataString & "," & Cells(i, j).Value
      Next j
      Print #1, sDataString
 
      Print #1, "&cht=bvs"
      Print #1, "&chbh=a,2"
      Print #1, "&chco=CCCCCC,FF3300"
      Print #1, "&chds=0,100,0,100'"
      Print #1, "title='" & Cells(i, iStartCol).Value & "' />"
      Print #1, ""
   Next i

   Print #1, "</body>"
   Print #1, "</html>"

   Close #1

End Sub

The output file looks something like this (a simplified version ...)

<html><head><title>BizUpdate Sparklines</title></head>
<body>

<p>Sparklines for last 12-months spend, IT Projects, by Initiative</p>

<P>Cost Reduction</P>
<img src='http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?
chs=100x35
&chd=t:52.25,65.3,72.15,33.15,33.95,33.65,47.7,92.88,79.49,0,0,0|0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,70.57,87.85,55.25
&cht=bvs
&chbh=a,2
&chco=CCCCCC,FF3300
&chds=0,100,0,100'
title='Cost Reduction' />

<P>Growth</P>
<img src='http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?
chs=100x35
&chd=t:67.05,88.25,85.61,95.25,86.70,55.49,54.75,81.19,65.62,0,0,0|0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,55.65,42.05,18.41
&cht=bvs
&chbh=a,2
&chco=CCCCCC,FF3300
&chds=0,100,0,100'
title='Growth' />

</body>
</html>

Some things I noted when constructing this stuff ...

• The Google Chart API seems to be picky about the order of the various parameters. I had some troubles getting the charts to work unless I output things just so
• I can control a lot about these graphs, but I couldn't get rid of the x-axis. Yes, there is a chart type for "sparklines" (cht=ls), but that's for line graphs only
• I am calling out the last three months spend in the table, so I want to highlight them in the charts, hence the little hiccup in the j loop

I can publish a version of my spreadsheet that puts it all together, just let me know ...

Previously ...

• Measuring and Reporting IT Value (1 of 2) (November 16, 2007)
• There ain't much IT in IT Management (May 7, 2008)
• Where to Start? (2 of 2) Metrics & Measurements (August 12, 2008)
• Linkfest: Data Visualization (September 6, 2008)
• Excel 2007 is a BOB system (Bag'O'Bugs) (October 5, 2008)
• I Think I'm Learning SAPanese ... (November 22, 2008)

Technorati Tags: application, business value of IT, development, documentation, hands on, presentations, Excel, VBA,

Invisible Technorati Tags: cazh1, James P. MacLennan,
jpmacl, MacLennan,

It's been a while since I've led an interactive requirements session for an interactive application - but it's kind of like riding a bike. After a few minutes, the old habits come back, and the iterative ideas and cascading creativity starts to flow. What has changed, however, is the application platform, the office environment, and the various knowledge capture tools at our disposal.

So, in the spirit of knowledge retention and sharing, here's a brain dump of ideas that make for a better requirements gathering session ...

• Think of it as an interactive presentation - so all of the classic prep rules apply. Arrive early, get set up and have everything running before people arrive
• Make sure you can bring the original application (if it's a rework) up on the screen: check in advance that you can attach to the network
• The best sessions are interactive, with application mock-up tools. Have a copy of Visio, PowerPoint or something similar ready to go - so you can paint screens and interactively work things while they watch
• Use a room with a big screen TV or projector, so your audience can "see over your shoulder" as you work. However, if possible, you should face your audience - have them look behind you at the screen / projection, while you look at the display on your laptop.
• This allows you to have a conversation with the folks opining on needs and wants, and lets you see their facial expressions as you dummy stuff up.
• This also allows your audience to see what you are typing. They are proofreading your work - not for typos, but to make sure their understanding of the words / ideas you are talking about are being captured correctly.
• Make sure you know where the local printer is, and can print to it. Waiting for a series of changes to be "painted" on the screen may take too long; it might be easier just to take a print screen and mark it up
• When sketching on paper, have a couple of different color pens on hand, and color-code your scribbles; red = follow up / things to fix, blue = talking points, etc. When capturing ideas on the hard copy, your fixes & follow-ups are easily distinguishable. A highlighter might be good idea, too.
• re: typing / data capture: Consider using a simple text editor, Notepad or something similar. Key is not to worry to much about formatting the text or correcting typos. As long a you can decipher your hacking, that should be ok
• However, a spell checking word processor might be preferable to Notepad - your typos will get automatically fixed up
• Always number your requirements / items to attack. Then you have a finite, trackable list of stuff that is either go or no go
• Consider creating an auto-numbered spreadsheet for a Requirements list - you can bring it up on the screen as well. Create additional columns for notes, resource assignments, effort estimates - stuff like that
• Bring a digital voice recorder to the session. Let the folks know that they are being "taped" - but it's only so you can go back and replay the discussion while cleaning up your notes. This will also allow you to stop typing and continue the in depth conversation - which is where all the value is
• Set clear expectations of what you want to accomplish in the meeting - and set a time limit; iterative work is easily digested when taken in small bites
  

There is a lot of power in truly collaborative requirements sessions - the ultimate users of your system will readily accept the results when they are truly part of the design process and experience.

Previously ...

• Three Best TLAs of all time, the hegemony of Excel, and the Intuitive Front End (August 12, 2006)
• The Iron Triangle - Quality is a Feature that We Choose to Omit from Projects (October 28, 2006)
• Another caveat for the erstwhile agile developer (January 15, 2007)
• Innovation That Matters - Substance Over Style (January 12, 2008)
• Do you want it good or fast? Prioritizing Time-to-Value over Requirements (February 10, 2008)
• Facilitating Innovation: Establishing an Environment of Possibilities (August 22, 2008)
• Agile Methods in a Waterfall World: Speaking In Code (September 29, 2008)

Technorati Tags: best practice, design, development, innovation

Invisible Technorati Tags: cazh1, James P. MacLennan, jpmacl, MacLennan

I am getting seriously aggravated with the flighty behavior of Excel 2007. Yes, I acknowledge that the spreadheets in question is quite complicated ...

• shared VBA modules in an XLA file
• database read/write using ADO
• array-manipulation for ranges of cells (see this post)
• lots of macro (VBA) logic to control look/feel of the tabs
• code to automatically insert formulae into cells    

... and so on. However, some of the observed flightiness is specific to the UberSheet, while other weirdness happens with even the simplest files.

Obtuse Errors that Don't Break in Excel 2003: One of the big, complicated macros does a lot of formatting, so tables of data look nice when printed out. And yes, I freely admit that some chunks of my code are derived from recorded macros, and not 100% hand-crafted goodness. So, when a certain set of circumstances are in place, I get the Run-Time Error 1004: Unable to Set the LineStyle Property of the Border Class error message. A Google search turned up this little item, calling out a known bug in Excel 2002. The macro recorder generates something like this:

With Range(Cells(iRow, iDataStartCol), Cells(iRow, iDataStopCol))
   .Borders(xlEdgeBottom).LineStyle = xlLineStyleNone
End With

... but if I make this minor change ...

With Range(Cells(iRow, iDataStartCol), Cells(iRow, iDataStopCol))
   .Borders.Item(xlEdgeBottom).LineStyle = xlLineStyleNone
End With

... the errors cease. Again - the original error is from Excel 2002, it never breaks in Excel 2003, but fails intermittently in Excel 2007. Nice.

Taking Features Away: I can be a stickler for sharp-looking presentations, and I've written about one of my favorite PowerPoint best practices - creating complex pictures or tables using a separate application like Excel or Visio, and then pasting into the PPT as a metafile. Unfortunately, Excel 2007 has broken this handy feature - by inexplicably making it unbelievably difficult to copy to the clipboard, and then ruining the metafile that gets pasted. It's not PowerPoint 2007's fault - the metafiles I cut and paste using Visio still work perfectly!

The Pause that Refreshes ... Something: When loading a file from shared folder, extra stuff happens that I can't explain

• Lower left on the status bar - message saying Contacting \\my.domain.server for information. Press ESC to Cancel appears, and we wait a bit ...
• Then, a message appears lower right on status bar - Opening filename.xls - with a nice little progress bar.
• When I save the file, a dialog pops up - Saving filename.xls - with a nice little progress bar. (Why the marked difference between Load and Save status indicators?)

The Pause that Annoys: This last one is the most frustrating (and disturbing!) for me. Among heavy Excel users, I've seen 50/50 split - some hate the ribbon, some are ambivalent - but all long time users love their keyboard shortcuts - especially the oldsters among us that remember Lotus 123 and Quattro Pro (first with tabs - rah!). For ages, Microsoft has supported the "/ menu" - a throwback to 123, and a boon to those speed demons who would eschew the rodent. For years now, I've deleted rows using /edr[enter]. I can slow that down a bit for clarity ...

1. Edit (menu)
2. Delete (menu option)
3. Entire row (radio button on a dialog)
4. (Enter key makes the row disappear)

... but when I'm in the zone, I can type /edr[enter] /edr[enter] /edr[enter] /edr[enter] and nail a number of rows very quickly. Well, ok, I used to be able to do that; unfortunately, Excel 2007 (Bob) has introduced a weird little delay between steps 2 and 3. This means that the default option on the dialog (Shift cells up) does not change to Entire row. The r keystroke is lost to the bit bucket, I hit enter - and now my spreadsheet is ruined, because I've taken a cell out (and "broken" the rows below) instead of taking the whole row out. This can be a very tricky problem, because you may not notice it right away, and it can be difficult to see the cells you've deleted (instead of rows) until the sheet is a real mess.

No idea how to get to root cause on these issues, and I'm certainly not blaming Excel for the latest Wall Street problems. Still, folks need to be mindful of very subtle differences in this "new" tool.

Previously ...

• Bug bad, bug good, bug Bug (May 18, 2005)
• Excel vs. RDBMS: Choosing the Technology, Winning the Arguments (March 11, 2007)
• Five Under-Emphasized PowerPoint Best Practices (May 7, 2007)
• Desperately Needed Features for eMail Clients/Servers (April 20, 2008)
• Does Excel 2007 VBA have Sneaky Hidden Issues? (August 25, 2008)

Technorati Tags: development, hands on, presentations, technology,

Invisible Technorati Tags: cazh1, James P. MacLennan, jpmacl, MacLennan

Starting up a new project, and I'm definitely having fun with it. At first glance, it looks like a fairly small, departmental application, but it is actually part of a web of disconnected processes and local databases (ie. "a mess") that support some fairly important master data. Also, the folks I'm working with are much more comfortable in a "waterfall world", with formal requirements followed by code, test, and deploy.

Lots of opportunity for process coaching and new methods - I've started notepads on data models, process maps, glossaries, even "best practice" lists for app dev processes like Requirements Gathering.

One session in particular was quite interesting. I am working with a developer on a Notes database, but I do not know the language (LotusScript, or whatever). Oh, I've seen it, and can figure out what's going on, but don't ask me to code anything! Anyway, the developer was educating me about "workflow", and the Notes app's propensity for spitting out email notification when Significant Things happened. When we clone the production database, we'll have to trap all of those emails, lest our testing process spams the department with meaningless links.

The developer started talking about a "global search" and a lot of hand coding, but I had a different idea. Not knowing the language, I just pulled up a screen and started typing VBA-like pseudo code ...

Is this how it currently works?

Sub btnSendInfo_Click()

   Send Mail to samir@initech.com

End Sub

Yes

And you were going to fix it like this, right?

Sub btnSendInfo_Click()

'   Send Mail to samir@initech.com   ' comment out this line

   Send Mail to michael@initech.com

End Sub

Why, yes

What if we did something like this?

Global Const iDebugMode = 0

Function SendMailAddress( sAddress as String ) as String

   if iDebugMode = 1 then

      SendMailAddress = sAddress

   Else

      SendMailAddress = michael@initech.com

   End If

End Function

Sub btnSendInfo_Click()

'   Send Mail to samir@initech.com ' comment out this line

   Send Mail to SendMailAddress( "samir@initech.com")

End Sub

The neat thing was that I couldn't even finish typing some of these sections when the developer started assenting with verbalizations that indicated understanding (ie. "grunting acks"). He had seen some .Net stuff, I was mangling some of the syntax, but the basic pattern was easy to see. It was about 5 minutes of silence, save for the clicking of the keys - we were Speaking in Code, and it worked great!

Previously ...

• Beermat App Development (October 18, 2004)
• The good and the bad about being a hands-on tech manager (January 25, 2005)
• Communicating Complex Technical Concepts (March 21, 2005)
• Tech shorthand, a minor interest (June 3, 2005)
• The "Army Rangers" model for IT Professionals (January 2, 2006)
• Funny, how techies talk to each other (September 11, 2006)
• The Joy of Programming, the Challenge of KM (May 5, 2007)

Technorati Tags: best practice, collaboration, development,
hands on, tech management

Invisible Technorati Tags:cazh1, James P. MacLennan, jpmacl,MacLennan,