On letting go and being let go

As I continue though my journey through my career I have experienced many things. I’ve created software that is used by thousands of people. I’ve architected databases that store information for a three billion dollar supply chain. I’ve lead a multi-million dollar project to successful implementation. I’ve created many, many project plans, some with thousands of tasks. I’ve had to hire people and fire people. I’ve had to mediate discussions between conflicting co-workers. I’ve had to tell others that their work wasn’t satisfactory. I’ve created web sites, windows applications, windows services, web services, reports and interactive spreadsheets. I’ve worked into the early morning hours countless times. I’ve celebrated when a large software deployments succeed and shook my head when a minor release fails. I’ve taught colleagues both technical and business information. I’ve had to make tough technical and business decisions and a bunch of compromises along the way. I’ve seen and done so much over my career but the one thing I never experienced was being let go…until now.

For the almost twelve years I’ve worked for a company that manages the supply chain for a global restaurant chain. I was hired as a developer in early 2000 and promoted Senior Developer three years later. In 2007 I was promoted to Manager, Application Architecture and took charge of most of the company’s development projects and systems that were developed in-house. During this time I transformed myself from a developer to a leader. I wound up leading the project that rewrote the entire supply chain software that ran the three billion dollar supply chain. On September 24, I was notified that my services were no longer required and that my last day will be on October 31st.

This was not a surprise to me. In fact, I saw this coming at the beginning of the year. The lack projects being thrown my way. The lack of communication from upper leadership. There just didn’t seem to be enough for me to do. The silence was deafening. I decided early this summer that I would seek alternative employment but I wanted to finish out the fiscal year out first. This time was difficult emotionally for me. I had sold out to the organization for so long I was no longer Richie Rump I was Richie Rump-Manager, Application Architecture. I had to separate my identity from my role in the company. That was hard because I didn’t realize that my identity had changed. I was questioning everything; who I am, what I’ve done and what I wanted to do. Luckily, this time didn’t last long but it did serve as a gut check and a checkpoint.

I don’t see my departure as a pure negative event. The company and I were moving in separate directions. The company was getting leaner and I was looking for the next challenge and not finding it there. I don’t hold any ill will towards the company, quite the opposite, I wish them all the best. I will miss many, many people there many whom I worked with for over a decade. I’m honestly looking forward to tackling the next opportunity and moving forward.

IT Camp 2011 – An Introduction to Project Management

This past weekend I had the pleasure to speak at the first South Florida IT Camp. It was a great event and I had a blast presenting on Project Management. I t was my first professional talk. The premise of the session was to introduce the concepts of the traditional project management methodology and to share some if my successes and failures in leading projects. To create my presentation I used Prezi.com. Using Prezi you can create very cool zooming and camera panning effects in your presentation. I recommend you checking it out. As for my presentation it can be found here: An Introduction to Project Management.

Photo Credit: @jseoh

Visual Studio and the tools that should have been in the box

One of the tools that I’ve installed recently and use daily is the Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools. I was introduced to the Productivity Power Tools while attending the Miami Users Group a month ago. Three team members from the Visual Studio team (Sean Laberee, Adrian “Spotty” Bowles and Prakash Balasubramanian) presented that night and Sean showed the usefulness of the productivity power tools. And they are useful. Here’s the laundry list of what’s in the power tools.

• Find
• Enhanced Scrollbar
• Middle-Click Scrolling
• Organize Imports for Visual Basic
• Add Reference Support for Multi-Targeting
• HTML Cut/Copy
• Solution Navigator
• Tab Well UI Enhancements
• Searchable Add Reference Dialog
• Tools Options Support
• Quick Access
• Auto Brace Completion
• Highlight Current Line
• Triple Click
• Fix Mixed Tabs
• Align Assignments
• Move Line Up/Down Commands
• Custom Guides
• Colorized Parameter Help

That’s quite a feature list for a free add-in. I haven’t tried all of the features but there are three that I really like.

Find – The find dialog in Visual Studio has always bugged me dating back to the first version of Visual Studio .Net. It worked great when you’re searching through the entire solution but it felt a bit heavy when searching the current document. Enter the find feature in the Productivity Power Pack. It’s oddly similar to Google Chrome’s search box. Aside from that it works beautifully. Just hit Ctrl-F and a small box appears in the top right. Type your search criteria and you’re in searching nirvana.

Enhanced Scrollbar – The enhanced scrollbar allows you to view a “map” of your code within the scrollbar. If you’ve ever had to work with a file that had a ton of lines of code navigating your way around is a tough chore. The enhanced scrollbar aims to make this easier. The scrollbar has three modes. In scrollbar mode, the scrollbar works as it normally would but artifacts in the code (breakpoints, highlighted words, errors, etc.) are displayed in the scrollbar as dots. In map mode, the artifacts in the scrollbar are still there but a preview window appears as you hover over the scrollbar showing you the code that is in that section of the file. Full mode has the artifacts and the preview window but changes the scrollbar to look like a zoomed out view of your file.

Quick Access – This is probably my favorite feature. Visual Studio is a massive application. I’m consistently hovering over menus looking for a feature that I only use once in a while. Just the other day I was looking for the Exceptions dialog and couldn’t find it. (I need to add it to the menu since it wasn’t’ there.) Quick access get rid of all searching around. Tap Ctrl+3 and the Quick Access dialog comes up. Need to format the document but forget the hotkeys? Just search for it in quick access. It’s a fantastic way to navigate around Visual Studio without hunting around the menus.

The team has done a great job of allowing the power pack to be configurable. It seems that most of the features can be configured to your liking. If you don’t like the way a certain feature works chances are that you can configure it to work the way you want it. So go ahead and give the Productivity Power Pack a try it’s definitely worth a download.

Leadership, is it in you?

One issue that I often see in technology organizations, whether it’s in an internal IT department or an entire company focused on technology, is a lack of leadership. The common situation is this: a ninja programmer gets a promotion to manager because they are fantastic at doing their job. Now, their job has nothing to do with managing people, processes, timeliness or creating vision. They’re good at writing code. A very technical, analytical and often solitary task. So the ninja programmer accepts the job because  A. pay is better and B. they’ve reached the ceiling in their organization and the only advancement is into management. So they take the job and shortly afterwards they encounter small issues with their subordinates. Not having any training in management or leadership the ninja programmer is confrontational with their subordinates, often times embarrassing them publicly. The ninja starts looking at his subordinate’s work and finds it not up to his ninja standards. So he bluntly tells his employees that their work sucks and not very ninja. These confrontations and the lack of tact by the ninja demoralizes the team and they start missing deadlines. Then the attrition starts. One programmer leaves, then another. The ninja dismisses it by saying they’re not good enough to work for the ninja. During this time the ninja starts spending less time with his team and more time doing what he loves, writing code. The team is completely dismayed at the situation and starts to complain to upper management about the lack of leadership. This leads to a huge problem for upper management: get rid of the ninja and his awesome coding skills or keep the ninja and have everyone be unhappy. The fact of the matter is that everyone is unhappy. The team is upset with the ninja, the ninja hates his new found responsibilities and upper management has to make a tough decision.

Of course this all could have been averted. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for promoting from within and giving people a shot at more responsibility but only when they’re ready. I’m of the philosophy that leadership responsibility should be given when individuals have a propensity towards leadership and they have shown an interest in leadership. It is a shame that in most organizations that there isn’t a technical path where people can continue to grow technically. I understand in most companies this isn’t feasible. We need to keep the ninja happy and most times that means keeping them in a technical position absent of leadership duties.

So what can we as leaders do? First of all, we need to identify individuals that show promise as leaders. Seek them out and hire them. Then we need to mentor them. Show them how we do our jobs and how we handle certain situations. Give them a glimpse of what it’s like to sit behind our desk. Finally, we need to give them leadership tasks. Start them off small with a simple project. Build them up with increasingly difficult tasks. We should be watching in the wings, giving them feedback and ensuring that they do not fail. We need to be their biggest cheerleader praising them publicly but admonishing them privately. Take the blame for their failures but let them take the credit for their successes. Before you know it your young leader will be ready to fly on their own. When that happens, get out of the way and let them soar.

You don’t call, you don’t write…

Finally, the Jorriss has come back to the blog! I know that’s a line from fellow UM alumnus The Rock but it sounds good and it’s appropriate. Yes, I have decided to get back into blogging. So what have I been up to during the past three years? Glad you asked.

• Led the team that rewrote the supply chain management system for a major restaurant chain. A project that started in 2008 and continues to this day.
• Became a Project Management Professional.
• Spent more time that I care to admit optimizing SQL and SQL Server.
• I became even more addicted to Twitter. I know you follow me.
• Had another beautiful baby girl.
• Started directing worship services at Christ Fellowship Palmetto Bay.
• Became obsessed with the topic of leadership.
• Was introduced to the financial teachings of Dave Ramsey. Debt is dumb, cash is king.

Frankly, I’m excited to be back on the blog. I’ve moved from Subtext to WordPress and so far it looks like a great move. I’ve got a bunch of posts floating around in my head that will hopefully come out in the upcoming weeks. Stay tuned friends I’ve got some catching up to do.

Finally, a big thanks to Brent Ozar and his posts on how to start a technical blog. He has some great tips on how to get started with WordPress. These posts were a big catalyst for me turning the blog back on.