Goodbye to 2015!

I’m always sorry when the year comes to an end. It means there’s one fewer to go, at least, for me and you, if not for the unborn and the dead. When I was eight and calculated that I would be 42 at the end of the century (let’s not quibble about how the new century actually started in 2001), that seemed unimaginably ancient. The last century ended sixteen years ago, though it still seems like yesterday. (The painful memory of the Queen and Tony Blair linking arms and singing Auld Lang Syne in that pointless white elephant, the Millennium Dome, is still horribly raw. )

auldlang

When the next century comes I will be unimaginably ancient by anyone’s standards (142), but who knows, with good progress in geriatric medicine and cosmetics, perhaps I’ll make it.

I’m a determined optimist, so I won’t dwell on the terrible things that happened in 2015. We all know what they are. Rather, I’ll list some of the best things that happened (the order below is insignificant):

An accord on reducing carbon emissions was reached in Paris by nearly 150 nations. Perhaps there’s now a chance that humanity might survive the threat of global warming.

globwarming

Angela Merkel did the RIGHT THING and welcomed nearly a million refugees into Germany.

merkel

Same-sex marriage was legalised in the USA after the Supreme Court rejected the Defence of Marriage Act as unconstitutional. In Ireland, and for the first time anywhere by referendum, a majority voted in favour of gay marriage.

gay marriage

The best-yet photographs of Pluto were taken as a NASA’s New Horizons probe sped by.

pluto

England won the Ashes.

ashes

Extreme poverty (as defined by the United Nations) fell for the first time below 10% of the world’s population

poverty

The African Ebola epidemic was defeated, albeit after massive loss of life, and anti-viral remedies were rapidly developed and seemed to work.

ebola

Myanmar moved a step closer towards democracy.

myanmar

Cuba moved a step closer towards rapprochement with the USA. (I include this rather reluctantly since Cuba will soon be just like everywhere else and very like the USA. But who are we to deny the Cubans this privilege?)

cuba

Africa, for the first time, went a year without a new case of Polio (I took this from Bill Gates’ list).

polio

Russian Athletics got booted out of world competition

russia

Sepp Blatter was banned from involvement in football.

blatter

‘You ain’t no Muslim, bruv.’ The vast majority of Muslims denounced violence committed in their name.

leytonstone

At Marks & Spencer’s Wenceslas Square flagship store in Prague the food section got bigger and better.

chicken

A rocket sent a satellite into space and returned safely and vertically to earth.

rocket

Hillary Clinton announced her candidature for the Presidency of the United States.

hillary

These are all great examples of scientific ingenuity, political principle, international cooperation, courage, determination against corruption and violence, progress towards equality, sporting splendour and gastronomic possibility.

Any dissent?

I shall be celebrating the New Year with Petru, Zdenek, Cedric, Remi, Tom, Revaz, Flavia, two roast chickens and an apple tart. Have a good party!

Consulting is More Than Technical Knowledge

I’m having a row with MarketUP, a consultancy in online marketing we’ve employed this year at LLP Group and systems@work to sharpen up our websites, our Google AdWords campaigns and our use of other marketing channels. In fact, I fired them yesterday.

marketing consultants

As so often, the ostensible reasons for our row are one thing, and the resentments and disappointments that fuel our row are another. From my point of view it isn’t so much about what they know or didn’t know, or did or didn’t do, as about their style as consultants.

Online marketing advice is in short supply. Everyone wants to improve the way their business is presented, and there are ever more sophisticated tools to use – websites (where fashions change with depressing rapidity), Google AdWords campaigns, LinkedIn pages and ads, blogs (such as this one) and specific campaign-oriented micro websites. These must be consistent in terms of content and style. It takes specialist knowledge that you’re not likely to have in-house, to use these tools well.

True, MarketUP did a good job of improving the graphical styles of our websites and microsites, but I was concerned at the start that most of their work had been in the area of B2C (business to consumer) where traffic is high, messages are relatively simple, and sales, in terms of units, are numerous.

In our world, of business software and consulting, messages are complex, target markets are very specific, traffic is low, and sales, in terms of units, may be fewer than twenty a year.

I’d actually had some success with Google AdWords campaigns. Over the last five years and more I’ve tracked the costs of our systems@work AdWords campaigns and the revenue derived from them. The results look like this (revenue blue, cost orange):

adwords

It’s a good story, but it doesn’t reflect much recent success. Once we’ve ‘captured’ a client, revenue rolls in for as many as ten years. In fact, over the last two years we’ve added very few new clients directly through our Google AdWords campaigns.

It was to address this issue that I turned to MarketUp. They presented themselves well and seemed to know as much as anyone in this area and their price was reasonable.

But consultants need more than knowledge. I have written extensively on this (see The Art of Consulting). Consultants need to ask good questions, they need to listen, they need to understand the underlying needs of their client, they need to take responsibility and do much more than deliver mere technical expertise. Telling what they know is just a small part of the job.

Things began to go wrong when it became clear that they didn’t really understand our products and couldn’t come up with the Ads that would speak to our potential clients. In the end I had to write these myself. I didn’t mind and I wasn’t surprised but MarketUP were curiously reluctant to admit any kind of fallibility.

And in the end the AdWords campaigns they put together were no more effective than those that came before, and over six months I’ve had not a single good lead from the site. I’d hoped that a website redesign (and I accept wholeheartedly that the new site for systems@work is immensely more attractive than before) would attract more visitors and contacts, but it didn’t.

Of course, consultants cannot guarantee success, and there is no online marketing agency in the world with the specialist knowledge to predict how online marketing can best be used for our particular products and market. But that was not my issue with MarketUP.

What has really annoyed me is their response to challenge and criticism. They kept insisting that ‘measurements’ showed that the website and campaigns were performing better, as if there could be any measurement of importance that matters to me other than obtaining good leads, of which there were none.

When criticised for their failure to put together Ads that made sense they were simply defensive.

And when, finally, there was a vast misunderstanding about a project to improve our natural listings, they made no attempt to see things from my point of view, or to understand that I only had one simple objective, to obtain more good leads through paid campaigns or natural listings.

It was their reaction to criticism that made me see red. I cannot remember a single occasion over the last year when they have admitted error.

And as far as I can recall, they provided no scoping documents, no memoranda of understanding, at any time to document their understanding of our needs.

It’s a lesson in consulting. Technical skills are essential, but there’s far more to consulting than knowing things. You must ask well, listen well, document well, understand well, and manage well, and you must respond well to criticism.

FPPs – Getting Paid and Getting Out

I’ve listed so many risks associated with Fixed Price Projects (FPPs) that you may well have decided to avoid them entirely. That would be a mistake. If approached carefully, and with reasonableness on both sides of the contract, an FPP can be both profitable and the beginning of a long and mutually beneficial relationship, based on trust and understanding.

As well as all the other risks inherent in and FPP there is also the risk of not getting paid for it, or not being paid on time. This is a much greater risk in FPPs than in time and materials projects.

Not what you want to be doing…..

getting paid

Payment Terms

Most fixed price projects involve payment terms based on phase completion or the delivery of components of the project. There are many risks in this:

A client may unreasonably withhold confirmation of delivery or completion of a phase, and yet allow other phases to continue
A client may halt or suspend the project

In both cases you may have difficulty in obtaining payment.

Include a clause such as this in your contract:

‘Where payment is dependent on acceptance of the completion of a phase or upon delivery of stipulated components of the project you may withhold acceptance if grounds are reasonable. In such cases it is essential that you put in writing your reasons for withholding acceptance. You also agree to provide us with immediate opportunity for clarification and remedy. If you do not do so within two weeks of delivery or completion of a phase then you agree to pay us as if you have accepted the phase or delivery. Furthermore you agree that other phases and deliverables may be suspended until payment is made. You also agree that during the period of remedy, however long, and until payment is made, later phases of the project will be delayed and deliveries suspended.’

It’s also vitally important that you build in to your contract and into your project plan an (albeit early) option to escape.

Getting Out

If you can persuade your customer to engage in a serious design phase for the project so that final estimates can be made on the basis of clarified requirements, then do so. You will save money and reduce risk, even if you pay for half the days yourself. You will probably have put forward an initial estimate, of say 100 days, and you may find that you arrive at a new estimate of 200. In this case you must make sure that both the customer and you can extricate yourselves form the contract. You must have a phrase such as this:

‘We have made estimates on the basis of the discussions we have with you, and assuming certain circumstances, intentions and needs. Those assumptions that might materially affect our estimates are documented. Following an initial design and estimation phase of the project we may find that some material assumptions are false, and that other circumstances are not as we understand them now, and in this case we may revise our estimate. Both you and we reserve the right to withdraw from the project at this stage, or to renegotiate the scope of the contract.’

Your client may try to argue that in this case he has spent money for nothing, but you should and can very reasonably argue that he will have obtained a very much more precise idea of what an implementation project involves, and what can be done in the specified time. This represents real value.

Dog-Eat-Dog at the Court

If William Golding’s fable, Lord of the Flies, had concerned not the gradual descent into beastliness and cruelty of a group of boy choristers stranded on a coral island without adult supervision, but, instead, the antics of a group of senior citizens (imagine a Saga Cruise gone horribly wrong), I fear the result would have been the same. The thin and gracious veneer of civilisation that the elderly present would soon enough wear off and the pettiness, arrogance and animal ambition that lies at the core would gradually emerge. True, the capacity of the elderly for actual violence might be diminished by age but the intent would be there.

retired ladies

I say this after spending a calm and pleasant Christmas at my mother’s retirement home in Salisbury in the West of England. It’s a community of about 50 elderly men and women (eligibility starts at 70) where communal and individual rights are finely balanced. Each resident owns his or her own apartment (albeit leasehold) but there are communal areas (a large dining-room and sitting-room), and there’s round-the-clock supervision (though this doesn’t extend to nursing), financed by a very considerable and mandatory monthly service charge. There are pleasant gardens, and the town centre and Cathedral Close are a short shuffle away.

At a comfortable retirement home you might expect an atmosphere of serenity and calm, but you would be mistaken. As retirement and age diminish our power and influence over professional and public events, and as our world contracts, so the will to control, to assert our capabilities, even if the battleground is smaller, burns ever more fiercely. As Alan Bennett writes in one of his Talking Head monologues, ‘If you think squash is a highly competitive sport, try flower arranging.’

Politics at my mother’s community are every bit as complicated as at the Kremlin, or Conservative Party Headquarters. Committees thrive in the tedium of daily life, putsches are plotted, and no prisoners taken. Two ladies recently came to blows at Reception over a procedural issue debated at the Entertainment Committee. At the Debating Club, fiercely dominated by the Church of England clique, you can sometimes cut the atmosphere with a knife. And who will sit with whom in the communal dining-room requires seat planning skills worthy of a chess grand master.

But one issue has recently torn the community apart, and shattered the fragile peace more damagingly than usual. It’s all about windows. Residents were recently asked by the General Purposes Committee to accept, collectively, the cost of replacing all the windows in the building. Never mind that some residents, as in my mother’s case, didn’t need new windows, and didn’t want PVC instead of wood, each was asked to stump up several thousand pounds for the collective good.

Now the terms of residency don’t require this, but it was put about (I think falsely) that it must be all or none, that the Council’s planning rules require this. True, costs are lower if all agree to have the work done at once, but the question is whether the collective good usurps individual rights. Unanimity on the question was required.

My mother and two other brave residents dissented at an all-residents convocation, my mother making a speech of almost Churchillian eloquence on the matter of individual rights and the collective, and the motion was therefore rejected. A tornado of bitterness has ensued, and over Christmas my brother was ambushed by two elderly and slightly equine sisters and invited to examine their rotting window frames, an invitation he declined.

But I discovered only yesterday that the issue is one not only of balancing interests but of the conduct of democracy. At the all-residents meeting, where, as described in the minutes with impressive pettiness and spite ‘only three residents opposed the will of the majority’ the vote was taken at the end of the debate by asking only those opposed to raise their hands. Never mind that some of the residents don’t have the strength to raise their hands, or didn’t have the faintest idea of what was being discussed, this was the method that was chosen for the vote. No secret ballot, no opportunity to abstain. Those who were not against were assumed to be on the side of the collective will.

Clearly the timid could simply rely on the motion’s being rejected without having to peep over the parapet. This flavour of democratic expression resembles the way voting was conducted at the Reichstag as the Nazi Party forced the passing of power into Hitler’s hands. There were no storm troopers in the sitting-room at the Court, but it certainly wasn’t democracy.

We must now install intruder alarms and strengthen the door frames at my mother’s apartment. I don’t know what the Gestapo are plotting but I suspect they will be mounting an offensive. Retirement doesn’t mean serenity. It’s dog-eat-dog at the Court.

All I Want for Christmas

Downton_Abbey_season_1

All I want for Christmas this year is that Edith should marry Bertie in the final episode of Downton Abbey. She’s certainly the more likeable of the two surviving sisters – sensible, independent, brave, intelligent and she’s had more than her fair share of bad luck. The decent man she’d planned to marry a few series earlier, and whose baby she bore, got himself murdered in Germany and she was left alone to conceal her bastard daughter and publish the magazine he left her. She’s ever so much more likeable than her stuck-up bitch sister Mary, who, undeserving by comparison, won her man in the penultimate episode. I suspect he’ll turn out to be a cad, but we shall never know because this really is the final episode.

I’d also love to see a happy ending for Thomas. He’s the bitter, lonely, gay under-butler at Downton, whose destiny is only to scowl, and scheme and be unhappy. In the equations that rule period drama and generate the marvellously predictable plot lines and dialogue of Downton Abbey, homosexuality means unhappiness. Sadly the cast doesn’t, as far as I can tell, offer Thomas many candidates for companionship, but who knows, Carson may yet ditch his overly dour wife and surprise us all. But it would be churlish, surely, of Julian Fellowes not to sprinkle a little magic dust over the only gay at the Abbey, especially at Christmas. I wouldn’t want to think he’s homophobic.

The fact is that Downton Abbey is as real to me as the Gospels, which is to say they’re both a lot of lovely nonsense. Lovely nonsense is what Christmas is all about, a pause from the laws of physics, biology, and dog-eat-dog. For a day or two, reindeers fly, Santa squirms through a billion chimneys and consumes a billion mince pies, and for a moment we believe that a baby can be fashioned out of a single set of chromosomes. The nostalgia we feel for simple make-believe must, I suppose, occasionally be indulged, though I’m hard pressed to understand why we feel such joy in children’s misplaced hope. Even if we want so much to believe that anything is possible, faith in the supernatural is usually a mistake.

My own disillusion came when I was about five. I couldn’t quite see how Santa could get everything done, and at a children’s party in Newport, Shropshire, in the early 1960s I set him a trap. Safely ensconced on Santa’s lap (the laps of elderly gentlemen were safe in those innocent days) I asked Santa what he planned to bring me for Christmas. I’d sent him a letter up the chimney just a day or two earlier and it seemed reasonable that he’d remember what I’d asked for. I half suspected, of course, that he wouldn’t know and his artful ‘Well, just let me think for a moment. I get so many letters from little boys like you.’ didn’t fool me for a moment. When he admitted to being stumped, my faith in Santa, fairies, leprechauns, and talking animals, was immediately, and forever, lost. I became then the knowing, smug cynic I am today.

Just a few years later I realised there isn’t much difference between Santa, God and little Baby Jesus. Religion may promote more complex ethical ideas, I suppose, and I’m not against a ‘religious sense’. I just can’t bear the words and strictures that the unctuous derive from it. These can be absurdly complex (the sheer technical detail of Roman Catholic dogma, for example, is astonishing, indeed impressive) but it’s still the wrong answer even if to a deeper need. Santa and God, they’re on the same spectrum in my opinion.

But I’m not against Christmas. Make believe, as long as we know what it is, reminds us that the world can be a wonderful place where dreams, both the selfish and the unselfish ones, come true. But I won’t be kneeling in a drafty church for my dose of hope this year, but will watch the last episode of Downton Abbey instead in the warmth and comfort of my mother’s home, with a mince pie and a glass of wine. I can’t wait for the final Christmas Special. I hope Edith gets her man. And Thomas his.

Have a Happy Christmas, all you of great, little and no faith at all. Be good, but don’t be credulous.

FPPs – Yet More Thoughts on What Could Go Wrong

Fixed Price Projects (FPPs) are difficult enough to estimate when everything lies within your control. Of course, in the real world of business system implementation there are many things you can’t control. You’re planning the work of people you don’t know, assuming preconditions of which you have scant knowledge, and you’re always at the mercy of the unexpected, such as a change in business conditions, of priorities and of sponsor.

If there’s one particularly risky area it lies in the interfaces you must build between your system (the system you know) and existing systems (which perhaps no one knows fully).

When drafting a contract or scoping document, consider these risks.

Interfaces

Interfaces can kill. Be very clear what you mean by them. Just as wars can be fought over the differences in meaning between ‘interfaced’ systems and ‘integrated’ systems, so battles can be lost and won over what you promise when you promise interfaces.

Just for the record, I use the term ‘integration’ when I mean that two systems (usually separate packaged software systems, and often supplied at different times or by different suppliers) communicate at database level, by which I mean that one system might write or read data directly from the other system’s database.

I use the term ‘interface’ to describe situations where one system exports a file or table specifically for the other system to do something with. But I’m not sure this is standard usage.

But whether we mean integrated or interfaced precision is essential. You must list the ‘interfaces’ you are promising (and here I mean program code that will read or write interface files or tables), together with the purpose of the interface, the frequency with which it will run, the data fields it will contain (or ‘data sufficient to support the standard …. function in system xxxx’) and your assumptions, which MUST include an assumption that the data are CLEAN and do not require additional validation. A clause such as this is needed:

‘We will provide the listed interfaces on the assumption that your systems will provide complete and accurate data in an interface file or table that are sufficient for the purposes [described if possible] of system XX such that no additional validation will be required to ensure compliance with system XX, and no conversion unless according to rules that are stipulated within the scope of this contract, and as and when these data are required. You accept that we need make no provision for the inaccuracy or incompleteness of these data unless otherwise stipulated in this contract.’

The last thing that you want to happen is that you find yourself unexpectedly committed to developing a whole subsystem for the provision, validation and conversion of data.

Go-Live Support

Go-live support can last forever. Its function must be clearly defined. It is not consulting by other means, or training by other means. It’s supposed to be support to deal with functions that have failed, on the assumption that the client’s staff can already manage standard situations and standard exception conditions. In reality it is often more than this, and therefore you must be all the more careful to limit your obligation. Your FPP plan must clearly limit the number of days provided, with this part explicitly agreed with the client..

You might include a clause such as this:

‘You and we understand that your staff’s ability to manage the system depends not only on the quality and duration of the training we provide, but also on the complexity of the requirements you have given us, and on the ability and conscientiousness of your staff. We have agreed that the FPP includes a fixed number, NN, days of go-live support and we agree that if more days are needed, then these fall outside the scope of the FPP and will be charged separately.’

Delays

When project tasks or phases are delayed, we often find ourselves doing additional work whilst waiting for things to happen. If this is the client’s fault then it is unreasonable that we should bear this cost. You must therefore always include a clause such as this one:

‘Our estimates are based on an agreed project plan, which depends for its success and on-time delivery on both parties to the agreement. When there are delays due to whatever cause, additional consulting time is often incurred. When the delay is due to our fault then we must provide any additional consulting time at our cost. When the delay is due to your fault then we reserve the right to charge for any additional time incurred.’

Accuracy

Accurate scoping and estimating depend on the accuracy with which a client has stated his requirements. When it comes to a contract and scoping document these requirements must be restated without any ambiguity, and with ALL material assumptions stated. A material assumption is one which will affect your estimates. A crude example:

Suppose that you have included ‘product costing’ in your scoping. No qualifications, no stated assumptions, just ‘product costing’. You have assumed one cost and a specific method (perhaps the client has even told you to make that assumption). Later you have this sad conversation:

FD: I understand that you think you’ve delivered product costing. You have, and it’s working nicely. But I only see one part of it.

YOU: Thanks. Glad you like it. We’re glad to have finished it.

FD: You haven’t finished it. You’ve only finished local costing. You’ve forgotten we’re an international company. We need to calculate product cost in USD too, using a slightly different costing method.

YOU: But you didn’t say!

FD: Did we need to say something so obvious. We assumed you knew. And anyway, you’ve signed up for ‘product costing’ and that’s what product costing means to us. And it can’t be much trouble to add it. A system like NEW SYSTEM should be capable of multiple costing methods.

YOU: S**T (quietly)

What your scoping document and contract should have said is ‘product costing based on the XXXXX product costing method in local currency’ or something even finer.

In any case your contract should include a clause like this:

‘Our estimates are based on the definitions, data and descriptions contained in the scoping document and on no other assumptions, whether expressed verbally to us, or by means of any other written communications. If these are incorrect then you agree that we will charge for any necessary extra time incurred as a result of such inaccuracies, subject to your agreement that such work should be carried out. If these are ambiguous then we will attempt to agree on a reasonable compromise in terms of charges for extra work arising from an interpretation at variance with ours, and will seek third-party arbitration if we cannot agree.’

In Praise of Immigration

I can’t understand all the fuss about immigration. Most of my best friends and family are immigrants. I’m an immigrant myself. Putting aside the subtle distinctions that some immigrants and anti-immigrants make between expats, migrant workers, refugees and asylum seekers, let’s just think of immigrants as those who settle in another country indefinitely, whatever their purpose, whether in search of opportunity or sanctuary.

immigrants

Let me itemise a few of those who populate my business, social and family life.

I am a British immigrant to the Czech Republic, where I’ve built a business in IT, software and consulting – LLP Group. I’ve been made welcome, despite my lazy failure to learn the local language. Serious cultural mismatches have been few, and the most serious have had to do with the proper making of tea.

My business partner, Barbara, is an immigrant, the daughter of Hungarian immigrants to the United States. I couldn’t have built the business without her. Her husband is an immigrant from Serbia.

My friend and colleague Darina is an immigrant from Slovakia to the Czech Republic (though it’s true these were constituent parts of the same country when she made that fateful journey). I couldn’t have built the business without her, either.

My partner is an immigrant from Moldova, now a British citizen, working in Prague.

My friend Jo, who has built a PR and Marketing business in Prague (JWA) is a British immigrant, and her partner Jan, an immigrant to Britain in the late 1960s, has returned to Prague as one of the few lawyers qualified to practice in both countries.

My friends in Prague are immigrant French, Georgian, Romanian, Slovak, and so on. And I have some local friends too.

My brother is an immigrant to Switzerland where he married a Swiss French musician. He was made to yodel at his wedding, but otherwise has faced no particular indignities.

My partner’s sister Doina is a recent immigrant to the United Kingdom. She qualified as a pharmacist in the summer, sent herself on a crash course in English in Plymouth, walked into a dozen pharmacies in London and landed herself a job inside a week.

Immigrants are hard working, determined, ambitious, tolerant, appreciative. The overwhelming majority enrich the life of the countries they live in, culturally and materially. They are rarely bent on destruction or social benefits, or the slaughtering of animals in the gutter, forced marriage or female circumcision. They have fled or sought new opportunities to avoid such things.

I write this today because I met the best taxi driver in Prague yesterday. He drove me from my office to the airport. Mr Linh (his card doesn’t give his first name) is Vietnamese, and has been driving a taxi and working with tourists in Prague for four or five years. He spoke English perfectly, and (as far as I can tell!) speaks Czech well too. He underbid his rivals on Liftago (the taxi App I always use), bidding 18 CZK instead of 28 CZK per km. He was just around the corner, and with a keen sense of market opportunity he grabbed the chance for a longer than average journey. His car was clean and he drove with care. No hints of ash or unwashed clothes.

And when he dropped me at the airport he offered me a gift from a basket of Christmas presents he’d wrapped for his customers. I had to take his word for the fact that none was explosive but after thirty years of business travel I am a good judge of taxi drivers. I have never before been given a gift by a taxi drive, assuming you can discount those cards that point you in the direction of striptease.

Mr Linh – +420 702 348 888 – the best taxi driver in Prague.

choc

I wish immigrants the world over a very Happy Christmas. And the rest of you, be glad of us!

Money is a Charmless Motivator

There’s nothing more vexatious than worrying about what to give your staff as an extra token of appreciation at Christmas.

At this time of year, at LLP Group, as at other companies all over the world, we’re busy trying to finalise projects and close outstanding sales, so that we can end the year with the highest possible revenue and profit. This year is no exception. But such anxieties are child’s play in comparison with the woes of deciding what gifts to give our staff.

I don’t mean bonuses, which may be substantial, or trivial, or indeed non-existent, depending on performance and position, and which are always monetary. Rather, I mean that little, and more effortful, token of appreciation that should be more personal, and which isn’t usually money.

Every year we struggle to please everyone, so every year we take soundings on what went down well in previous years. But, of course, we always fail.

We’ve given vouchers for Marks and Spencer.

mands

We’ve given ‘experiences’, whereby everyone can choose from a list of ‘adventures’ such as driving a double-decker bus, a day of facials, massage and other forms of indolence at what’s called a ‘wellness centre’, a parachute jump, a dancing or a cooking lesson.

parachute

We’ve given company-branded items such as backpacks, jackets and polo shirts.

backpack

We’ve even given smoked salmon (I remember one employee saying, ‘All they gave me was a slab of wet fish.’).

salmon

Last year we did a sort of secret Santa thing whereby each employee chose a gift for another randomly nominated employee (I got a bottle of vintage Port and gave a collection of Japanese items to a colleague who’s learning Japanese).

secret santa

We’ve given LLP-branded mugs. We’ve given iPod Minis.

In Budapest this year, we’re giving dining-out vouchers.

romantic dinner

But I’ve learned that you can never get it right. True, you only hear about your failures to please, rarely that you have delighted anyone, but that is the way things are, and I am long since inured to it (any form of remuneration is naturally understood as entitlement rather than gift). So the scale of disappointment is always exaggerated.

A close friend of mine described how, even in a very difficult year, she managed to give cash bonuses to her staff, and heard not a word from them. (Her partner, seeing how hurt she was, gave the staff a stern dressing down.)

There’s a strong lobby in favour of ‘branded’ items with our logo on them, but my own view is that a gift shouldn’t come with too many strings attached. ‘I’ll give you this, but you’ll be advertising the company by wearing it or using it.’

We could debate this issue for hours, and often we do.

My advice, though, is not to worry too much about it. You’ll never please everyone. All in all, you’d be better off worrying about the sales you need to close.

This year we’re giving vouchers, which, to my mind is more or less money. It’s charmless, and impersonal, but it’s convenient, and easy, and it’s apparently what everyone wants. You’ve got to please the majority at Christmas if you can.

Now, four more working days to close those sales.

FPPs – More Pitfalls to Avoid

The key to successful Fixed Price Projects involving business system implementations is a good imagination, an imagination that encompasses everything that might go wrong, every misunderstanding or wilful misinterpretation by your client. And your client must possess the same imagination to protect himself or herself from you.

One impediment to this, of course, is that you are more experienced and more aware of the mistakes that both sides can make. You would be foolish to consider this an advantage. It is your job, whether the client thinks it’s necessary or not, to drag him or her through the tedious but essential process of project scoping. Nothing material should be left undefined.

bananaskin

In my last post I looked in detail at some aspects of scoping and contracting. In this, I’ll continue by addressing some areas that are often defined too vaguely – Report Development, Training and Documentation.

See

FPP – A Frightening Acronym

FPP – Estimating Fixed Price Projects

FPPs – Mitigating Some of the Risks

Reports

If you don’t say what a report is and don’t know what the client wants to see in his reports it is very dangerous indeed to make vague promises. If the client has the open ended opportunity to say what he wants in a report he can say anything and require anything of you.

Just suppose that you have a clause in the contract or scoping document that says ‘8 Management Reports’. He might say:

‘I would like a report that shows me the locations of all deliveries within a specific period, with a map on the second page showing the current weather conditions and forecast, some notes on the current local political situation, and a picture of the most interesting local marsupial’. And you would be legally bound to provide it.

Ideally, therefore, you should have a description of these reports in advance, and you should include such descriptions in your scoping document. These descriptions might be full pictures of the report and its layout, or might specify data items, summary groups, etc.

But if you have to be vague (‘8 management reports’) then you must include a clause such as this:

‘Our obligation under this agreement includes the provision of reports which are not yet defined in terms of layout , data items, format, summary levels, and so on. To reduce the risk of an obligation to create reports of any arbitrary nature, we therefore make the following assumptions:

A ‘report’ means a document that presents data in a single format at detailed level and at specified summary levels. It does not involve repeated presentations, in different formats, of the same data. For example, if transaction data from an account are to be reported, a report that shows all transactions in date sequence, with summaries by calendar month, is one report, but a report that shows all transactions in date sequence, with summaries by calendar month, and then all transactions in sequence of transaction value, is two reports.

All such reports can be created from the unaltered structures of an unaltered Version N of NEW SYSTEM and based on unaltered workflows and valiidation rules inherent in NEW SYSTEM Version N.

All such reports will be described once, and finally, and signed off by the client prior to development

We reserve the right to charge for any additional time incurred in developing reports which do not conform to the assumed definition of ‘report’ above, or which require extensive modification of the underlying data structures of NEW SYSTEM, or modifications to the application program to support non-standard workflow processes, forms or validation rules, or which must be modified due to the client’s change of specification.’

Training

It’s hard to estimate how much time is required for training. It depends on the commitment and capabilities of the client’s staff as well as on your own skills. But you can be sure that the training you do will never be enough. You must protect yourself from the endless refrain of ‘I still don’t know how it works’. If the client needs more training than you have given he should pay for it.

It’s hard to enforce this, but it might help if you include such statements as:

‘Training is designed to teach users how to work with the system in standard ways and to deal with specific exception conditions (which will be described in the training plan). Training is limited to NN days, and trainees will be asked to confirm in writing that they have understood what they have been shown and taught. If additional days of training are required these days will be charged additionally.’

Documentation

There are many kinds of documentation:

Project Plan
Requirements and Scoping Specification
Prototype Description
Training Manual
Procedure Manual
Technical Manual
Etc

The first two are essential tools for both you and the customer. The third, a prototype description, can be useful if you are designing and building a system using iterative prototypes. When the customer finally says, ‘Yes, that’s it. That’s what I want,’ it can be sensible to describe that carefully, with screenshots, so that he and you can sign off on it and you can refer to it if changes of mind occur later.

The other documents are ones that the customer will find useful during training or during system administration. Make sure that the customer knows what he is getting in these cases. You don’t want to be sent back again and again to your desk when he says ‘I want more. I want it described keystroke by keystroke.’ Provide examples, in the contract itself, or by reference to external examples, of what he will get and include a phrase such as this in your contract:

‘Documentation provided under this contract will conform in terms of appearance and level of detail with the examples provided (as specified in Appendix NN) and will exclude the following:

Instructions on the management of SQL databases, on the assumption that database administration is system independent and is described in manuals provided by Microsoft

Etc’

What’s the News in Bucharest?

laika

‘What’s the news in….. ?’ may be an unexciting opener, but it’s often the first question I ask when I arrive at one of our far-flung offices (LLP Group). It’s an open-ended question, and a good conversation starter, but I also ask it because I’m genuinely curious. What makes the news in Sofia, Budapest or Bratislava mightn’t have hit the headlines on the BBC or Sky.

So, ‘What’s the news in Romania?’ I asked my Romanian colleagues yesterday as we sat down for a mid-afternoon Christmas lunch (the second in two days). They should know by now, of course, that what interests me is scandal and gossip, political or otherwise, but in the concerned silence that followed I suspect they were scratching their heads for trade balances, GDP growth, inward investment figures, and so on. Who cares about such things at this time of year, or ever, for that matter?!

‘I’ll tell you what’s the news in Britain,’ I offered, as the pause lengthened. ‘We’ve just sent a man on a dangerous mission to space, and another one on a dangerous mission to Brussels to renegotiate the terms of Britain’s EU membership. And a thousand happy and relieved immigrant Syrians are already complaining about the weather. If that’s not assimilation, then I don’t know what is.’

‘Been there. Done that. We sent our man into space years and years ago,’ one of my colleagues proudly pointed out, though it was probably before she was born.

‘And did he come back?’ I asked. And from there we quickly got to the factoid that I was born on the day that poor ‘one-way-ticket’ Laika (a Russian terrier of some kind, I believe) was blasted into space.

‘I saw Angela Gheorghiu in the street,’ another colleague offered (perhaps knowing that I have a soft spot for opera, if not for preening divas).

It was a gloomy afternoon, and the background music was funereal, though the words, apparently, were Christmassy and joyful. A sense of the absurd prevails in Romania and Romanians are naturally and properly distrustful of Government, of the Judiciary, of officialdom in general. I shouldn’t have expected good news.

To my mind, some of the best recent news has been the resignation of the Prime Minister, Victor Ponta, already a proven plagiarist, and the possibility that he might be charged with criminal fraud. But according to my colleagues it’s quite likely that a deal’s been done and he’ll avoid prosecution as a reward for resignation. So much for an independent legal system.

The fact that Romania’s jails are crammed with corrupt politicians and corrupt businessmen and women should also be cause for celebration, I thought, but there’s a sensible ‘let’s wait and see’ attitude about whether the judiciary is truly independent and sufficiently powerful. After the next election it’s possible that the jailers and the jailed will simply swap positions.

There’s also an interesting story about dogs. Romania, and particularly Bucharest, has always had too many. Former President Basescu, when Mayor of Bucharest, impressed his electorate by sterilising the wild canine population of the city, to non-Romanian Brigitte Bardot’s dismay (see Street Dogs). Some dogs were also offered to the Russian space programme, but were refused as being insufficiently Russian. Now, apparently, the aim is to forbid farmers from possessing too many – a ‘one dog on the plains and three dogs on the mountain policy’ is to prevail in rural Romania (see Romanian Shepherds Protest Dog Policy). Who the beneficiaries might be (ramblers?) is not clear to me, but the result was an invasion of farmers waving agricultural implements that brought traffic in the city to a standstill on Tuesday. It’s good news of a kind, I suppose, that Parliament has nothing more important to debate.

Parliament has also brought a number of businesses to a halt by forbidding the public use of buildings over a certain age unless they’re certified as possessing sufficient structural strength to survive the next, long overdue, earthquake (see Might Close Down).

It was a jovial afternoon, and the food and wine were good, even as the sky darkened and the rain began to fall. It was a cold walk to the Athenee Palace Hotel.

atheneum

Thursday was, by contrast a glorious day, and it felt as if the news could only be good. The sun was shining brightly on an ever-tidier Bucharest. Secret Santa called at the office while I wasn’t looking and left me with very good news indeed – a loaf of traditional Christmas bread (here shown a little squashed during my onward journey to Budapest).

bread

Adam Bager

Occasional thoughts on IT, Business and Other Matters

Monthly Archives: December 2015