When you have a large scale project that just feels stuck, where nothing’s moving, where everything is a constant battle just to make the smallest progress it can be very frustrating.
But ultimately as an architect you need to get it sorted. It just might mean you’re battling on too many fronts, the solution to this is to focus down to individual issues, as I was once taught
“it’s how you kill a zombie horde, one half brick in the head at a time”
and this works. In fact, it’s exactly the same method as people deal with overwhelming personal debt. You pick the biggest, most painful item and concentrate your full attention on it. break it, beat it, do not get distracted.
Once you’ve beaten that one. Then you move to the second most awkward one and again put your full concentration on it, and work your way through like this till the project as a whole starts to move again, if you’re dealing with real people this form of action builds up momentum, problems that were just made up issues before suddenly melt away because people do not want a projects full attention on them, and issues that were genuine welcome you, as they think you are bringing real help, even if its just a half brick and a grim expression.
Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.
This is an odd little tip but it’s one that has stood me in good stead over the years.
Sometimes when you’re talking to a senior stakeholder, they see things from what they often say is ‘50,000 feet” which gives them a very broad view of challenges, and from a strategic perspective gives them a better idea of how to solve things, but can at a tactical or small scale actually cause a lot of grief.
Trying to explain that without inducing a dismissive response is actually quite challenging. It’s often either “just get over it” or “this is our strategic view”, and to have an example of how such a strategic view is actually worse for a given project is challenging. The one example I found that worked is related to a military feature 1:
A salient2, is a battlefield feature that projects into enemy territory. and if you look down on one from above they all look the same, however the solution is different depending on their size.
If they are huge in scale, then you can “bite” or “Nip” them off, which cuts a load of troops of in a position where they are surrounded and cant get any support.
However if they are small, say for this example a trench in world war I, then they just expose the enemy to being shot at from all sides which is great, but also attempting to “bite” them off costs a load of your people while making the enemies life easier.
Generals of the era treated both sizes of Salient in exactly the same way, that is, the large scale strategic way that they had been taught, this lead to many, many needless deaths, and gave away many a tactical level advantage.
So I know that this example sounds a bit contrived, but I have found that when dealing with senior stakeholders, grander examples hit home better, and hopefully it will convince them that sometimes a tactical solution works where a strategic one will not.
For me this was happily, a nice “mob handed” conference, harking back very much to the old pre pandemic style, where I knew multiple people and met with several groups during the day and the first one in a while where multiple members of LDC Via have attended. It was three times bigger than last year and packed with content.
This was another Excel centre conference in the same area as the AWS, Snowflake and Pokémon world championships, of all the recent conferences presented in this same space, this was by far the best laid out, very definitely a marketing conference, the whole Trailhead theme they’ve been running for a number of years, really makes the layout and the walking of the main showroom, a far more pleasant adventure than is normal.
One thing that was of note was that there were far less product venders than I would have expected. In fact, between every four to six of the stalls was a pure consultancy which I can tell you from personal experience are quite difficult to man as you don’t have much visually to show.
You could feel the “Sales” in Salesforce in this conference as there was a certain hard push to arrange a sales meeting as soon as possible, So it felt a tiny bit pushy compared to what would be a normal technical product conference. A feeling that was backed up by a number of my larger client contacts stating “Don’t make eye contact with the Vendors”
The technical content was less than I’d normally expect. But as I’ve just come from London’s calling a couple of weeks ago, that is a good pairing to do and they match each other well, however that’s not to say that wasn’t enough to see and do. As one of my colleagues pointed out there was actually too much for a one day conference, you couldn’t visit everything, this was really now a two day conference.
On a personal side I met up with a lot of people and we chewed the fat on projects and deliveries and reviewed the content of the main presentations.
The actual main presentation we’d all gone to see was exceptionally AI driven, far more than any of the other conferences recently, and spun slightly more towards the marketing side than the technical IT side, a number of the slides contained technical terms but with no explanation given so it was obvious who the target audience was.
The Legal “Forward looking Statements” document that was flashed up nearly gave me the giggles.
On the presentation side. they are assuming all your data is in salesforce, and if its not then Mulesoft can fix it, which made one of my eyebrows crawl up my forehead, also they were claiming to have been first with AI with Einstein, which I’m fairly sure IBM might argue with.
On the configuration of the AI, they are moving to the same sort of framework as many of the other vendors such as Microsoft and AWS, so they have caught up on the use of multiple engines, in addition they are using AI for easy template generation that can be linked to actions ,and most pleasantly a whole lay of extra security to stop your data from escaping, which is a massive selling point to me as understanding of AI data is not common knowledge yet.
A particular thank you goes out to Bluewave who had the best after dinner drinks, in which we fixed the world and all things Salesforce while drinking what felt like gallons of Beer 1. So exactly what you’d hope for at the end of a conference.
Conclusion
All in all, A long hard serious conference in the traditional form. A good 12 hours of solid networking, not quite the technical level that I prefer, but that’s because I’m a geek. But from a genuine conference “meet your clients”, “see what’s going on”, “find out what the business needs, and work out what you need to deliver on”, an excellent day.
Workshops or the simple act of sitting down with the client or customer in a single room and thrashing out a problem are absolutely invaluable in any decent sized project.
They are a necessity both for actually getting the feel of a given bit of work and figuring out local issues 1, to building rapport with the business so they know that you’re all on the same side when trying to deliver. The only thing is, timing. The human element of a workshop, the rapport side of it demands that we should do them straight out the gate, to provide a good first impression, “we are your kind of people.” “Tell us what you need, and how we can help.”, all that kind of stuff dictates that you should do a workshop first thing in a project.
But from a technical and practical side this does not work, because you haven’t turned over all the rocks and looked under them, everyone is fresh to the project and enthusiastic, however very little of the true cost or issues that a project is going to face will come up now, and frankly from a moral and engagement point of view you don’t want the cynical techs raising such points in initial calls. This is one of the reasons why when you have large consulting houses come in and do an evaluation of an infrastructure or what have you, they always miss things. It’s not their fault, things simply have not been found.
You need to go down into the project’s dependant systems, turn over every rock, find the real people who are doing things rather than the people who were introduced as in charge, find all the nooks and crannies where the Dragons be, before you actually have a true visualisation of any existing system or processes.
So, when I’m doing large scale projects, I would recommend two sets of workshops. An initial workshop that is human focused, that develops rapport, and gives initial starting positions and works out where people hope to end up.
Then further down the project timeline, book in a review workshop, or “step back” workshop to be done once you’ve had a few months in, and the techs have had a chance to talk to each other, you’ve had a chance to thrash out real processes, found those hidden systems that everyone had forgotten about. Found out the people that do all the little manual interventions to make a process run in the real world
After that, put those into the project plan and cater for any knock back they will cause. This is the crucial point, you will have planned for these knock backs and timing changes up front, this gives the client the appreciation and understanding that you have been down this road before, you know that this is what’s going to happen, can predict it and roll with it to still deliver on time, and should you do the review workshop and don’t find anything new, then it can be used as a back patting exercise for the client, shows everyone how well they knew their stuff to start with, and how pleasurable they are to work with.
So yes, I would always include two sets of workshops.
I really should have done this post last month as that was the first Tuesday Club’s 20th anniversary and I have been going for the full 20 years, The event should really have been a big song and dance, but as always with the first Tuesday club, everything is subtle.
However, I’m glad I’m doing my periodic post for this particular meetup. It was at a new venue and with a new sponsor 1, and it was a particularly good one. Not only was there a number of new people there that had never been before, but they all had a far better time than they expected. of particular note was a conversation with one new attendee who was coming because their office is moving back to full time in the city, and therefore these kinds of social events suddenly leap back to their old prominence.
The vendor Checkmarx did a particularly excellent job. They were in evidence and we’re working the floor as any good vendor would, but only in a very social aspect. The rule of no hard sell was very much kept. I met three people from the vendors team, who were genuinely fun people to chat to and very knowledgeable, Good contacts to know. One of them particularly was very, very funny, despite the fact he was a salesperson dropped into a room full of security techs.
Conversations as always varied hugely from serious ones on how politics effects security implementation in corporations, through to the daftest travel stories
The highlight conversation of the night for me was a very involved one on exactly how vector databases work.2 How these worked in their base form, as well as how their search associations functioned. this sounds boring unless you were watching us do it , because we commandeered a chunk of the bar and watched by a number of very, very patient bar staff were trying to explain Euclidean distance and dot product by using wine and beer glasses.
The venue was the Hispania Restaurant, a new one on me, and particularly fine, when I mentioned it to a colleague it turned out that it was their favourite restaurant, and they were very jealous that I was getting to spend the evening there for free, the facilities were perfect with a steady flow of drinks and food all night.
All in all it turned out to be one of the most pleasant work evenings I have had in ages, my Linkedin has more contacts than it did yesterday, and all the people I met were keen to come back next month.
