Hooray!!!, I have been accepted to speak at mwlug this year

I will presenting 2 sessions

1) “The SSL Problem And How To Deploy SHA2 Certificates” with Gabriella Davis

This session went down well at connect and we are hoping that Austin will love this changed and updated version, Gab is awesome to present with.

2) “Salesforce for Domino Dogs”

Now If you saw this at Engage I urge you to come again as this is an evolving presentation that changes dramatically with each iteration (depending on presenters and the ever changing world of Salesforce)

• Version 1: Balanced Architect (Engage 2016)
• Version 2: Happy Evangelist (DNUG 2016)
• Version 3: Rabid Developer <– This is the one I will be presenting

It will be my first trip out there and beside from presenting I will be manning the stand (The rest of the team are insisting I wear a shirt and everything).

P.S.

I’m looking for someone to room share/split cost with ( I sleep on the floor so there never seems to be a point to getting a room for myself ) …. I can provide references…

I have been doing a lot of cloud dev in recent months, not Internet facing work (been doing that for over a decade), but proper work on various cloud platforms (4+ of them) and they have turned out to require a shifting of mental gears, not from a technical aspect nor from a platform or paradigm shift (saas) but from dealing with a different type of client point of view.

Now that seems odd, sure your cloud clients are nearly all the business rather than IT, but lots of my work is direct with the business and it is often a relief to do so as you can deliver a product that best matches the exact needs of the people that use it.

So why?

After a lot of head scratching and reviewing of the projects I have come up with the following reasons

1. Sales before IT: With cloud based projects the sales team have very often just finished with the customer, so the customer arrives with the expectation that the platform is a PERFECT fit for everything they might want and it might just needs a tiny update to match their needs and that the update will only take a hour or 2…. but as is always true the devil it in the details, so when we look at their requirements and say that it’s going to take a week of hard work and then they will have to spend time testing, you have suddenly upset both their time frames and budgets. ¹
2. Client reflexes: A lot of the cloud clients are sales/marketing people or from another branch where haggling and negotiations are built-in, these people live in a fast moving world and have never liked the iterative and somewhat slow moving nature of traditional IT projects “I just want it to work how I want”. for such people paying “not a penny more” and getting more than you paid for are Good Things. A side-effect of this is that such clients are quick to anger when they require a change that will take more money or time. Small changes are non-stop with cloud projects where the client can see the work as it is done: I have heard phrases like “Just one more thing”, “It will only take 5 minutes”, “I had assumed” and — my absolute favourite — “It’s just common sense, it should do XXX,” more over the last six months than I have in the previous six years combined.
3. They have already paid: Decent cloud services are not cheap and the clients have often already paid a fair lump before they get to customising their environment, so every penny you want is money they feel is an extra, very much like someone at a hotel, we all enjoy the extra stuff but are really unhappy to see it on our bill. ²
4. Re-tooling: All of the new cloud platforms are feature rich and do a lot of things very quickly but that is often within the boundaries of a given tool or feature, I can see why this is so ³, you are aiming for the old 80/20 rule , so when a customer says “I just need it to do xxxxx” and you simply can’t make the tool do that, have then used a different tool and spent a load of time reconfiguring the new tool to look like the old one so you can add the one missing feature. it does not matter how clever that is or how hard you have worked, from a clients point of view you have turned a simple 5 min job into a 5 day job you and are from their point of view are not providing value for money ⁴.
5. Client rapport: Most cloud customisations are quick things, as a developer you have had very little time to get to know the client, what they mean vs what they say, what pressures they are under, if they have budget for these changes etc etc, and they often just view you as someone just getting in the way of their shiny new cloud platform.

These relatively new changes in the client developer relationship mean you have to change your way of dealing with clients

So how do we fix this??

This is the hard bit, I have laid awake at night for a number of nights, wondering hard how to fix this, my time honoured method of working my guts off having failed me.

So far I have come up with:

1. Make it human: Try and make the relationship one between humans, site visit if possible, Skype video if not, so clients feel that they are working with people and more importantly people who’s professional opinion they can trust.
2. Speed up interactions: Not speed up coding as that has actually not got much faster with the new platforms, but speed-up the feedback you give clients, a quick Agile Scum with a client each morning can head a lot of bad things off and make them feel far more in the loop ⁵, use this to also keep them informed on how much the client has used / left in their bank / project pool, even it they have pushed for a fixed price, addionally the clients can cut their losses if a small change is going to take a long time.
3. Be firm: I’m rubbish at this part but with cloud clients there is an underlying expectation that you get loads for free, and that includes any changes they might want to make after a spec has been agreed, there is a middle groud between “nickle and diming” and being used as a doormat, try and get a rapport with your client so that you both know where that is.

Any one else got any good ideas?

1. Both Matt and Julian have been REALLY serious about avoiding this kind of thing on LDCVia and have made the phase “it will be easy, it will only take and hour or so” a capital offence.[↩]
2. One thing that I have found after multiple quotes, is that honesty works even less with cloud based quotes than it does with traditional IT quotes, I have had at least 3 occasions where I was genuinely puzzled that a quote I had done had not got picked for a spec, and a much cheaper quote was accepted, on all occasions I questioned the ability to deliver on a quote that low (even using offshore staff) and have been told each time that the competition just use the quote to get in the door then nickle and dime the project to death…. I hate that, I really hate it >:([↩]
3. Hell I’m one of the co-developers of a cloud platform and when we are coding new stuff it always with an eye to “how can we spend our time on stuff that will get the most use”.[↩]
4. BTW the phrase “I’m trying to do what you asked” does not help here.[↩]
5. But be firm that the meeting is only of keeping everyone on track, it is not a place to add a few new requirements in to the spec every day (ohhh boy don’t they love to try that), and that each person does only get 2-5 mins, if they want a longer meeting, book it later in the day.[↩]

Where to start….

I should have done a proper blog after IBM Connect 2016, but its been so busy I did not make time, however a number of the points here that were just supposition at Connect have now been turned into facts.

Engage the Event

Theo Heselmans who for all intents and purposes IS Engage, managed to do the impossible and top last years conference, firmly establishing Engage as the best event after Connect, with a huge array of varied content and no subject taboo, all that is required is that the content is GOOD!!, there were a number of times when I really would have liked to be in two places at the same time and that has not happened at a conference in ages.

The venue was the crazy Evoluon in Eindhoven which seemed custom built for such event (if they could get a grip on the wifi)

In a cheeky moment Theo did a backpack give away (because Connect did not this year for the first time)

LDC Via

We went live with LDC Via one year ago at the last Engage so it holds a special place for us, in that year a lot has happened and we have delivered tons more, but we got a lot more attention this year and found that we even have some competition, in this last year we have become established in peoples minds and people realise we offer a great product, all 4 of us were there and did not seem to have a quiet second, as always the speed sponsoring was exhausting and Julian did a great job on the 30 second new speed sponsoring to the whole conference, Matt White was bogged down with cold but still fought his way through the conference and drove us both there and back while at the same time giving his flipping cold to the rest of us.

This years give away “Colin” did sterling work and won the unofficial “best conference give-away” from a number of sources.

We tried a different tack with the sponsor session, showing how many ways you could integrate LDC Via into different frameworks (slide deck below)

IBM and Champions

Well bugger me… Inhi Cho Suh really impressed us all, from the little we saw of her at Connect (she was only introduced to the community right at the end of the conference) we guessed that she might not only be sane but sane and HUMAN and it turned out that she was!!, far more than we had all dared to hope, no “two tassel talk”¹, she had fresh new ideas and had already started acting on them (such as moving Connect to San Francisco in 2017), we had a proper round table event where she dealt well with the hysterical gibbering we blasted her with and left us feeling that it might actually be possible to finally turn things around and start IBM ICS again (somebody pinch me)

On that note being a champion meant something at Engage and made me really think that I must buck my ideas up and start delivering far more.

The Community

Sadly I was doing another round of late night work while I was there so missed out on the parties and such (hence no photos), but judging from the state of my fellow LDC Via colleagues, the events and evenings were great fun and even members who were no longer in the IBM world turned up to revive past glories.

I got happy gifts from friends, Carl Tyler played mule for the amazing vegan mayonnaise that I cant get in Europe, and Rene Winkelmeyer got me the most amazing energy drink

Gabriella Davis got me this totally apt t-shirt (which has since been pinched by my wife)

Me

The session I luckily got accepted for was with Paul Mooney and was on Salesforce, a relatively new skill set for me and we were standing room only (mainly due to Paul), but people liked it and we were asked lots of good questions.

Other than that, it was mayhem, I had terrible client overflow and was running around all over the place stressing every second, but frankly I would not change it for the world. roll on next year.

1. “two tassel talk” : This is the long stream of corporate platitudes (sort of the corporate version of what politicians say) that you get off senior managers that are just marking time in their current role before they hope to be promoted away.[↩]

As we ramp up for Connect 2016, we decided to do a quick introduction to LDC Via. this means that if you see something you want to ask questions about or a feature that is a must have we can sit down over a drink at Connect and see if we can solve them.

So come join us and listen to Matts dulcet tones (as well as Julian)

One of the main differences in going truly freelance* is having to have a consistent formula for calculating quotes and pricing for jobs, as for most things this basically comes down to a time and materials calculation, but the time part has a load of variables in its own right, So far these seem to me to break down into the following

“Basic” = This is the hourly rate you would pay for a permanent member of staff who could do the job to the competency you require.

This is our baseline, it represents the ultimate “bulk buy” and so offers the cheapest rate but is the least disposable.

“Contractor” = “Basic” + A pro rata amount representing all the stuff that a permanent would normally get as part of their job e.g. Holiday, Pension, Sickness, Insurance, job security etc etc

In actual fact a contractor tends to cost the same as a permanent in a holistic way, it is just that you see all the costs up front, more expensive but also more disposable than a permanent member of staff

“Consultant” = “Contractor” + Business over heads (such as travel, time lost, project overruns and changes)

Consultant rate is in fact a reverse form of “bulk buy”, you are only paying for people for a short period of time so they have to maintain them selves when you have finished with them before they pick up their next role, consultant rates also tend to cater to sudden client demands and changes, very often when you see a project start to get picky about every change and alteration, it is because the project has been aggressively priced according to “Contractor” rates (either because of rate negotiation or competition) which means every time there is a change it ACTUALLY costs the consultant money

“Jump” = “Consultant” + Cost of Impact to other clients

More properly called “On Call” or “SLA Maintenance” rates, “Jump” rates mean you stop what you are doing and immediately attend to the needs of a client, you see them all the time in the different costs associated with a support contract, you have to consider the impact to other clients if their work is interrupted and if that is not permitted, someone must be constantly waiting for a client to make them “Jump to it” which cost money, of course many large clients expect “Jump” performance for “Contractor” Rates, so you must decided if such business is worth the Loss leader Behaviour that this represents

Of course you can throw all of this out of the window due to a number of reasons e.g. Really Interesting work, Worthy cause or to improve your skill set.

So this is what proper managers do…………

*That is having no one main client but lots of nearly equal clients.