Method(s): Spray basecoat of Wraithbone. For the skin use Guilliman Flesh, once fully dried, dry brush Pallid Wych Flesh lightly over all skin, then with a 1:1 mix of Magos Purple and water, wash over the hands and feet. Next apply Gore-Grunta Fur to all fur areas being careful not to get it on the skin. Lastly paint teeth and claws with Stegadon Scale Green.
This is an object, usually software, that promises something but can only deliver it when a lot of additional resources and other systems are bolted on, normally paid for by the customer.
In this tale, a traveller or travellers convince either a old woman or a village that they have a magic stone that can produce soup. However this is a con. They get the villagers or old woman to actually make the whole soup by adding tonnes of ingredients one by one.
This tale has two interpretations:
Is that if everyone works together they can produce amazing things.
Don’t believe people who say something can produce amazing things without proof and that nothing is free.
In the corporate world, its the second interpretation that is most common, and is seen mainly in the form of something that promises everything and while the something indeed exists, 1 it doesn’t do what is advertised as without tonnes and tonnes of extra bits. This is most commonly seen in software systems, particularly a lot of the modern day cloud ones. So they may say our software does XXX, but it only does that because it’s hosted on AWS and takes advantage of their systems and you have to pay for the extra AWS systems, or that it has monitoring when all it does is allow other monitoring software 2 to interface to it. or it sends emails but it requires a separate mail server etc, etc, etc.
It’s when something is sold as doing something but requires lots of other systems to actually complete. In the worst case, you will be sold a single licence for a cloud subsystem in the hope of keeping everything on the cloud and end up with a bunch of local servers to deliver on that promise and leave you with twice the complexity you started with.
The only real way to combat this is to dig down in to the detail, arrange a workshop with your techs and get hard details on what supporting systems and licences are needed for your deliverables.
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 year has been my most professionally challenging year for at least the last decade and all in a good way.
Prior to this year, I fixed complex IT problems. I did project management to make things work when there was no good project manager allocated, I did business liaison as a specialist, again just to facilitate the work I was delivering, but this last year its all been very different.
This year each of the 3 core areas of work has been a deliverable in its own right and my competency held to a high standard.
Management: People management on a much larger multi region team with different levels and types of people with different challenges, multiple projects all going on at the same time and not projects in the contract way, where you keep them all separate, projects that merged together, projects dependent on each other. There was an awful lot of plates spinning, In this, delegation has been my biggest challenge the scale of deliverables required has truly meant I have had to “Work Smarter not Harder” 1.
Technical: The normal technical growth continues and technology keeps on changing at its insane pace, so it was all in all absolutely fabulous, a real challenge but one that has been my bread and butter for 2 decades so its just a case of fitting it in with the other learning needs.
Business: The main project I am working on weaves multiple areas of business together and to my knowledge has not been done like this before, so a lot of truly complex business challenges come up suddenly 2, thus I’m expanding my knowledge on a daily basis, indeed I put aside 7 hours a week on training to accelerate this, this is making things that I only saw in the distance before, snap into sharp focus.
2023: My only fear for the upcoming year is it won’t be as challenging, because I’m enjoying it hugely 3. I am learning far more about the people side of project management, dealing with people who are quite frankly not wanting to come onto the same page as you, something that you don’t tend to have with clients when you’re a contractor. From the business side, I am going solidly for my CII certification and full SOX certification, so can reach a point where I can argue with authority with an actuary or with compliance lawyers. The constant technology push I’ve always loved. It’ll just keep going through. I spend my time learning, I spend my time digging through things and having fun. It’s a joy. It’s a non stress part of my job, but thankfully I still have lots to learn.
Bring it on!
Mark makes a retching sounding sound at using such a phrase[↩]
Even with the best planning done by competent BA’s[↩]
My Wife says that its the least unhappy she has seen me in a while[↩]
These 2 words are often used interchangeably in the corporate world, with everybody wanting to be a Partner never a Vendor, but they actually have quite a strict difference:
A Vendor
This is someone that’s selling you stuff and just sends you an invoice for it. it doesn’t matter what it is, it doesn’t matter if they give you a discount or freebee stuff, or how large the invoice is, If they send you an invoice and you pay and it’s a simple process like that, then they are a Vendor.
A Partner
Now, a Partner on the other hand is a Vendor that takes on some of the financial load or some of the financial risk for a given project or work. for example, if you are wanting to accelerate a project faster than your current budget would allow but are sure you will get the budget in the next years allocation. Then a vendor might say “look, we’ll give you five extra people for six months. and we won’t be invoicing that until next financial year” then they become a Partner, they have accepted a modicum of risk in the project or given you something that is more than just freebies. e.g. solid internal training that actually costs them something to provide.
That’s it. You don’t call yourself a partner until you’ve actually exposed yourself to some form of limited risk or given the client something that they cannot currently get.
Personal Opinion Addendum
How long does partner status last for? Traditionally corporations are like angels in that they have no memory, but in this case I tend to see this last to the first financial period that the Client company does not owe the Vendor company anything, e.g. if a Vendor forwards a Client a bunch of free consultancy or training at the beginning of a project, but then invoices for that consultancy in the next financial period, they have just used up their partner status, They will still be called a partner but it is unwise for them to assume they can use it until they again show they are willing to resume their investment in the project.
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.
For a lot of the major companies, the quick wins of moving to the cloud, which really translates to making it easy to vertically scale some existing servers is over.
We are now getting into the area of integrating serious existing systems with cloud services and having to match the expectations of cloud services to everything else that exists in the company.
One of the big things I’ve seen now multiple times is that we are trying to match the “everything is instant” “everything is real-time” expectations of consumer level products that are built totally in the cloud with existing on premise infrastructure and platforms. “What is the problem?” I hear you cry, just upgrade everything, but it doesn’t quite work like that. Now you have a cloud system that has an expectation of receiving data from internal systems, and indeed can pull data from said systems at real time, but the source systems just can’t take that load, everything from database servers, to internal network, to app servers are not designed for such a load. Not only are they not designed for this stress in general terms, but they have not had to work out the capacitance planning for it. A perfect example of this is transactional logging. When you enable transactional logging on source systems so that they can feed these monster cloud systems, that introduces an additional load across the board and these have not been planned for, not only are these not being catered to at an IT level , but they are often ultimately driven from other business areas and the normal slow business growth planning of humans.
The points to be learned from such problems are:
Communication, communication, communication: With all of your existing people. You will find you will have communication issues, but this is not down to them not wanting to grow or change. This is simply down to the speed that the internal systems is set to grow is not aligning with the cloud systems expectation. You have to work with people from all areas. You have to get them involved from the minute you’re starting to do this. Try and give them a heads up on what you’re going to do. They often have to plan their budget and how much they spend on infrastructure change and people hiring a year in advance, suddenly turning on your AWS servers and cranking them up to 11 does not help them.
Expectations: Most of your customers for your systems are now expecting consumer level speeds. All of your social media plans are nearly real time. Now, all of a sudden you are expecting that from human and IT Systems that are buried deep under a whole raft of procedures that you have not changed for decades. You cannot provide real time updates to such things with only changes to IT systems, you need to bring along the business systems that are supporting them. Explain this to your cloud system consumers so they can set their expectations along real human lines.
Fear: A little bit dramatic, but its a real statement, people fear change, if you do not work with people on this they will fear these changes. To gain proper improvements from cloud systems you have to work with everybody, introduce them to the advantages and their place in such a changed world, help them grow as you are helping the IT systems grow.
The best analogy I can think of to explain all this is from the image that is headlining this post, from “Appleseed” a famous comic by Masamune Shirow which confronts a lot of the issues of change in the world. One of the doctors in the comic states “You can’t give someone a Cyborg Leg Just like THAT, It’d tear out when they try to run”. Think of your move to cloud in thoese terms.
