Technology, as a profession, is an interesting social experiment.  You can have a front row seat to just about every stereotype imaginable.  Introverts, extroverts, passive aggressive know-it-alls.  They are all contained in this microcosm known as Information Technology.  What I’m finding fascinating of late is the interaction between the generations.

In the interest of full disclosure I’m near the end of Generation X as defined by the greatest source of useless information on the web. 

So what am I seeing?  A greater disconnect between the Boomers and Gen Y.  I think for most folks this probably isn’t much of a surprise.  However, I’m in this precarious position called management.  I have Baby Boomer bosses who come in at the crack of dawn and wonder where all the ‘coders’ are.  I have Gen Y that comes in at 10 and stay until midnight and wonder why all the ‘bosses’ have gone home.  And this is probably the simplest example I can think of.  And if your like me, a Gen X’er, your stuck in the middle as a translator for both sides!  At times this can be a challenging position because you need to be somewhat more conservative in your approaches with Sr level staff, but you also need to build and nurture a team of folks that will become the future of your IT organization.  And god forbid if either side sees you fraternizing with the other!

This sounds like a rant.  However, I’ve had a chance to put some perspective between my initial observations and some recent experiences.  As a Gen' X’er I get the best of both worlds.  I get the experience and guidance from the Boomers who actually have seen it all (even Fortran).  I get the Gen Y’ers that have grown up consuming technology and believe anything is possible and everything SHOULD be easy.  And what do these folks get from this Gen X’er?

Let’s take Your experience and Your enthusiasm and do a start-up.  Seriously, we can IPO in a year.

The last few year have been terrible.  It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, your education level or place of residency.  The latest economic down-turn has been rough on all of us.  However, there are signs of an upturn and you need to be prepared for it.  How do you position your teams to respond and meet the demand of your business?  Getting smart about outsourcing might be the key!

The next upturn is going to present a few realities that you will need to come to terms with.  The first, is that  your company has ‘right-sized’ your organization at some point.  Translation, you have less resources than you did before the bust.  The second is that the economy is starting to pick-up.  Translation, you will lose talent.  The third, and most important, is that your company will want to be ahead of the curve and implement technologies and products so that they can gain the most by the upswing. 

The challenge as an IT manager is how do you ‘ramp-up’ for the upswing?  You will face the challenge of fleeting talent as well as increased demand.  You need to develop a resource strategy that is scalable and forgivable.  So what is the solution.  Outsourcing.

Outsourcing is probably the one word that will have all IT pros see red.  I think it’s a natural reaction giving the recent experiences of most IT pros.  However, now is the time to leverage the ‘right-size’ outsource solution so that you can continue to meet the demands of your company’s IT demands and best position your team.

So what is this mythical outsourcing phenomenon I speak of?  It’s coming to the realization that you don’t have enough team capacity nor the time or energy to meet the current needs.  You don’t want to bring on full-timers that you will have to layoff  when the demand levels off, you owe your employees more than that for sure.  So now is the time to start to develop outsourcing relationships.  And make no mistake.  These arrangements are relationships. 

Develop Level 1 Outsourcing

Phase one of an outsourcing relationship is simple.  Get some contractors in that your team manages.  Not all firms love this arrangement, but guess what, the economy is tough and they will do it.  The benefit is that you can release or add contractors as your demand requires.  You don’t have to lay anyone off, and the vendors begin to learn what your standards are and what you expect.  You can also use this to see what the strengths and weaknesses of each vendor are.  I call this the ‘getting to know you phase’.  The main advantage is that you can increase the capacity of your team without having to hire an FTE.

Develop Level 2 Outsourcing

This level is a bit more challenging and requires you to have a level of trust.  You have gotten to know a vendor and now want to outsource a project because your team just does not have the capacity to complete it when the business needs it.  It is critical that you make this distinction.  This is not about cost savings, it’s about increased capacity.  Your team needs to have tight control, good project definition and good management in place.  When considering moving to this stage I recommend giving a vendor the easiest or best defined project you have.  At this point your success is tied to theirs and theirs to yours.  I recommend managing risk though the statement of work, verifying work with your own QA resources and assigning your own technical resource to oversee the project. 

The best strategy when negotiating this: Fixed Bid.  Why fixed bid?  Fixed bid is a shared risk.  Each party has skin in the game.  They want to make a profit, you want the project completed.  It puts you and the vendor in a shared  risk relationship. 

Develop Level 3 Outsourcing

I know what you are thinking, level 3 outsourcing is complete project outsourcing.  Something I’ve learned through trial and error is not an optimal solution.  Level 3 is all about reducing cost and freeing up resources.  It’s not project driven.  When you get to level 3 you should be looking to outsource the remedial tasks that your full-time staff does day-to-day. Also known as application maintenance.  At level 3 you want to move maintenance to a lower cost resource so your internal resources can continue to spend time managing Level 2 while keeping IP in-house!

The economy is picking up.  Now is the time to start implementing these strategies!

I’m going to tell you the tale of two software shops.  Both shops have incredible Engineers,  great Product Managers and excellent processes.  The only thing that separates these two shops is release night.  One shop knocks out the change in minimal time, the other is working through the weekend to fix issues.  This anomaly has nothing to do with platform choice, complexity of the stack or location.  The problem is universal across all of these.  The difference between these two shops, a release engineer.

Typically a release engineer is a person, or team of people, who are familiar with the build, deployment and configuration of a product.  This is important because one thing I can tell you for sure, your production environment is not exactly the same as your lower environment.  Even more sure is that your production support team has even less knowledge on how to trouble shoot release issues.  You absolutely need someone who is familiar with your configuration.

Unfortunately release engineers are somewhat of a luxury for many shops.  They are an unappreciated component of a successful software shop. If you can’t get the budget to hire one I have a suggestion that has worked for me time and time again.  Appoint one of your developers (and a backup) as the designated release engineer.  This makes on person solely responsible for the success of your pushes. 

There is a cost associated with dedicating on of your developers.  I generally find it amounts to 10 hours a week as the developer builds and defines the process, approximately 6 weeks total.  After that, maybe 1 hour a week to maintain the process.  It sounds like a modest investment, but it will pay off the first time you have 6 developers working all week to make a deployment successful. 

Start getting control

My first article in this series I outlined twelve points that I generally find to be true in respects to a start-up company.  While moving from start-up mode to corporate mode there will be some pain points.  So let’s talk about things you can do to start making an immediate impact. 

There are two things that will have immediate impacts on your business during the transition.  The first is attrition.  Folks who started working for the start-up from day one will begin to feel like the power they once had is being taken away.  These folks could make decisions on a whim.  They know where everything is, because they put it there!  At the time this was appropriate.  Everything was about getting the business going.  Now, that you’re moving to a corporate or enterprise mentality these decisions can have dire impacts on the companies operations. 

The second major impact is the inevitable lack of documentation.  So what type of documentation are we talking about?  I mean everything.  How many people in your organization know what server has what software installed?  How about dependencies?  License agreements?  What about all of the small applications that were built to bridge the gap?  Who built those?  Chances are there are only a select few people in your organization that can answer these question.  And I bet there are some surprises. 

So here’s the dilemma.  You have a lot of information in the hands of a few folks that are beginning to feel disenfranchised.  No matter what you do these folks will eventually leave.  Your first plan of action is to try to harness this mind share as soon as possible. 

The Tool

A cheap and very effective way of doing this is to setup a Wiki.  I’m not kidding.  I have found this to be very effective tool for documentation.  It’s what Wiki’s were made for!  IT folks have a tendency to want to brag through documentation.  It’s natural that they will run with this.  To help the process along appoint a Wiki admin.  Setup some templates for people to follow.  I’ve seen templates for Server documentation, applications (including release notes), Product roadmaps, IM accounts, people, etc.  Believe me, consistent presentation of information will go a long way towards adoption.  Have your Wiki admin setup a front page to highlight ‘good and new documentation’ as well as a ‘most wanted’ list.  Finally give it a name.  At the company I currently work for we call it ‘TWIKI’ as in Tech Wiki. We even branded it with its own logo.   Interesting enough some of our largest user base is not in IT.  The business and sales teams use it on a regular basis to get the most up-to-date information.

This strategy will solve a few issues:  Attrition and the loss of organization knowledge, documentation issues, as well as a great communication platform between your engineering department and the rest of the business.

During Part 3 I’ll be discussing the importance of asset management and how not doing so can really cost you.

 
I once heard a saying that you don’t know where you are if you don’t know where you’ve been.   I’ve had the pleasure  of working for several start-ups as well as some established companies through out my career.  I’ve always been fascinated by the transition companies go through when moving from start-up mode to corporate operations.  No where is the change more evident than in IT.  This is a tough transition plagued by pitfalls and hard lessons.  Hopefully, by you reading this post and the ones to follow, you can gain some insight as well as avoid some of these pitfalls should you have the fortunate experience of making it out of start-up mode.

This post is the first part of a series I’ll be posting in the next few months addressing this phenomenon.  Many of these lessons are from first hand experience.  However, like I said I’m fascinated by the process and I would love to hear your stories be them successful or otherwise. 

Characteristics

What is start-up mode vs corporate operations?  We will need a definition.  My view of a start-up is a company that is just trying to establish itself.  This is a loaded definition because there are many facets to an established company.   The first is that a company must establish a product or service.  No doubt obvious and tangible.  But we must also consider the non-tangible, things like culture and brand recognition.

So what does a start-up look like from an IT perspective?  The truth is that it can be in a variety of states, but here are twelve points I typically find to be true: 

1. No centralized management of assets
2. Data center sprawl
3. Release Management in disarray
4. Lack of code standards or code reviews
5. Inconsistent SDLC processes
6. Missing Architecture strategy
7. Lax security policy
8. Missing disaster recovery plan
9. Lack of code documentation
10. Lots of ‘small apps’ to bridge a gap
11. Missing or lacking quality control points
12. Inconsistent help desk operations

These points all sound bad, but remember, the goal of a start-up is to make it to a point where these issues can be addressed.  Implementing a coherent SDLC process is useless if you don’t have a product or customers to serve.

So what makes corporate operations different than start-up mode?  I’m sure most of you reading this can think of examples where the corporation you work for either isn’t doing all of these activities or struggles with these activities.  The main difference is that the corporation you are working for is probably doing some of these or is working towards these activities.  A start-up has to begin with a clean slate.  Improving one of the twelve activities is a different animal than starting from scratch.  Especially when you consider the ‘culture’.  Remember you are moving away from the mind set of ‘just get it out’ to ‘let’s do it better’.  For many folks that were involved in the start-up from the beginning this is a tough pill to swallow.  Attrition will happen, you will loose rock stars and gain new ones.  For this reason alone it’s good to start implementing some of these controls as soon as possible.

During Part 2 of this series I’ll begin to discuss which of the twelve points above are the least painful to implement, and why they are important.  Please check back for more next week!