One small step…

  by Charles Rattray | 26 Sep 2008 | Permalink |

Following a recent engagement, one of our PMs produced the lessons learnt details provided below. Often lessons seem obvious and we sometimes wonder why some basic stuff manages to trip us up. More importantly, not all lessons represent negative behavior or outcomes – there are positive lessons we can repeat. The nice thing about all the points made below is that they enforce the need for repeatable packaged service type engagements to ensure customers have early success, while joint expectations are leveled. For customers, deployment and operational success with TWF is not the end game. Just a step towards value. One small step for Tideway, one giant leap for our customers (ok, sorry about that last point…:-))

The lessons learnt below apply to the deployment of our product across an IT estate, but some clearly have relevance to all projects.

Lessons Learnt:

1. Provide regular dashboard reports & WebEx sessions to demonstrate discovered data. This builds confidence in the discovery process and the data captured, while encouraging customers to assist in achieving deployment success. There is always something very compelling about seeing continuous progress which, in the end, tends to encourage and drag us all to the finish line – who want to only get to 80%, for example.

2. Choose and develop early champions on the customer team who naturally exude confidence and trust in their colleagues. It is amazing what an employee badge can do for our sense of belonging. When that employee badge is carried by someone who believes in the success of our engagement, and can influence others, expanding the deployment into new areas becomes so much easier. As a famous 49er once said, “Leadership is like gravity…” it doesn’t matter how we define it – just use it.

3. Now for the technical lesson. Progress will be slow without technical support. Have committed technical resources available from the customer’s team, and make sure they have equally committed air-cover. Report technical progress in detail – point out precisely where the issue is, and what the issue is. Better still, change the way the product works or reports its progress so that it can self-diagnose its own issues. Making it clear what the problem is makes the solution clearer. Some specific points pertinent to Tideway Foundation:

 Implement deployment reports to help remediation and track progress.

 Gain permission and leverage the potential to roll out a package with ssh key, required access, and any required tools and permissions (specifically lsof & ndd). Especially if these are not already resident on target servers.

 Ensure DNS or a similar tool is available to indentify hostnames of discovered servers for which access is not yet available.

4. Learn who does what. Identify the tasks and who has responsibility for them on the customer team. Building on this point, use the customer’s additional information systems which might provide valuable ‘Let’s get this done’ data, such as who owns which system, and who is authorised to make changes to them. More specifically, learn the art of the mash-up, and know how to pull related data from different systems into a single view. For example, asset systems may contain useful ownership and location reference information.

5. Be a teacher. Encourage the customer team with early coaching & mentoring to enable them to takeover basic ‘business as usual’ product tasks (remember to get sign-off on your deliverables first though). Don’t fish for the customer – show them how to fish for themselves. After all, our customers have a greater appreciation of the value of automatically discovered application dependency mapping information as it applied to their systems, than we do. What we can provide, though, are those nuggets & gems about the success other customers have had elsewhere. Be the customer’s guide.

6. Maintain data quality. Measure quality using an appropriate yardstick, and report change against this. Aim to show positive progress on data quality, so that any regression becomes something customers feel compelled to do something about. In the case of our product, quality can be maximised by continually aggregating daily scan results during deployment.

7. Finally, beware local public holidays and general national vacation periods, when delivering small engagements to global customers. In the US the workforce likes to work ‘summer hours’ in July and August, while in Europe August is a popular vacation month too.

…and remember, keep learning!