University of Phoenix

I am at the half way point of required classes for completion of my MBA at the University of Phoenix. I just completed a busy 18 weeks of classes and now I am taking another break. My plan is to complete three courses each year which will allow me to receive tuition reimbursement for each course. The duration of each course is six weeks and there is a lot of work associated with each course.The most demanding class to this point has been accounting which required a good understanding of all financial statements along with knowledge of the formulas and methodologies required to determine each component of the financial statement. My struggle was not with the math in accounting, but instead with learning each formula and understanding when and where to apply each formula and methodology.

Now that I am at the half way point and know that I can do the work, I wish I had started this process sooner. The three issues stood in my way were the cost of a graduate degree, taking the GMAT’s, and my age. What really turned me around was the fact that many of my peers were going back to school and a few of them were older than me. I figured if they can do it, I can do it, and started looking at schools that did not require the GMAT’s. I knew someone who was taking online classes at Northeaster University, and they really liked the format and the program. Northeastern required the GMAT’s, but I started to consider online programs and that lead me to the University of Phoenix which did not require the GMAT’s. From a financial perspective, MIT would reimburse me for 2.5 courses University of Phoenix courses each year, where the cost of Northeaster's online program allowed for reimbursement of 1.5 courses per year. The choice was simple.

My biggest struggle has been managing both work and school. Similar to any higher level class, you need to do the work if you want to pass, however the struggle with a six week class is the amount of work a such a short period. Each week requires about four to five hours a week of reading along with about ten to fifteen hours a week of writing and responding to others. With the exception of Accounting, the work has not been hard, instead the struggle has been finding the time to complete my assignments. This is a process that you need to commit to because you cannot afford to take a day or two off each week and maintain a good grade. 

over the last 20 years, I have seen many individuals with no advanced education, move up quickly on persistence and good skill sets, however they often plateau on the technical side and cannot make the transition to manager or above because they do not have an advanced degree. When appropriate, I often share my experiences with these individuals and explain how you can take the long slow road to an undergraduate degree and still graduate. If there is one point to be made from this post, it is to consider going back to school. Whether it is undergrad program or a graduate program, you can start now, take your time and in two to four years earn a degree that will help you in the future. Online courses are not for everyone however they do offer flexibility and provide more options than the colleges and universities in your local community.

Velocity–Web Operations

I was really impressed with the Velocity conference, the organization, the content and the participants. The conference was a perfect size, not too big while at the same time not too small. Velocity had two main themes, Web Performance & Optimization and Web Operations. Common topic of discussion were performance, operations, change management, configuration management, monitoring, optimization, metrics, mobile, devops, webops, agility, JavaScript, node.js, and dirty-apps (data intensive real time apps).

I gravitated to the web operations talks but also sat in on some of the mobile and web optimization discussions. I heard multiple times was how web performance and optimization has grown and really delivered value over the past five years, whereas the web operations sector has not grown at the same rate. From a web optimization perspective, browsers are faster, JavaScript has been optimized and delivers 6 times the performance as 5 years ago, node.js has become a framework for JavaScript on both the client and server side, and an entire market has evolved around web optimization.

From and operations perspective, Amazon, Facebook and Google all have efforts focusing on changing their data center and application delivery strategies, moving away from an older style of enterprise capacity planning which focused on scaling vertically at the application level to a newer web level of capacity planning and optimization that delivers a flexible infrastructure across all applications. Both Facebook and Google have created standards around server configurations, builds, deployments and decommissions, and Facebook has custom built their datacenter, squeezing cost out of server builds and power delivery. Amazon focuses on capacity planning and has recently moved all Amazon online store applications off of physical servers onto a ec2 infrastructure, putting all their apps into the cloud, even if it’s their cloud.

Other areas where web operations is adding value is in the continuous deployment and configuration management space. Common configuration management and deployment tools identified at Velocity were cfengine, puppet, chef and the cast-project. There was a lot of talk about devops which is basically introducing a operations strategy into the development process while at the same time introducing a development strategy into the operations process. Examples of this would be using a code repository for all applications builds and deployments, and from a development perspective, introducing the developers to the monitoring and performance stats before they release their code. I agree and fully support this strategy, however I do feel that there is a too much hype surrounding the “devops” term, and prefer the “web operations” term as a replacement for the devops term.

There was not a lot of discussion around gathering metrics however a number of folks did talk about monitoring, looking at your data and understanding your logs and data. John Allspaw gave an interesting talk on “Advanced PostMortem” where he spoke of Time to Detect TTD an incident, Time to Recover TTR from an incident and the overall impact time which is TTR-TTD. John made the point that the severity of all outages are not the same and each organization should define different levels of severity, and track TTD, TTR, Impact Time along with the severity level.

I was also looking for some help with deployments, and chef and the new cast-project look interesting, I am going to hold off on a configuration management systems at work and focus on building out our continuous deployment process. We have started this process in development using Bamboo, however our organization needs to commit to this strategy, and then scale out the current Bamboo infrastructure to accommodate building all of our apps. There was more talk about application servers in the cloud as opposed to application servers on premise so my application server question did not get answered. A couple of vendors offered sophisticated java monitoring products however both came with a steep pricetag. The one java monitoring product that I thought was interesting was dynaTrace which I will probably investigate.

A challenge that I have and I am sure that many other enterprise level organizations have is that our infrastructures are carved out and deployed on an application by application basis, which means that we have to pay for and build redundancy into every new application as opposed to the market leaders like Google, Amazon and Facebook who have redundant infrastructures and add applications onto their redundant infrastructures. The market leaders have had a lot of success with this infrastructure strategy, it is surprising that more large enterprises has not started down this same path.

I thought this was a valuable conference and next year I am going to recommend that we have two or more folks attend velocity. More information on Speaker Slides and Video can be found here.

Velocity Conference

I will be at the O’Reilly Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference next week looking for strategies to help my Application Admin team in the long run. My team is not your typical system administration team, instead we are the Application Administrators or App-Admin Team and we fall between the development team and the system administrators. We build, deploy and support applications on a Middleware level of java application servers that host a majority of MIT’s internal applications. The majority of our applications are Java based running on Oracle Application Server or Tomcat, however we also have a bunch of PHP applications, a few older html/cgi applications and we also support multiple instances of Confluence.

My goal for the conference is to identify tools or strategies to help us improve our metrics gathering and analysis, along with help in the deployment and automation space, and if possible, I am working on a long term application server strategy that would provide a nice transition from our larger Oracle Application Server instances to a product that will support both small light weight applications as well as multiple large enterprise level applications.

From a deployment perspective, Velocity covers a number of DevOps solutions, however the majority of these solutions are wrapped around Chef or Puppet which are based on Ruby. My challenge to to find a  non-ruby based alternative to Chef or Puppet as my organization is not supporting Ruby and does not want to introduce a Ruby based solution.

If you are attending Velocity, please feel free to say hello.

Building Relationships

The MIT Human Resources group sponsor multiple Professional Development courses and one course that many of the MIT Manager take is Essentials of Managing. Although the course is geared toward new managers, it reviews MIT policies and relevant laws and also applies to experienced managers. Many of my peers at MIT have taken this course so when an opening presented itself, I decided to enroll. 

Over the span of the last few years, I have not thought to deeply about management or management strategies and techniques, however in this course, I found that I am sharing opinions about managing and the characteristics of effective managers which is a topic that I wrote about back in 2007  with a post called “Characteristics of an Effective Manager”. In that post I outlined six characteristic that I feel are important qualities for all managers:

1. Be a Leader and Lead by Example
2. Effective Communications
3. Provide Feedback
4. Be Fair
5. Be positive, Negativity Kills
6. Promote Teamwork

I still like this list however, I would like to add another characteristic to my list which is to “Build Relationships”.

The Value of Building Relationships

Enterprises and organizations are formed to provide goods, and services, and most organizations are formed to make a profit. While each organization is different, they all have goals and tasks required to deliver their goods and services, and the organization’s management team is responsible for planning and delivering the resources necessary to meet those goals. Managers need help from direct reports, peers, senior management and vendors to get their job done, and often rely on others to meet their goals. It’s advantageous for a manager to invest time and effort into building a relationship with everyone that will help them accomplish their goals.

Building a positive relationship with all individuals increases your influence and trust in an organization. As you learn more about your team, your peers and vendors, they also learn more about you. Communication improves, sharing of information increases and that is how influence and trust grows.

As a manager, if you work from a position of control where your circle of control is related to the position that you hold, as opposed to the influence and trust that you have earned, then I believe that you will have less control because your circle of control will only include your direct reports. Without the extra level of influence and trust, your direct reports may do what you say, however they will not be motivated to put  in the extra effort that is often needed to complete critical projects. Managers who make decisions that best suite themselves, and not the team, are recognized quickly, and often loose influence and trust.

If you are looking to improve your circle of influence you can start by building a relationship with all of your direct reports. My strategy is bi-weekly one-on-ones and a weekly staff meeting where everyone is open to bring their challenges to the table. If you are managing a remote employee, then the frequency should increase and you may need to speak with the remote employee every day. From a peer perspective, let your peers know that you are always approachable and willing to help and do the same with your vendors. Good vendor relationships are key in many managerial jobs.

As managers we all have different communication and management styles, however by building a network of relationships throughout your organization, you reduce the risk of a miscommunication or misinterpretation and increase the chance that everyone will be working together toward similar goals.

Other Resources

I have really enjoyed the discussions in the Essentials of Managing course and would like to offer another resource for folks looking to improve their managerial skills. I have been listening to Technology and Management Podcasts for many years and would recommend www.manager-tools.com for anyone who is managing people. Manager-tools.com is a great resource for both the new manager and the experienced manager. It is a free service, with forums, podcasts and premium content, where they discuss different managerial scenarios and outline the strategies and techniques necessary to deal with each situation.

The Open Social Web

I have been talking and writing about web 2.0, the open web, social networking, and social computing for a while now and now like to refer to all of this as The Open Social Web. In my version of the Open Social Web, all applications and content are built on open web standards that provide users with interoperability and control of their own data. While that may not be the case with many of the larger social networking sites, I like to think of it as a good goal to work towards. Adoption of social tools and applications have moved the digital conversation from blogs to social sites like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Buzz and Identi.ca, and the adoption of free mobile tools has helped to fuel this migration. While many people lose site of the Open aspect of these tools and social adoption is still growing and that is good for everyone. Social tools are changing how, when and where we communicate and that benefits everyone.  Openness leads to innovation, and innovation leads to better tools, applications and communication both within and outside of the social networking space. Location tools like Foursquare and Gowalla are great examples of innovation in the Social space and the wide adoption of desktop tools  like Seesmic and TweetDeck prove that users want to pull all of their social data and communications into one tool or application and companies are innovating to make that happen. I use Seesmic more than TweetDeck and both are great social aggregators, however I am still waiting for the tool that produces one open stream with all my social data. 

An Open Social Web built on top of the same open infrastructure components will lead to an increase in discovery and sharing across all social sites. A good starting point for learning about open infrastructure technologies is the W3C Incubator Group Report on “A Standards-based, Open and Privacy-aware Social Web”.  The W3C Incubator Group Report on Social Web Standards makes a case for Open Social Web Standards and focuses on identity, profiles, social media, privacy, activity streams, accessibility, open social networking projects and business considerations.

Adoption of these tools and standards is growing however there is still a lot of user friction sharing data between the large social networking sites and when it comes time to move to or at least try a new social networking site. This is too bad because discovery of new social tools and friends is a big part of the social web, and there are many groups working to reduce this friction and find tools and let users take their credentials from site to site. OpenID, OAuth and XAuth are the prominent tools for logging  into new social tools and services with your current credentials. Many of us have seen the Twitter, Facebook, Google and OpenID buttons presented when logging into new services and the advantage of using these buttons for authentication is access to your current friends at Twitter, Facebook or Goggle on the new service. This enables a pass through service back to your authentication point of choice which enables the user to easily identify current friends on the new service. This functionality helps with discovery and as I said, discovery is a big part of exploring the social web. Joseph Smarr and Jon Panzer outlined many of these tools in their Google I/O 2010 talk on Building fluid social experiences across websites:

Chris Messina also spoke at the Google I/O 2010 conference on many of the same topics however Chris’s talk was a little more conceptual than John and Josephs talk. Chris touched on  OpenID and digital identity, WebFinger, Activity Streams, PubSubHubbub, Salmon and the Hammer Stack and how these components can be used to build an Open Social Infrastructure that will easy friction, encourage discovery and open the door to innovation of these technologies. Here is Chris’s talk on the Open and Social Web:

While Google is a big player dedicating many resources to the Open Social Web, there are many other organizations and people creating open tools and applications on the Open Social Web. Status.net  is one and MindTouch.com is another.

Here is a list of additional links, slideshows and video that touch on the Open Social Web:

• Federating the Social Web - James Walker
• Connecting the Open Social Web with OStatus (#FOWA2010) – Jon Phillips
• Deciphering the Interoperable Web -  Michael Bleigh
• Opening up the Social Web - Standards that are bridging the Islands - Bastian Hofmann
• Go real time with pubsubhubbub and feeds – Alex Barth
• The Power of “Open”: Using the Open Web and Social Media to Get Things Done – Matt Thompson
• Welcome to Social Web 3.0 – Jean Dobey
• GDD Brazil 2010 - The Open and Social Web  - Patrick Chanezon
• The state of the open social web with OneSocialWeb architect – Robert Scoble and Laurent Eschenauer
• Cliqset - Salmon demonstration – darrenbounds
• OpenSocial – Google
• Mozilla Drumbeat – Mozilla