Graham Chastney

Hopefully many of you will be seeing this as I’ve moved over the feeds that used to work against my old hosted location.

I’ve decided that it’s time that I stopped hiding behind the funny “oak grove” thing and came out as the real me. I wasn’t really hiding, and wasn’t doing that good of a job of it anyway.

There’s still plenty to do, but all of the old content is here, including Jimmy and Granddad.

Let me know what you thing.

It’s a long-long-time since I’ve been to a face-to-face open technical presentation. By that I mean the type of thing where people book a conference room and invite people along to see presentations on a technical subject.

I’ve done lots of small presentations with customers, I also watch a lot of online presentations on technical subjects.

One of the challenges with small customer sessions is that the questions aren’t very insightful because the focus is very narrow and with online presentations you often don’t get the questions. There are also advantages to these scenarios; in a small session the focus is just on your challenges (hopefully) and in online presentation you can skip over the bits you aren’t interested in.

Today I decided to give a physical face-to-face half day technical conference a go.

I’m not dealing here with the technical content, I’m talking about the experience.

In many respects I have to say that this was a positive experience.

The venue was The Lowry in Manchester which I love, so that helped (sorry, oops, “in Salford” – people from Salford get very upset with being lumped in with Manchester).

The conference was technical so the audience was the usual mix of male misfits, scruff-bags, business casual and suits. There was also requisite number of women for these things – two.

There didn’t seem to be many young people, we mostly seemed to be IT dinosaurs like myself. Perhaps that was telling of the topic, or perhaps it was more to do with the way that young people learn these days.

I struggled with attention, something I’m starting to become worried about. My tool for the day was my Filofax for note taking; but I also made the mistake of taking my BlackBerry with me. Part way though there was a bit that I wasn’t interested in so let the BlackBerry grab my attention. It took me a little while to come back to the things happening around me. There were plenty of others struggling with the same thing I noticed.

In this instance the questions weren’t of any really value to me, either too technical or too esoteric, but they still brought out points that would have been missed by the presenter. If there had been less presenting and more questioning it might have been different.

The pace of the session was quite good, but there were definitely times that had I been watching online I would have used my fast-forward key and not really missed anything. What these times allowed me to do, though, was to think about how some of the other things would apply to my customer, and also to write down some actions so I didn’t forget them.

Was it worth the 4 hours out of the office? That’s really the $64,000 question.

In this case the jury is out, it’s a slow burn subject for my customers. It did give me some more ideas on how to accelerate the burn, ideas that I wouldn’t have picked up if I hadn’t gone to the session.

I can definitely see why face-to-face sessions are under threat but sometimes there just isn’t anything quite like them. I think that they are going to change over time to being less like “presentations” and more like “workshops” or “Q&A” sessions. Less PowerPoint and more demo and whiteboard. Or perhaps I’m just being a dinosaur?

There has been a bit of discussion around recently about the value of blogging, with some people giving in because they can’t make a decent living from it.

I don’t do it for a living, but I was intrigued as to what my blog would be worth.

I don’t think I’ll be giving up the day job any time soon.

I have quite a complicated set of criteria for writing what I write on this blog.

My first criteria is value. Is what I am writing of some value to someone. It might just be of value to me – helping me to construct a set of thoughts. If I’m trying to construct these thoughts then perhaps others are too. It might be something I’ve found that I think others would like to know about and it might be a set of opinions that I want to express.

That’s the positive side, but I also have a set of criteria for things that I avoid writing about:

• I won’t write about something that I am currently being directly paid to work on. I’m never going to write about a customer’s project. That’s not the purpose of this blog and would potentially ruin my relationship with my client.
• I won’t write about something that is “mainstream” and by that I mean that I am not going to write about something in blogs like lifehacker of ReadWriteWeb. They are paid to do a good job of covering their information, anything I say is just adding to the noise. If I have an opinion to relay I may say something, but I’m more likely to do that as a comment.
• I won’t write about individuals. The internet is far to severe a place for me to write about someone.
• I won’t write about my employer, I’m not paid to blog and I don’t have a mandate from them to blog. It’s a personal activity, so I’m making personal comment.

All of these criteria leave me with a lot of grey areas; where it’s grey I’ll always err on the side of caution and not write.

I also won’t aggregate into my blog all of the other stuff that I contribute to on the web – del.icio.us it visible as is twitter, but I’m not going to copy them in as posts. The same with flickr, and facebook. If people want to connect with those streams then they can do so by the appropriate mechanism. The other reason why I don’t do this that I’m just duplicating the number of times many people see the same piece of information. I’m considering turning off notifications of my blog updates in twitter for this very reason; I regularly read the same piece of information twice which annoys me, and probably annoys others too.

I write lots of stuff and only some of it appears here. This probably makes my online persona difficult to pin down, but it’s only ever going to a part of who I am. I think that I need to do a better job of showing people where I’m contributing, but I don’t think that aggregating it all together into a single stream is the way to do it.

A spend a good deal of time pondering whether I have the balance right; I’m still not sure.

One of my tools is a Logitech Cordless Presenter. I really like this device. It enables me to stand and present and to ignore the laptop and keep the engagement on me. This device has nine buttons – and is over-specified.

For some people it might be perfectly specified, but for me it is over-specified. Let me tell you why.

Yesterday I travelled to the south of England via a customers corporate jet (yes, I know that sounds very fancy, but it isn’t believe me). Even though this is effectively a private flight it still has to abide by all of the rules and regulations that a commercial flight would, the same restricted material, the same security checks, the same hand luggage restrictions. That’s where the problem comes in, the Logitech Cordless Presenter has a laser pointer, and lasers are not allowed in hand luggage.

I’m sure that a laser point is really useful to some people – but I never use one. The type of presentation that I give doesn’t require such a thing (to be honest I’m not a fan of people who do).

As I join the flight reasonably early in the morning the location of the Presenter is not high on my list of priorities. A couple of times now, most recently yesterday, I have had my bag checked on the far side of security and had to relinquish the Presenter to security. It sits in my bag for those occasions when I want to use it.

Even though it’s only nine buttons, this one button makes the Presenter over-specified.

The keyboard in front of me has lots of buttons on it. I know which ones I use because they are clean and shinny, there are an awful lot that are dull and dusty. Why on earth would I want a “Shopping” button? The keyboard is over-specified.

I’ve recently started using TweetDeck for Twitter. It’s a really nice twitter client. Today I updated to a new version and got, in return, a few more buttons. I’m highly unlikely to ever use these buttons. TweetDeck had the capabilities I required, it now has some capabilities I don’t. TweetDeck is in danger of becoming over-specified.

Over-specification is a huge problem in IT. People ask for more and more features which have less and less value. If they were high value it’s likely people would have thought of them early in the lifecycle – the further along the road you get the less likely it is that you are adding something of really significant value.

What’s even worse though, is that the new features become diversionary, particularly in the development cycle. I’m currently working on a number of large programmes where we are in danger of focussing on the peripheral requirements and not the core capabilities. People will get something new and shiny, but not something that makes a real difference to how they work.

Someone once told me a story about a spider that lived up in the eaves of a garage.

One day the spider noticed that there were lots of nice juicy bugs down on the ground, so he decided to lower himself down. He started by building a simple web to see how he got on. This web was a very successful web and the spider decided to extend a little further to see whether he could be even more successful.

Bit-by-bit he extended to form a whole complex of webs that kept him supplied with more bugs than he could have ever imagined.

One day he was walking around his vast abode when he noticed this rather scruffily and dusty looking strand leading up into the eaves above. Seeing all of the webs around him he decided that he no longer needed this connection with his past. He climbed up onto the webs and rid himself of this piece of history with a single snip.

No sooner had he snipped than the web below him started to collapse, trapping his feet. Further down he sank deeper into the web. Before he knew it he was completely engulfed, with no way out. There he lay until he starved to death.

The spider took his focus off his foundations, we must be careful that we don;t do the same.