Adventures in Truthland

- A Tall Tale by Tom Bellinson

Human nature is such that self-preservation is usually the primary motivator.  The challenge with this is that we are often faced with decisions that hinge on reducing personal risk at the expense of the organization's goals.  Most of the time, there is only one reason for this risk: management will receive your message in a way that you did not intend.

Shooting the messenger is a time-honored tradition.  Let's be honest (since we're talking about truth here), if you're bringing the message, chances are pretty good that you are at least somewhat involved in creating the news.  Being responsible, taking responsibility and being held responsible are all different things.  How these three interact with one another can be the difference between a constructive outcome and a destructive one.

Let's take an imaginary visit to Truthland, a place where everyone is exclusively motivated to ensure that the organization's goals have the best chance of being achieved.

You arrive at the office and get to work.  Halfway through the morning, you discover that the new tool the team just got to assist with your portion of the project is not working as expected.  You check the forums and discover that you are not alone in having this problem.  So, you reach out to the vendor's technical support only to discover that "yeah, that's a problem.  We've got that on the list for a future release, but we don't have a schedule for it yet."

The workaround is going to double your original estimate for the project.  You immediately let your teammates know.  After a brief huddle, everyone is agreed that there aren't a lot of options at this point.  The team decides to pull a resource from a lower priority project to mitigate the delay on your work effort.

Sanjeet, your team leader let's his manager, Josephus, know that there are now two projects at risk of slipping their original deadlines.  Josephus wants to know why a problem with one project is going to cause two to slip and Sanjeet explains the team's decision.  Josephus respects the team's decision, but he also knows that Carolina, the product owner for the lower priority project is a proverbial "squeaky wheel."  Before he talks with her, he had better inform senior management, so they can handle the situation properly should it come to them.

Josephus sends an email to his Director, the Deputy CIO and the CIO apprising them of the situation.  A brief meeting is convened, which includes Sanjeet to go over the details.  Sanjeet asks if you can attend the meeting as well.  Everyone listens to you as you recount the events leading up to your team's decision.  Questions are asked for clarification purposes, but everyone agrees that the decision is in the organization's best interest.

Sanjeet contacts the product owners for both projects and informs them of the situation.  They are both understandably upset.  Carolina, as expected, does not believe her project should suffer for "mistakes" made in another project.  Sanjeet invites her to contact his leadership if she would like, but that the decision is unfortunately final.

Carolina does call the CIO.  Todd is ready for the call.  He explains to her why the organization must give priority to the other project.  She doesn't like it, but Todd's explanation is sound and she really doesn't have anywhere else to go.  She begrudgingly accepts the decision.

Notice what DIDN'T happen here.  Nobody obfuscated or watered down the truth.  No blame was assigned.  No repercussions were handed down.  Nobody refused to accept a role in dealing with the problem.

The organization quickly identified a problem, communicated it to all those affected, and rallied around the course of action that best suited the organization's goals.  Sometimes bad things happen.  Their affects will vary depending on how they are handled.  In Truthland, they have a much better chance of having minimal impact.

New Information has Come to Light!

-- Tony Markel

TL; DR: We're staying with Zendesk by moving down to Zendesk Plus from Zendesk Enterprise.

Back when I started this project I did a ton of analysis to determine what we needed from Zendesk should we transition away.  I also asked what we wanted from a ticketing system.  What I didn't ask was: Is there something we could do to keep Zendesk and save money?

It took a discussion over ticketing APIs to find out, that, yes, we can keep Zendesk, and, save money.  More money than by switching this year, and, to boot, we did a little more analysis, and found even more money we could save by moving our Atlassian products to our new cloud infrastructure platform.  So, we decided, with data and analysis, to stay with Zendesk.

What will we lose?  Not much.  Our procurement process will need a minor tweak, and we won't be seeing much in the way of swag and invitations to exotic locations in the near future.  As Enterprise customers, we've had tremendous influence on the shaping of Zendesk in its current form.  As the platform has grown however, our influence has decreased proportionately.

We still have some work to do, so this isn't the last you'll hear on this subject.  If you'd like to review our analysis, and our conclusions, please feel free to contact myself, Erik Zempel, or Vince Chmielewski.

The Importance of Being Unprofessional

By Tom Bellinson

Here at MSIS, we seem to be striving for something better than the traditional business environment. Whenever I hear the word "better," I can't help but think of the word "different."  If we're going to be different, then we had better examine all the things we do that are "the same" as traditional business practices.

Professionalism is one of those ideas that needs a bit of examination.  Let's break it down.  It seems to me that there are two main components to professionalism: 1) how you present yourself physically (dress, and personal maintenance), and 2) your communications.  Some communication is passive, but most is active or at least intentional.  It is this latter form of professionalism on which I would like to focus.

Professional communications have come to be synonymous with emotionless business and/or technical talk.  Hmm.  What's wrong with this picture?  Here's what's strange about this whole concept: modern management principles teach us that we should be "passionate" about our work.

Now, I don't know about you, but when I think about the word "passion," I can't help but envisage strong emotion.  So, if being professional is about containing my emotions, I want no part of it.  You shouldn't either.  This is not a license to become a raving lunatic, but c'mon!  I bring my whole self to work every day whether you like it or not.  If you are leaving part of yourself at home, it's probably the passion we're not getting around here.  That's the juice.  We should want that.

The challenge for an organization full of totally engaged passionate people is learning how to express and respond to emotions in a constructive manner.  The first impulse I tend to have is to suppress my negative emotional thoughts.  I do this to spare my colleagues the stress of dealing with my problems.  Unfortunately, this deprives them of the opportunity to understand the issue(s) that is/are preventing me from being happy.  It's not fair to me and it's not fair to them.  I must be vigilant to avoid suppressing my negative emotions.

When I have the privilege of being on the receiving end of negative emotions, my first impulse is to attempt to squelch them in some manner.  This isn't good either.  Let's be honest: they make us uncomfortable.  When someone shares a negative emotion with me, it is a gift and should be treated as such.  It is an act of courage and trust on their part to share it and it is incumbent upon me to respect that emotion and seek to understand its source (or root cause for all you Six Sigma freaks out there).  Doing this builds trust, commitment and respect.  And that, my friends, is at the core of building good teams.

So, the next time you feel the need to share your emotions with your teammates and they tell you that you are being unprofessional -- agree with them.  Remind them that you are not a professional.  You are a human being.  Remind them that there's a reason why Google spends an inordinate amount of time evaluating emotional intelligence when they hire new employees.  It's because emotions are the essence of greatness.  They are the "better" in "different."


NOTE: I am currently reading a book entitled Software for Your Head by Jim and Michele McCarthy (you can find it here if you're interested).  It was recommended by Chet Hendrickson of the Ron and Chet show.  I will be writing a series about the teachings within and this is a taste of what I've read so far.

MSIS Notifications: What We Want

The MSIS notification approach project, codenamed 'Beacon', began with a simple notion: the way we tell people about IT service statuses and events probably could use a tune-up. We didn’t claim to know how to improve the situation yet, nor that we necessarily should improve it, but rather that it was time to launch an investigation into the matter.

• What purposes do notifications serve for us?
• How do we want to send and receive them?
• What information do we want them to contain and how should it be presented?
• What about them do we want to measure and track?

These questions and more lie within the scope of Beacon, and to begin to find answers, we first decided to ask our customers and staff what they actually want from notifications. That conversation was facilitated through a survey, and this report walks you through the results.