I’m going to apologise upfront for this post, it’s a bit Mac Fanboy.
There’s advert for HP laptops at the moment. In the smallprint on the advert: “Colour not available in the UK”.
Advertising a product that isn’t available the country seems a tad short-sighted.
Perhaps a silly management suggestion, but I can’t help thinking organisations would be better if everyone could embrace the sense of de-mob happiness they get when leaving. But without actually leaving.
When you’re leaving you document, at least you try to. When “the person who knows everything” is leaving, you desperately try to stop the knowledge flying out the door asking endless questions.
This of course doesn’t work.
Asking questions only works when you know what to ask. We’ve all been in office until 8pm on the last day writing documentation, desperately trying to summarise three years in a large document. Later mutters of “if only he’d told us…” fly around the office, while the unloved document sit unread in an inbox.
Living documentation on the other hand does stand a chance of being used, but again is rarely updated. How often do you find yourself saying “if only I had the time?” when considering automating something with a script or a macro, or handing it over to an operational team. We never do though, the training might take a half a day, and it’s only 15 minutes to do the trivial operational task. 15 minutes every day. Forever.
Which is when we get to money-laundering legislation. Banks and other financial institutions enforce a two-week holiday for many stuff, in the hope that any illicit positions will become apparent in that time.
I think all companies can embrace this, if you have someone who can’t take two weeks leave without major ramifications then your company is at risk (once you’re more than a five-man band). Illness, family crises, geopolitical situations and ash-clouds don’t tend to arrive with as much notice as holiday does, and can easily last longer.
Instead of seeing it as headache, the ‘flexible organisation of the future’ should use handover to distribute work in a way that cross-pollinates and leaves the right people doing the right things at the right time; there is no reason to hand back the same work you were given. Even in the ‘rigid organisation of the past’, handover makes painfully clear where your weakness lie.
The final point that is most interesting, but dangerous to explore: the sense of freedom people often get when leaving. I’ve seen managers who were appalling up to the point that their “strategic exit” was negotiated, and even where they were pushed, for the final month their performance improved.
Was it their impending freedom, or the ability to ignore the latest “corporate update” emails about the new org-structure? Obviously you can’t ignore all future things, and ignoring the elephants is never a good idea, if nothing else they can be easier to deflect from a distance. Freed from all the potential faff of the future, people feel more able to perform in the present. Perhaps we just need to send less update emails?
If we can find a way to foster some of those leaving behaviours in an ongoing culture, and we can do it without diminishing commitment; we can build organisations that perform better. I don’t think the principles are hard:
I’d like to think that would help create the kind of place good people would love to work.
Sometimes it feels like we’re still failing to solve the basic problems time after time. Can I present my first list of things we really shouldn’t be launching without solving.
Further suggestions welcome.
Hi,
How are you doing, long no time no speak, how are the kids? That new house you bought? Your family, they’re doing well? The cat? Oh…run over, that’s really sad.
How’s that project whose name I can’t remember with the things and stuff? And the weather?
BTW CAN YOU HELP ME BECAUSE I NEED SOMETHING?
I’m looking for new opportunities at the moment (Technical Product Management: check-out my Linked-In). I’m speaking to people in my network, including the sleeper-cells I’ve not spoken to in some time.
I’m trying to avoid emails like the ones above. People are busy: even before you open a message from someone you’ve not spoken to in years, the subtext is pretty obvious.
Sure I’ll genuinely say “Hope you are well” but anything else seems insincere.
Am I wrong to skip the dance, get to the point quickly and save everyone some time? Or am I being rude by not playing the game?
A committee of MPs has poured scorn on the UK Payment Council’s plans to phase out cheques. They’re also suggesting the re-introduction of the Cheque Guarantee card. Cheques are in decline, still one billion used a year, but 70% down on peak of their usage. I’ve not written a cheque in around four years. I receive two cheques a year for my birthday and christmas from my gran.
There’s clearly a demographic bias, but most people I know would rather transfer money directly, as it avoids a trip to the bank. Faster payments makes this even better (As I will learn when my bank finally gets around to letting me use the damn things).
I’d argue that in the removal of the cheque-guarantee card actually helps clarify risk: many times I’ve seen online “get them to write their card number on the back so they can’t bounce it”. That’s totally misleading, the guarantee is only valid when the card details were verified in person. On the BBC, a spokesman for the payment council set-out that less than 15% of cheques were guaranteed – so I don’t really think this is a major issue.
The payment council had previously stated that “a new paper based system was being explored”. This has drawn scorn of the form “You mean like a cheque then?”. Well no, because technology has moved on. Can’t we design a cheaper, sustainable system using something newer that meets those important use-cases of the elderly or other vulnerable groups?
Cheques have a centralised clearing centre, do we still need that? Why are we still posting cheques about the place? Why not have a QR-Code (sorry for the cliched inclusion) meaning that a cheque can be scanned and automatically routed to issuing bank for approval? (EDIT: you could of course use the existing magnetic ink characters for this)
I think that some kind of “send money to a phone number” tie up with faster-payments will be a killer for many of the situations. The plumber needs paying, you text him the money, his phone beeps, you all move on. Apps like Square show that it’s possible for sole-traders in the US to accept cards (albeit they don’t have Chip+PIN).
The committee report feels change & risk averse, they’re saying a legacy system should continue until it, or those who use it, die.
Just because you need to do roughly the same thing, doesn’t mean that you should stick with decisions made many decades ago – the world moves on.
As my former colleague and not-former friend Chris Young would ask: “what’s the value you’re trying to deliver?”
Storage units can be great to tide you over when you’re moving between flats, or if you’re going away on an extended trip, or you’re selling a house and want to declutter. But they are habit forming and become just another direct-debit that you’re paying for.
I’ve been paying for over 3 years for a room full of stuff I’m only just unpacking. I went away for a holiday (which was to be anything from three months to a year), was then living in ‘temporary’ accommodation (for 18 months), and finally was too busy at work… I don’t want to think about the total cost, or worse the total cost in relation to the value of stuff I’m actually keeping. In the hope of saving others, I present:
Take out the stuff in small batches, it’s less daunting, and means you can better sift/integrate/dispose of stuff rather than just putting it all on the shelves again. Take time to assess everything, and have another cull.
I love my AppleTV, it’s the easiest way I’ve got to get music playing on my TV, which is the way to get music through my stereo.
The only thing that could make this nicer would be if Apple more fully used some of the features of HDMI. While I’m not really a fan of HDMI, it does have some useful things in it.
My PS3 can trigger my TV to turn on, or to change input to display it through the use of HDMI’s Consumer Electronics Control1.
The AppleTV doesn’t send any signalling: meaning that every time I’m sat playing music from my Laptop or iPad, if my TV isn’t in the right state, I have to find the remote control (or even worse stand up from the sofa).
It’s minor. Totally minor. But when I get this gripe most days, and when I know the thing sat beside the Apple TV can do this, it’s annoying.
People notice big things that are wrong in products, and complain about them vocally – but small recurrent niggles also wear down consumer satisfaction. It’s the only thing I really don’t like about my Apple TV. I forgive it not playing non-iTunes content, and its lack of favourites on radio stations.
I know it’s unlikely, and I don’t even know if the hardware supports it, but it would be lovely if an option appeared in settings after an update “Change TV input when Apple TV starts”.
Pretty please Cupertino?
BT are being forced to block access to a piracy site.
This will no doubt use the BT Cleanfeed infrastructure used for the IWF. You either have something clever that proxies everything, or your redirect the blacklisted IPs to a filtering proxy. The former is expensive, the latter breaks wikipedia anonymous updates.
Anyway, I wrote about this point that the Aussie No Clean Feed were making made a while back. Given politicians and the judiciary a toolkit that can be applied generally, and they will.
This raises some depressing questions:
I’m sure none of us are really surprised, but it’s sad to be proven right.
James Cridland wrote about how broadcast was a potential way to distribute Lion, the new version of OS X. While digital broadcasting is compelling as a mass-distribution media, the logistics don’t stack up to my mind, and while tuners are getting quite cheap, the hassle of trying to get aerial signal to your computer is still there.
Multicast was briefly mentioned in the comments, this provides a much more realistic alternative, and is something that BT, the main ISP Wholesale provider, is implementing. This post covers ISPs that use BT to provide connections to their subscribers, the method most ADSL customers are provided by. Customers with Sky (who are Local-Loop Unbundled) or Virgin (who run a cable network) are on different network topologies.
What is multicast? Basic machine to machine communication is unicast. Broadcast allows one machine to ‘talk’ to all others. Multicast is somewhere between, where other machines can choose to listen to stream on the network, but without the “speaking” machine having to transmit at additional copy. It’s perfect for things like live Radio or TV viewing, where many hundreds of users are viewing/listening to the same thing.
Most ISPs don’t support multicast, so every download or action on the internet is a separate stream:
The ISPs that do support multicast have to split it before it goes to BT. The BBC multicast some content out as a trial, and the traffic looks something like this:
The ISPs save on their ‘transit’ bandwidth, but still have to inject a separate copy of the video for each person watching when it goes to BT. Transit costs are unfortunately the cheaper part of an ISP budget, which means that multicast doesn’t help ISPs that much at the moment.
BT are introducing multicast into their network, which means that the “splitting” of the multi-cast to uni-cast occurs much deeper in the BT network, which means the result looks something like:
Much more efficient, only one copy of Radio1 goes from the ISP to BT (and some older BT documentation implies this may even go directly to BT bypassing the ISP).
If you were to treat the 4 gig Lion update as a broadcast you could transmit it as a “carousel”, where it loops around. Run multiple carousels at different positions in the file and a client would join 1 or more streams based on the amount of bandwidth available, and how much of the file was downloaded
For efficiency, you might also want to offer streams at higher bit-rates so that a client could join fewer streams.
This traffic would need to be flagged as lower priority. TV multicast will be the opposite, and have Quality of Service to make sure video plays back smoothly, here though you would want the download to be dropped if other traffic was present. This will leave you with “holes” in the download.
The client could wait for the broadcast to “come around” on one of the streams and join that appropriately, or it could also make direct connections back to the CDN, or use Peer-to-peer networking, to “mop up” the specific bits of the download it had missed.
Would it make everything faster?
Yes, and no. It would definitely be more efficient, however the limiting factor will still be the copper at the end of the journey, between the exchange and the customer. However, by reducing the demand to both the CDNs, and the ISPs bandwidth, that last mile should be used more fully.
For things like downloads using CDNs that are embedded deeper in the network would be simpler for the client, and ease the load on ISPs. After the initial download “flurry” the multicast approaches efficiency reduces.
Two things make it more sense for video content like the BBC iPlayer: you have many people downloading content as it is being released, and you have a custom download manager in place.
Multicast will definitely happen for live-content. For other content it probably remains an interesting thought-experiment, unless the economics proved compelling enough. That is less likely since those impacted (the ISPs) are not those able to make the changes (Content Distributors).
