Innovative Solutions To A Persistent Problem In IT

Me and my gato Minou tired on Sunday.

The problem: Consultant ramp up and learning curve.

Regardless of how great of a company I was assigned to, no client one but one had a library worth checking out, easy to find, or both.

I have spent 26 years consulting in IT for every aspect of Database programming, ETL, and reporting in SQL Server, Oracle PL/SQL and MS Access for 30 clients and no one was truly prepared for new consultants. There was always three days to two weeks of confusion trying to find the data experts, the white papers, or both.

Companies are literally spending or in this case wasting $500-$2000 to get the consultant started on the learning curve and once there another $1000 for him or her to understand the random pages on some host server like SharePoint or similar product or file cabinet.

The century of documents that were once in file folders were at least where you could get at them quickly but the menagerie on Sharepoint is most times equivalent to having one closet where you just toss manuscripts, books, and assorted printed data and close the door.

The advent of machine and computer systems from IBM, Honeywell, Digital, Wang, Hyundai, NCR, and others had one shining selling point in common. Large wire bound manuals that laid flat on your desk and told you everything about your product. These were the shining examples of libraries that were 100% useful. When you built programs with these systems you followed the same guidelines so your program had as useful a manual as the system you built it on.

From working at Seabrook nuclear power plant, I know the guideline was one day of programming for every 2 days of documentation. NASA is the same way. They leave little room for error and it never takes anyone much ramp up time to be productive.

In huge corporations that are not splitting atoms or launching rockets, standards have gone to pot. Managers and PM’s say they do not have time to set things up properly so I go into companies trying to find information about the database, tables, functions, procedures, and ETL workflow and sometimes struggle to put together the whole puzzle left behind by the last consultant in order to begin working properly.

It does your business no good to ask for a consultant who can hit the ground running if you present a muddy dog track.

The solution(s):

1. Design your library so the books can be found and used.
2. You are designing an IT library like you would a department store. Without a place to put everything in and enough space to guide customers and employees to where everything is held will cause pile ups and confusion.
3. If I walk into a department store there are large signs to guide me to tires without me having to traverse the whole store.
4. The large sign for tires is the shelf it’s located on.
5. Once in the tire department, I can easily find the tires, tubes, and repair kits available.
6. This would be the category of tire items or books.
7. Once I find the items I want in the tire department, I can easily read how each one works and warn me what not to do.
8. These items are the books.
9. A service department may service your tire department but it also serves batteries and oil changes. Do not reinvent the wheel. Design the service department and have it listed with tires but it is just a link to the service dept and the categories of items it serves and the book on each item

Introduce a simple system that enforces standards in tech writing, coding, and database dictionaries. These are the, what is necessary information in each project as opposed to, this is how I want it done.

1. What project specifications must include.
2. What are the test questions this solution must pass?
3. What technical specs must entail.
4. Management and customer interviews.
5. Guidelines on database object documentation
6. This means every single database object ties to a reason why it was built.
7. This cross reference can be a link or worded within the object.
8. Every object has a section in a book that tells what this table is about and the script that creates it before it becomes an object in the DBMS.

Remember, you hired professionals, expect the best written and verbal communications for the money and don’t feel bad if you have to tell them to do it again. Too much money and time is spent on just the coding aspect and not on the library and thus millions are wasted each year on missed communications and ramp up time.

A proper library allows you to sell your book to others, verify its legitimacy in court cases, and prepare your management for mergers and acquisitions. That is where your star as a manager shines or dulls. The consultants come and go. You can call one up later and yell at them before they hang up but if your expectations were nothing more than get it to work, your career will end up the same way.