Glad to see that Dare's back to blogging regularly again. Even though his blog doesn't cover anything specifically on antimalware or security, his direct tone has been very enjoyable by me.

One of his first posts after his hiatus really highlight the key issues that I've seen as a challenge to my service's quality.

Fundamentally, the development and project management model that were placed on my service had a number of flawed assumptions, which resulted in the series of constant issues.

Firstly, as Dare has mentioned as well, was the fact that there is (and was) a misalignment of goals from the various teams. Regardless of whether the various sub-teams were reporting to the same executive or not, it doesn't remove the fact that my team and myself is focused on one single goal: quality of service in terms of antimalware scanning coverage.

Some teams that utilize the service have other goals; one specifically to do with processing time. We want higher level of coverage; they want increasingly shorter processing time. Now isn't this a major disparity right here?

What are the chances that we can get the features and coverage that we need?

Since most of the upgrades were treated as projects, one can't miss the fact that project members have project goals that implicitly meant if a project complete, they met their goals. Nothing to do with what the service is actually capable of sustaining or improving its coverage or not.

When the majority of the project members want to focus on just completing the project, a single voice of sanity meant one will be treated as someone that is not willing to collaborate, and might be slighted or even disassociated from the project or the service as a result.

Dare's second point was about the undisclosed concerns (read his post for more details!). Indeed, risk mitigation isn't something that any project members would want to bring up as an work effort to look into. This becomes even more of a problem when one team continuously is unable to provide results of quality; or completed on time.

What can be done about this? I always wonder about it. And then something lit in Amsterdam and it hit me... (i'm sure there wasn't any weed influence at all in Amsterdam).

Acknowledge: that something needs to be done, because status quo is not going to be good for any teams or any service. By putting your head in the sand and think that the issues will go away is the worst possible thing one can do. As something perhaps Dr. Phil might say, acknowledge that the model is flawed is the first step.

Listen: Spend time to listen to the folks that really want a quality service. No more brown-noses to cloud your thinking. If you do not want to listen, no one will tell you anything that needs to be worked on anymore.

Talk: Get the team members worked up with a plan and a roadmap. Every single step towards a better future will energize the teams and create a common goal for everyone. That increases the morale and refocuses everyone's efforts. Talk about your strategies, and your limitations. We can work better if we know what your constraints are. Without that, we will assume that there's some other agenda clouding your decision.

Act: Quickly. Any faults along the way must be fixed with immediate speed. Again, the same old soft-landing approach for folks is no longer working. No more soft landing for anyone. Streamline the cohort of distractions that are creating churn for everyone. Redefine communication channels with the goal of speed of communications. Make it specific and clear cut that issues need to be looked at by the ones that matter, rather than a committee or a bunch of committee that manage-by-agreement. That's almost like trying to get an elephant that was described by three blind men. You can't.

Hmm.. i wonder what else...

I've been reading and enjoying quite a lot of James' blog posts, and a recent theme that he has been bringing up was the fact that companies are using process as a substitute for competence.

It has been quite a sore point of internal discussions for me. Adding this to the idea that documentation catered to the lowest common denominator means that each and every process that were researched for years, which require experience and skills to follow, could suddenly be applied to any Tom, Dick or Harry that they can pick off the street.

That is a dream state, based on flawed foundations. Why would a competent team want to hire any one that they can get off the street? That's not a realistic approach at all.

To divert resources to aim for something that is inherently wrong makes the decision and the process even worse. A cynical point of view is that the business consultants are just creating justification for them to do more of these kind of projects, and to increase their revenue stream.

Just did a survey on the Pokemon's website for their two new DS games, and was pleasantly surprised that it was pretty accurate!

 

That's about right... i think... great for a start.

Wow... great insight indeed!

Hmm... does it know things that i didn't know?

Meowth? Gooooollly!

You gotta check this trailer of a japanese game now!

It's a combination of all the things i like:
- cartoons
- DS
- football
- and a blatant copying of Stephen Chow's Shaolin Soccer

In fact... the ending of the trailer looks EXACTLY like... how the final match in Shaolin Soccer ended.

My team and I have been going through a few rounds of documentation efforts. You might ask why are we doing multiple rounds? I really don't know why, but every single effort get "completed", dumped on a share that no one really knows where, and the documentation expert, typically a vendor, moved on from this project, and we're back to square one after a few months.

One of the things that I've been constantly fighting a battle with my former manager was the fact that a lot of the things that i'm doing is hard to document down. It's also something that he, and other folks, have labeled as "tribal knowledge".

On one hand, i understand the need to have some baseline of knowledge; on the other hand, it is a challenge to provide an almost infinite amount of variables in a system that doesn't necessarily reproduce the same issues every time you try to do so. So what happens is that I'll offer to show people how i think, in the mind set that you train others to fish, and not just hook a single kind of fish.

I often say..."I'll show you... you go document it."; and one one ever took up that offer. I always wonder why folks just do not want to see it to believe it.

There's no way this monkey in Japan could have been reading up documentation before he start serving customers in the restaurant.

Documentation doesn't mean nothing if one doesn't understand!

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” - Gandhi

Now that I just have a few more additions to my team, i thought that a look back was due.

Well, the infamous decision made almost three years ago now. Let me just recall how things have gone since then.

First and foremost, i decided that day that the decision makers no longer deserve my acknowledgement anymore. None. Anyone and any group that was linked to that eventual decision is on my ban-list.

But let's get back to the period prior to the fateful day. Back.. Way back. A project that was supposed to be the build-out the fundamentals of the service. It gave me an insight into how things do not work.

With prior experience on the flawed project with practically the same team, Yeah.. my concerns were repeatedly ignored throughout the second project. I was told that it was "good enough", "this is not Office 2003", "get it over with", "will not happen".

Well, if i get a thousand dollars every time one of my concerns become reality, i could be Bill's neighbor by now. Haha.

So who would have known that this model was flawed? Well, almost everyone did. But did they do anything about that knowledge? No. It was not the lack of knowledge, nor intelligence, but the lack of courage by some folks to act in a manner that's required on what they knew. It wasn't ... that failed. Most of the establishment went along with the facade, and even promoted the facade to the rest of the company, and celebrated repeatedly of its success.

Since then, the service have never recovered from the lapse of judgement. Never had a chance at all.

Now that we have a all hell broken loose situation, and eyes and brains and heart are now all staring at the source of the problems, there appears to be a spout of armchair critics that are now saying things like "why didn't you do this...?", "why was this done in this manner?"..

Well, if i get a thousand dollars every time one of these "insightful" questions can be auto-replied with one of my concerns made years ago, i might even be richer than Bill. Haha.

So how did I get it right all along when the higher ups did not? It's not because I have better information; It's also not even because I was smarter.

I just decided to say what I knew to be true. No matter how much my statements had made me suffer in the next two years. No retaliation policy, i seriously wonder about that at times. Even with hindsight, i would have still made the same statements and raised the same concerns. Personally, i rather be right than be part of the cohort.

With the expedited changes recently, there are hopes from the team that things will be better. Perhaps for the new members. Quoting someone... i am too "poisoned". I wonder what will be required to remedy this situation.

Something that i thought was bound to happen has happened. Why this again wasn't considered as part of the decision was a surprise.

Well, maybe not.

In football games (soccer to my US readers), if a referee decided that you've made some misconduct, you might either get a yellow card, or worse, a red card.

I remembered Roy Keane being one of those that were always on a short fuse.

At times, the referee will make the decision based on the notoriety of the player. He would send off the player rather than risking the scenario of retaliation from the player, and risking injuries to other players.

Now, in this case that i'm talking about, i wonder what will happen.

A topic that came about in after my trip back was the supposedly "bad behavior" by some folks. The implicit labeling of bad was done by folks that, either through inaction, or a lack of strength, to object such behavior through the years.

It's the same as handling kids, or gorillas. If they do something wrong, you have three options. You either punish them, or reward them, or do nothing. If the behavior annoy you when it first occur, you better make sure you punish them. Because, just like the legal system, if there's a precedent, it will be applied throughout without much thinking, because it .. "just is because it just is!". Somewhat of a circular justification indeed.

When some gorilla throws away the banana skin on the floor, and instead of punishing it, you actually celebrate the event. That means you are also implicitly performing the same behavior as well.

The worst possible outcome is that you will be held accountable for the gorilla's behavior. Isn't that bad? Why?

Just catching up on my personal mails and saw an donation appeal from one of my high school buddies.

He and his fellow volunteers are trying to raise funds for primary school students in North-East Thailand.

Instead of paraphrasing his mail, i'm going to post snippets here:

------------------------

We are trying to get some donation for some primary school students in North East Thailand, Si Saket. Please assist?

In the beginning, we actually wanted to buy 1 school bag and 1 set of text books for the under-privilege students.

We have talk and discuss with the teachers and Principals teaching in a few primary schools, they agree to assist us to identify who are the needy students. 

However, they comment that it will be a uphill task to provide textbooks as each schools uses different textbooks and each level (Primary 1 or 2 etc) uses different textbooks too. There will be many administrative work. Further, ours is not a on-going process, meaning, it may be a onetime donation  drive, try to make it simple.

We agree with them because we dare not commit that we will sponsor text books and school bags for next year (2009). We hope that we are able to sponsor next year, but subject to manpower issues, as all of us are volunteer, no allowance paid to us!

Hence, they recommend that we will buy school bag, stationery, and dictionary  for each student (preferably two types of dictionary: Thai language dictionary and Thai-English, English-Thai dictionary if there is enough money. This is because Thai-English, English-Thai dictionary is very expensive). The dictionary will allow them to use all the way to junior college. Money is more well spend.

If any of you are interested, please email me.

------------------------

Yeah.. if there's anyone interested, please contact me and i'll forward his email address to you.

Saw this off ziggy-boy's corner, a malay boy with the world's strongest name ever!

And yeah.. we're back from Amsterdam, and day trip to Belgium too.

From work and from blogs.

Sharon and I are going to Amsterdam for a holiday (for her) and some workshops (for me).

Be back reinvigorated to start a fresh new series of blogs that i've been drafting for the last two weeks, based on events that occurred here.

See ya!

Not really ours, but you get the idea.

My niece's three babies are growing so quickly these days. It's always fun to do video conferencing with them; they have gotten so used to the video cameras that they no longer look shocked or surprised when we appear on screen.

In fact my niece said that when we finished our video conferences, the babies will sometimes point to the monitor and indicate, in their baby language, that they want to continue seeing us. 8)

As we go about doing our regular grocery shopping and activities, we have started noticing long-running neighborhood stores closing one after another.

My fave BBQ place is gone, as i've mentioned before. Luckily, a new BBQ vendor is taking over its place.

One unique thing that we've noticed here in the area is that, particularly for restaurants, these stores do not really have (or need) too much traffic to survive. Other than the usual peak hours for lunch, and that's if they are good/lucky, restaurants more often than not get rather small customer base.

A 3-generation family-ran furniture store that's nearby to our place has closed too. A cinema chain closed its doors in the town center mall. And a record breaking opening and closing of a "Uniquely Australian" store in the same mall. That was probably a wrong business decision, trying to sell aussie goods in a american city.

Almost as bad as placing a highly critical security-focused service in a operational focus group.

When you're working in a company as big as the one i'm in, you'll experience a lot of reorganization of the group's structure. It's so common that it's been said that you should never ever burn bridges (especially so here) because you'll never know who your next manager is going to be.

I just had one (reorg, as we call it internally) announced a few days ago.

Andrew and I are going to report back to a manager that used to manage us. Obviously Ian will be part of this new team too. In fact, John was the hiring manager for Andrew; so it's really back to square one. Funny how things work out.

As i'm writing this, i remembered i did a post when we first reported to John, and here it is, made a few years ago (wow!) that i mentioned both Andrew and I gave him good feedback. Let's hope that it'll be as good an experience as what we had the first time round.

And perhaps i might do a refresher of the "Bosses Review" post soon.. hehe.. Since that post in Nov 2004, we had two more managers before going back to him. If you think that's a lot, you should hear about me listing out my project managers since Nov 2004!

Nah.. i'm not that crazy about it. The one in the middle, in metallic black/white, is mine, while the other two are for my friend's son and son's friend i guess.

Bought the guide book for them too as i get 30% discount off the listed price for it.

Myself.. i'm at the final boss now. Almost sad (and apparently most players will be) to see the ending.

Some acquaintances of mine have been telling me how good the resell market has been in Singapore, and how the en-bloc fever is blanketing the nation. This was particularly when i was back in January, where friends of friends all echo the same sentiments.

Just like the mid-90s property boom, my "minute" level of understanding is that:

• yes, you can earn a lot from selling your current property
• but you're going to spend most of the income from the initial sale for your purchase of your next flat

As some folks might say, net-net same amount, or whatever goes into left pocket goes out of the right pocket immediately.

Just read a blog post here and it described how a reader's pain and challenges in going through such an experience of en-blocing, if you can even call it a word. Ouch!

[via The Singapore Daily]

I am such a goofy person. At work, I cannot stop laughing and speaking loudly, and yes, I am contributing to the noise pollution. But hey, I always tell my co-workers to file a complain against me. But they never did. I suppose they like having me around to 'entertain' them.

I like my job, co-workers (as long as they are not long winded and domineering) and boss. My boss does not micro manage me. As long as I produce quality work and there is no complain from anyone, I am fine :)

In my role, I am in constant contact with GMs, Directors and Business Managers. I learn to be careful in writing emails and speaking to them. I suppose most people will do the same. You don't want a senior manager to think that you are an idiot. Communication is about making sure your recipients understand the message. Understanding the message does not mean that they agree with you. That's fine. Agreeing on a topic a different matter.

In Jon's earlier blog, you read that he and I attended Dr Stephen Covey's presentation. We know who he is and we are not his groupie/fans. He is nice person, agreeing to shake hands, signed autographs and take photos with the attendees. I suppose if you want to be an inspiring or motivational speaker, you need to know people, engage them and make sure your personality appeals to them.

Here are some of the valuable takeaways from his presentation:

1. Leadership is not about control, it is about inspiring your team members
2. What is important is not urgent. What is urgent is not important
3. Listen emphatically. Do not be in a rush to interrupt or judge. Let the person finishes what's on his/her mind. Pause for a minute and reply to the question/give comments. When you listen with empathy, the person feels great, his/her heart is open to options and is more willing to accept your suggestions

Sometimes, what works in theory does not work in reality. But you need to keep trying. I am trying out all that are indicated above.

I remembered that i read this on his blog a long time ago, and the thing i think i remembered mostly was his haircut on the first photo.

After much research (and rediscovered his post on it), i got myself the Koss Portapro. The quality of the sound ratio against the price is so amazing. I tried many of my higher-end Sennheiser headphones i have through the years and this can easily match against them. Wow!

I now goes to work, and walk around the campus with this geeky headset, but hey.. when the quality of the sound is that great, i don't mind (uneducated) folks from staring. Some folks that do know about the quality of this gave nods knowingly.

A new colleague said it looks like something from Transformers! *faint*

We touched down at Sea-Tac airport on 04/04/04. I guess we should have picked a more auspicious date instead of this (for the non-chinese folks, 4 sounds like death... and this date is death^3!).

Sharon and i both remembered what we did on that day. With high hopes and a dash of bravery, we stepped out of the airport and got to our temporary apartment that the company had provided for us.

After some short time to take a quick jet-lag nap, we took the bus to the Bellevue Square shopping mall, and had our first meal in Red Robin.

And guess what we did to celebrate our 4th anniversary from the 04/04/04 date? We went to another Red Robin, though it seems that their standard had dropped a lot in the years in between.

How time really flies.. whether you're having fun or not, it just moves on.