Tag Archives: twitter

Continuous Integration vs Phased Deployment in a SaaS world

I was very interested to read some links that Naomi Bloom posted about how Workday have moved to a continuous integration deployment model rather than a phased release.

@SAP_Jarret @wombling This is a must read. In contrast, here's #workday on same subject http://t.co/NptCFjcywz and http://t.co/LzL879kQ9G

— Naomi Bloom (@InFullBloomUS) August 8, 2014

As developer, I love the idea of continuous integration, having a set of tests that can automatically check whether the code I have built will cause an issue in production and then allow me to move it up to prod immediately. It fits with TDD and all the other cool things I want to do. Awesome!

If I were writing code in the internal development teams of Workday or SuccessFactors, I’d want the software to be CI.

However! As a developer of extensions to one of those platforms, I couldn’t think of a worse option! If you look at the “disadvantages” section in the linked Wikipedia article on CI, you’ll notice that one very important thing is to have lots of good automatic test scripts. The problem is, a vendor can only possibly run their own test scripts, they can’t run mine. (Perhaps they could run mine if such an API was built, but could they justify not deploying to prod because a little used partner extension failed a script?) So what if some change that the vendor does breaks a behaviour in my code? Well, that’s bad for me. I’d better hurry up and fix it, because all my customers are now with broken code, and the first I found out about it – when it broke. And likely I’m not going to find out until I have one of my customers complain – unless I have proactively set my test scripts to run every hour and send me a message when something breaks, in which case I’d better be ready to do emergency support 24/7. Yeah, just what I want. NOT!

This would be a huge burden on a extension provider, you wouldn’t have a stable platform to build on.

With SuccessFactors being on a phased release rather than continuously integrated to production, it is much easier for me to join in with the testing of my solution before it hits the market. I know that my customers aren’t going to get a nasty shock because something suddenly breaks/changes behaviour, because I have a window to test that before it impacts them. I also know when that window is going to be, so I can plan around it and allocate my resources. Whilst the solution might be wonderfully cloudy and elastic, my skilled pool of extension developers is definitely less cloudy and more finite and fixed.

Now it might be possible to allow partners to have an early access box, and perhaps delay CI deploys to production by a week or so to allow partners to test their code. But that is one hell of an effort that you’re demanding of your partners to do that. And as one of those potential partners, I can say I’d be thinking very long and hard about the risk you as the vendor are putting me at, and probably would decide not to go there.

I think, that in a world where purchasing 3rd party add-ons for your cloud platform will become the norm (allow me my dreams please). And where the power of the platform is driven by these add-ons/apps, having a phased release makes sense. How cool would an iPhone be without any apps from the AppStore, how good would an S5 be without apps from Google Play? They are both great devices, but they are awesome when enhanced by external developer partners. These mobile solutions have phased releases. It’s not because they couldn’t have constant updates, the tech is easily there for that to happen, but because in order to sustain the applications/application developers that make them so cool they need to provide a stable platform.

I’m really glad that SuccessFactors provides a stable environment for me to build on, as I am convinced that HCM SaaS has a huge potential to be enhanced and extended to the better use and consumption of businesses. It’s a real strength of the solution, and I am very happy to be play a part this story, and that SAP and SuccessFactors are carefully considering the needs of the development partner in this scenario.

All that said, it would be cool to be developing in a continuous integration solution, but just not for the partners building on your solution.

Intangibles, appreciating your employees motivates, performance ratings processes don’t

Sorry, here I go again. I just read Steve Hunt’s post: http://www.tlnt.com/2014/08/04/performance-management-we-wont-fix-the-problem-by-ignoring-it/

Stop ignoring #performancemanagement! @steventhunt explains how to motivate employees with performance ratings http://t.co/Xe7FHSwVUP #HR

— SuccessFactors (@successfactors) August 5, 2014

And of course I’m all worked up. Why? Two reasons.

Firstly, I strongly disagree on the premise that performance management actually achieves improvements for the employees that are being “managed”. This is using Steve Hunt’s own definition of performance management:

Standardized and defined processes used to communicate job expectations to employees, evaluate employees against those expectations, and utilize these evaluations to guide talent management decisions related to compensation, staffing and development.

This has nothing to do with motivating and improving employees. It’s all about figuring out what is the smallest amount you can get away with paying your staff.

A process that can actually help employees improve is by working with them to find out their interests, find out what they want to do and shape their work around that. This isn’t the world of Gen-X and Boomers any more. People are far more interested in making work part of their life and life part of their work. Will they do that if there is a regimented process that is going to measure them against the cookie cutter mould? No, they won’t. Because no employee is exactly alike and no employer that wants to get the best out of their employees is going to manage that by trying to shape an employee to the employers expectation. We need instead to understand the great whole of the employee’s values and use that to motivate them. An employee that is doing what they feel is valuable and feels that the company supports them in this is far more likely to perform well than one that does not.

We have the tools (in a creepy big brother kinda way) to be able to analyse far more than just our employee’s achievement of our stated corporate goals, but also the interests, engagements, networks and influences of our employees. By better understanding our employees, and then aligning our business goals with their goals, we stand so much more chance of motivating and retaining talent.

Remunerate at the market rate for the skills that the employee possesses, if they gain more skills then pay more. Or if those skills have nothing to do with your business, don’t try and hold on to someone who would be happier elsewhere. Likewise, if the desires of the employee do not align with your corporate goals, don’t attempt to force the employee to comply, you are both better off without each other. Have the frank discussion that their desires and your goals don’t align at all. If their goal is to sit and eat chocolate and drink coffee all day and you don’t have a coffee and chocolate tasting role in your company, then it’s probably not going to work out. But it is good to know this – it’s time to move this employee on. Not because they don’t do what they are supposed to do, but because they have no desire to be doing it. Be frank, you can’t get rid of them if they are doing a reasonable job, but they will never be stellar unless _they_ want to do the work.

Now, I’m sure that this approach isn’t going to work in many, if not most, industries. If you have a load of jobs that people will only do if they are paid enough to suffer through, then this approach will not work. In this case fall back on Steve’s approach, just realise you’re very unlikely to develop or retain any talent.

However, if you are in an industry where people (or at least some of them) work because they love doing the work and are enthused about being the best, then I think my approach has some real advantages. Of course you will get and hire bad apples. This is where I believe performance management comes in. You now attempt to manage that person out of the company and ensure that you are not at legal risk by following a clear process. I’m sure there are risks in only performance managing those you’d rather have leave the company, but there are certainly rewards too.

And now to my second point of why I’m unhappy with this article. It was written by someone with the job title Senior Vice President of Customer Value at SuccessFactors/SAP Cloud HCM.

If this is what SuccessFactors believes will drive more customer value, then I’m very worried that innovative and alternative approaches to making talent management work are not likely to get a great reception.

I strongly agree with Steve that we need to find out and measure how well our people are doing, but that does not need to be against a defined set of company goals, but against an slightly less well defined set of individual personal goals that the company can hopefully align with and benefit from. I believe that the next step for talent management solutions like SuccessFactors is to help employers with the analysis of who their employees are and what they want. Then use that information to help align both the business’s needs and the employee’s desires. It’s a huge technical challenge but we have to start somewhere. By at least acknowledging that there might be better ways of doing things rather than just dismissing them, we’d be making a first step in the right direction.

Companies that start to embrace the holistic view of the employee rather than the company centric one will, I believe, start to reap the rewards.

I could well be just dreaming, but at least I’ll be dreaming with some of the most motivated and enthusiastic people around who are all trying to achieve their goals in my company.

Should you be a manager?

A response to “Talent cannot be managed” by Vijay Vijayasankar.

I read Vijay’s excellent post http://andvijaysays.com/2013/08/29/talent-cannot-be-managed/ about how talent should be lead and not managed.

It seems to have had a stratospheric response, with lots of people loving it. I had to pause for a moment and wonder why.

My first thoughts – involve a little set logic

Of all the people that are out there in the world, there are PLENTY that are unmanageable. (n.b. I do realise I spelt that wrong in whiteboard sketch, some reason there isn’t a spell check on whiteboards (now that’s a cool idea for a future demojam)). There are also plenty that out there that desire leadership more than they like being managed. Of that group there is a small subgroup that are “talent”. I’ve drawn a bigger overlap with “desire leadership over management” for talent as I agree more with this, but the overlaps aren’t really supposed to indicate % of overlap, more that there is some.

Vijay defines some other things about “Talent”: Loyalty, requirement for trust, lack of scalability, need for direction, these are all other things I could have drawn on the diagram. In all cases, there would be an overlap with the other areas (although not being very good and drawing n-dimensional diagrams on a whiteboard I didn’t attempt it.)

The point I’d make is although Vijay states (and I’d tend to agree) that talent possess these attributes, these attributes do not define who is a “talent”.

However, I’m pretty sure that anyone that read the article would be able to identify with two or more of those attributes. Unless the reader had particularly great self awareness, then the “logical” jump is “if I have these attributes, I must be a talent”. Result – instant warm fuzzy feeling. Next result – share warm fuzzy feeling with as many other people as possible. Result, lots of reposting.

Ok, I’m being a little 😉 cynical here, but I don’t think I completely off. Vijay has written a lot of other articles that have been just as good, and many of them have been less subjective. But perhaps haven’t addresses such emotional areas. This article has had a huge response and I think in part (and compared to his other excellent blogs) it’s because of the group identity emotional response trigger that it pulls.

I’m waiting for his next blog “Actually, you’re not a talent” and see if that gets the same response 😉

But that wasn’t the post title – it was “Should you be a manager?”

When I read Vijay’s post it did trigger some thoughts though, primarily, if someone were to identify with these points and consider themselves a “talent” should they really be in the manager role? Now, in most companies in the world, it’s impossible to rise to the top unless you take on some people management skills. But should we, could we, reasonably expect a “talent” that by Vijay’s definitions, “doesn’t mix with non-talent” to effectively manage a team of anyone other than “talent”? Given how rare “talent” is to find, could we even expect such a team to ever exist?

Do we need to think about special training for our “talent” to make then a little more accepting? Or do we risk taking them out of that talent space if we start burdening them with management responsibilities? Or perhaps there are special “talents” that exist who’s talent is people management? What does it say about the career progression and potential of talent if we can’t make them people managers?

One of the comments that I made on reading the post was:

"@vijayasankarv: Talent cannot be managed http://t.co/MOHlBdvlDA" < leadership distinctly different from management. A great post.

— Chris Paine (@wombling) August 30, 2013

Management is distinct from leadership – Talent leads, that is clear, but can/should it manage? That’s my question back to you Vijay 🙂

Thanks for such a great post.

Influence this you <removed>

Walking on a tightrope with the birds

Recently I passed the completely arbitrary mark of 1000 twitter followers. Yeah! Woohoo! Well done me! (Please note points with exclamation mark are meant to be dripping with sarcasm.)

And around the same time, I unfollowed – shock horror – two folks I had been following for quite some time. Now, I know I’m not the social media guru who can use twitter perfectly with lots of lists, following back people and then analysing where the links in my post have been successful and all that bs. But, I stopped to think about what I was doing, why I was doing it, and whether the same could/should be done to me by the wonderful bunch of ~~idiots~~ people that follow my twitter handle.

Unfollow 1 – Where is my personal space?

The first person I unfollowed, is great at sharing interesting content, and has some really useful things to say about some stuff that I’m interested in. However, they also have a LOT to say about politics. It might even be a political view that I agree with and sometimes I’ve had fun following some of those links. However, sometimes it went beyond fun and started getting nasty. Now, I strongly support people’s right to have a political viewpoint (I have one) however, if I’m going to include you in my feed of people that I want to listen to, please don’t make me uncomfortable by going all extreme on me, regularly.

Unfollow 2 – Wake me up to smell the coffee!

The second person I unfollowed was the polar opposite. They tweeted some interesting stuff occasionally. But generally their sharing of info was following the company line so intently that I never had the view that the stuff they were sharing was more than their company’s carefully edited press releases. I decided that in balance, press releases disguised as personal viewpoints was just a bit too boring, and I didn’t really want them in my timeline.

Walking a tightrope

Clearly, being too extreme is bad, but being too timid, is just as bad. So where one earth does one go? And this is the tightrope I guess that we walk. I’m certainly not pretending to know the answer and if one analyses the question it’s clear I’ve made some perhaps unsupportable assumptions. Is it really that bad if your audience is tightly aligned your viewpoints? If you’re gaining kudos in the eyes of your employer, is that a bad thing?

From my POV

I think in the end, the tightrope you walk is the one of your own making. It’s the choices that you make to go in the direction you want to go and associate with the people that you want to associate with. So for me, that means being slightly (but hopefully not offensively) irreverent, and keeping a T-shaped focus on the stuff I share. What it also means to me is that some things that I do care quite deeply about, for example climate change and the way that our generation is screwing the planet for my kids, I’m probably a LOT quieter about that I sometimes wish I was. Self censoring is a pain in the butt, however, it might just get me along the tightrope I want to walk. Just grab me after a few beers, and then I’ll tell you what I really think. 🙂

Keeping it real

Anti-Social social media

As many of you who might read this know, I like social media. I spend a reasonable amount of my spare time following and trying to keep up with the information that is available about SAP, cloud and HCM topics. Many of these social media discussions (a majority I’d suggest) take place over twitter. Now recently I’ve found a few tweets that have really got me irritated. But before I explain what got my back up, it’s probably worth pointing out that there is a simple option for me, and it’s put the phone/tablet down and walk away. This really isn’t that serious! Secondly, don’t ask me to name names, I won’t and I don’t think it’s helpful anyway, and I’ll get to why not later.

What’s wrong?

I’ve seen two types of behaviour that I’ve disliked. Firstly has been where people have been using social media as a tool to strike up a conversation. But rather than continuing with the conversation, just make a couple of snide remarks and tried to spark up a fire. In some cases these have been extreme storm in the teapot scenarios, where some information misunderstood, or not at all researched or understood has been used to derive wild scenarios that are great link-bait but do not actually help drive the conversation forward. Conversations are two-sided, if you refuse to engage in a manner that engenders discussion then you don’t have a conversation, you have a battle. In battles the only people that win are the arms manufacturers.

The second type of behaviour is where people represent themselves as “individuals” but start broadcasting what can only be described as advertisements for the products that the company that they work for sells. Now this is a fine line as you’d expect people to be interested in and excited about the products that they company that they work for sells. But when it is done across a whole group of employees and sometimes with a common message/format then it really starts to smell bad. Even worse when people start tweeting info and then add link to some sales website or their company twitter handle when the content of the tweet isn’t about that! It’s like they are branding their tweets! But when they then refuse to engage on the marketing type tweets to clarify details (possibly because some of the marketing bs is actual bs?) it gets really irritating.

The problem.

Well my real issue is that the response I want to give the tweets of the second type would just make me an asinine tweeter of the first type. Keeping it real and respecting myself involves not walking either of these two paths. And that’s tricky. Not to mention frustrating! This is why I don’t what to name, it’s just behaving like a spoilt brat and isn’t doing anyone any favours. Don’t be evil!

My solution – not “the” solution

I believe that I shouldn’t take myself too seriously, it’s one of the reasons I still keep the ridiculous twitter image that I have whilst pretty much all those that I engage with have sensible portraits. To remind myself not to think overly of my skills, abilities or influence, as I’m just a silly looking guy who’s biggest achievement was becoming a father. Remembering what is important and valuable to me then drives my behaviour. Yes I’ll post this up to vent a little, but the anti-social social media that winds me up, hopefully you won’t see that coming from this direction. 🙂

Seriously, don’t take yourself too seriously. Photo was taken at my son’s 1st birthday party.

Elasticity

or or

(Hooke’s Law for expressing elasticity of an object in various degrees of complexity)

The equations above get pretty complex pretty quickly! And that’s when we deal with equations that have been known about for hundreds of years. When we start using elasticity to describe cloud computing, it gets even worse.

The topic was brought up the other day when I was looking at purchasing some space on the SAP HANA Cloud to run an application that we’re developing in-house. I was checking the price for this.

http://scn.sap.com/thread/3350483

I got quite confused.

Then the conversation moved to twitter and we started discussing not just the price of going to the cloud but also how it should be priced. And then even onto how it could be made multi-tenant (which is a bit beyond the scope of this post, but it was interesting nevertheless.

I think the conversation is worth preserving so I’ve made a copy of it with a little help from Aaron’s Twitter Viewer and a lot of cutting and pasting so I could do without the CSS (if anyone knows how to add custom CSS to a single WordPress post, I’d be interested.)

Have a read, it’s not a bad collection of thoughts, and interjections (by the one and only Dennis H) and I’ll recap on my thoughts at the end:

wombling
Chris Paine
Feeling slightly confused by SAPStore pricing for #saphanacloud if you understand it pls help me scn.sap.com/thread/3350483

2 days ago
1 retweets
#

rhirsch
Dick Hirsch
@wombling compare price to other #saphanacloud packages in #sapstore – all have similar structure