Category: Work

We stayed very late at the office last night, and we were very happy to get out of there today .. but the work never really stops.  When I got at San Francisco airport after driving the rental car there this afternoon, there were 20 new e-mails on my smartphone.   One simply said ‘Send KDD* slides’, from our project manager.  Yikes. This must be urgent, I thought. *KDD stands for key design decisions, that our proposed solution will be built on.

The file is large and I could not send it with my phone.  I had no luck using the airport’s wireless network either.  (For my second attempt I was at the TSA security station.  The notebook computer screen was open, and the agent closed it before I could stop him, killing the connection).  Aargh.  Right, I only had 5 more minutes before I had to board my flight.  Time to pull out the heavy artillery : my Verizon ‘Mi-Fi’ JetPack. It creates a secure personal hot spot (wireless connection).   Let’s go, let’s go .. why so slow? send it !  wait for the confirmation .. yes! made it.

Check out the waistband of the fancy pants I am wearing.  This is stitching on the inside of the pants, of course. (So is it OK to wear Wednesday pants on Monday?).  Stitching the day into the waistband is probably a marketing ploy to get me to buy seven pairs of pants – or at least five, one for each working day of the week.  I actually have four pairs of these pants already.  I like to wear the same types of pants every day to work.

I have written about an SAP ‘sandbox’ system before, here .. it is usually a copy of a company’s SAP system with some sample data.

I finally gained access to our current project’s SAP sandbox on Friday, and it was great to look around in a real system and to see how our client company has deployed the functionality.

It’s been awhile that I got my hands dirty in an SAP project! That was not the case in Denver.

 

Our project team members have all come on board.  I for one have joined the project ‘late’, towards the end of the design phase.  That means documents with specifications have to be written up and deadlines have to be met.   We’re working in a modern office building with all the necessary amenities, lunch rooms, meeting rooms, hotel cubicles and all, but the process to get us all our badges to move freely as we want is lagging somewhat.   ‘We’re all just prisoners here’ said someone, referring to the classic 1977 song from the Eagles, the Hotel California.

From the song :
Mirrors on the ceiling,
The pink champagne on ice
And she said ‘We are all just prisoners here, of our own device’
And in the master’s chambers,
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can’t kill the beast …

My team members and I here on the project had a busy two days.  This morning we were off to a rough start. We had to facilitate a workshop at 8.30 am, and we drove to the wrong location.  So at 8.10 am we had to go back into San Francisco traffic, and finally arrived at the correct location at 8.45 am.   By this time my colleague had her notebook computer logged in via a wireless device into Webex (software that shares one’s computer screen with other users that are logged in remotely, so you can show slides and have everyone discuss the content).  Right outside the car and right then was a guy trimming the hedge in the parking lot and making a lot of noise! (of course!).  Ok, hold on!  We’re coming in to the building, we said.   Once in the meeting room, we continued the discussion, now with real people to talk to.  (Still by far better than video or phone conference).   When it all was over, I realized I left the rental car unlocked with the key inside.  Yikes.  Will it still be there? .. luckily it was.  It was only 10 am in the morning but it felt like a full day to me already.

 

Here I go .. I’m off early in the morning to San Francisco to my new project at the gas utility company.  I don’t know what the work place will look like; I have only worked with one of my firm’s team members before, and with none of our client team. So : brave new world for me.

 

It’s my last week working in Denver on the SAP implementation project for the oil and gas company here.   The project only goes live at the end of the year, but I cannot stay.  I will start working soon on a different project, at a gas and electric utility company in California.

So this last week or so I have been handing over my responsibilities to consulting colleagues from a company called Nimbl.  Be nimble! is their tag line (naturally).  I would say ‘nimble’ is a word that is not used in everyday language.  And it reminds me of a guy called Jack*.

*From the nursery rhyme –

Jack be nimble
Jack be quick
Jack jump over
the candlestick.

[From Wikipedia] Jumping candlesticks was a form of fortune telling and a sport. Good luck was said to be signaled by clearing a candle without extinguishing the flame. A variation of this rhyme is featured in the classic song, ‘American Pie (1971)’, sung by Don McLean.   It goes as follows:

Jack be nimble,
Jack be quick
Jack Flash sat on a candlestick
‘Cause fire is the devil’s only friend.

It is a short work week for us in the United States with the upcoming Fourth of July holiday on Friday.  I added Thursday as a day off to my weekend, so by Wednesday night I was done with my work week.   Way to go!

The 800-lb gorilla company of business software (SAP) is hosting its annual ‘Sapphire’ conference this week, in Orlando Florida.  Since I have never been to one – even though I have made a career out of working with SAP – I try to read about the conference proceedings on-line, and hear from my colleagues that attended, what was said.

Well, everything is moving to the cloud*, and that includes the sprawling suites of business enterprise software that SAP has been so successful in selling worldwide to large companies since the 1990’s.   The challenge for SAP is that its marketing team has to assure its customers that they can move their SAP software to the cloud at their own pace, and that their concerns about security and system performance and availability will be addressed.

SAP CEO Bill McDermott noted that ‘The most intractable CEO issue of our time is complexity’ and that ‘At SAP, we see a dream for a simpler world, for a simpler SAP, and for a simpler customer experience’.    Also check out this recent front-page article from Bloomberg Businessweek that it calls The Trouble with IBM as it relates to the ‘cloud’.

*What is the ‘cloud’? Let me borrow some words from an on-line post from PC magazine here : In the simplest terms, cloud computing means storing and accessing data and programs over the Internet instead of your computer’s hard drive. The cloud is just a metaphor for the Internet. It goes back to the days of flowcharts and presentations that would represent the gigantic server-farm infrastructure of the Internet as nothing but a puffy, white cumulonimbus cloud, accepting connections and doling out information as it floats.

There is an entirely different “cloud” when it comes to business. Some businesses choose to implement Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), where the business subscribes to an application it accesses over the Internet. (Think Salesforce.com.) There’s also Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), where a business can create its own custom applications for use by all in the company. And don’t forget the mighty Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), where players like Amazon, Google, and Rackspace provide a backbone that can be “rented out” by other companies. (Think Netflix providing services to you because it’s a customer of the cloud-services at Amazon.)

I read this article in the New York Times with interest, since it mentions ‘accountants in the middle of their firm’s busy tax season’ and it also explained the success of the Costco wholesale store, which we I visited just this Saturday in Seattle.

From the New York Times article : The way we’re working isn’t working. Even if you’re lucky enough to have a job, you’re probably not very excited to get to the office in the morning, you don’t feel much appreciated while you’re there, you find it difficult to get your most important work accomplished, amid all the distractions, and you don’t believe that what you’re doing makes much of a difference anyway. By the time you get home, you’re pretty much running on empty, and yet still answering emails until you fall asleep.  Here’s the rest of the article in the New York Times ‘Why You Hate Work’

 

We had a team dinner tonight, and managed to steer clear of discussing work – for the most part.   We all have travel stories and consulting ‘war’ stories to tell.  We even retold – for those that did not hear it – one of the best ones, of the time one of our colleagues from Germany managed to clear everyone out of an entire Frankfurt Airport concourse in a classic cheese bomb incident.  (Here is a similar story I found on the website Mother Jones, where I borrowed the phrase from : cheese bomb incident).   He had bought a soft flavorful cheese in Russia, and at Frankfurt airport was questioned for the third time during his trip back about the suspicious substance in his carry-on luggage.  ‘Open your luggage’ please, said the security personnel.   Fed up, grumpy and probably feeling that’s he is German and should be trusted by his fellow citizens, he announced ‘Why should I? There is a bomb inside’.  Whoah.  Of course that triggered a major security alert, and everyone had to leave until the cheese was inspected properly.  (Cheese not only looks like plastic explosives, some cheeses have vapors similar to the signature vapors of explosives).   I don’t think our colleague spent time in a German jail, but he got in some serious trouble, alright.

It’s Monday and I was off to Denver early this morning.  No rest for the wicked, as the saying goes!

I read about ‘The Silicon Valley Conspiracy’ in Bloomberg Business Week on the airplane. Only thing is, it was for real.  Over the past several years, Google, Apple, Adobe and Intel conspired to use their vast wealth and warped sense of entitlement, says Businessweek, to suppress the salaries of their programmers and engineers. They basically agreed not to hire away each other’s employees.   The $324 million that the companies agreed to pay to settle a class-action law suit, amounts to 0.4% of their combined total revenue for the most recent quarter.   That ‘Don’t Be Evil’ slogan attributed to the Google of yore is starting to look awfully tarnished.

Another week done at the Denver project office.. it went by quickly.  I presented how we are going to test our solution at the end of April (Cycle 2, of four test cycles) to six different teams.  I had to prepare only ONE set of presentation materials, so that helped !

Wednesday was a tough day for me, and I was very glad to get out of the office.   We are pushing hard to get our methods and tools in place for the SAP ‘house’ (system) that we have to build next year.  Here and there a ‘window’ is still in the wrong place, and a ‘door’ may have to be moved (adjustments to the design).   We also have to finalize the reviews of the project plan.

We had project-wide design review meetings on Monday and Tuesday.  Everyone that made a ‘worthy’ contribution to the discussion got a star from the project manager (and so lots of team members got a star, and the one in the picture is mine). The star is a stellated heptahedron of sorts. A heptahedron is a polyhedron with seven faces and the ‘stellated’ means that pointy pyramids were added to the faces of the polyhedron.

Thursday was Halloween, of course – and we went for a full celebration here at work on the project.   Our floor was the minions from the Despicable Me movies from Universal Studios. We had a popcorn machine in a big meeting room going, and awarded prizes for ‘cutest costume’, ‘scariest costume’ and more. My team won the team competition.

(So the United States government has shut down at midnight last night, and ‘Obamacare’ is open for registration).

Here on the oil company project in Denver we are keeping our heads down and working away to complete the design phase of the project.  The PwC project manager came into my office today with two ‘new’ PwC members in tow, introducing them just by name.  After I greeted them, I asked :‘And what will you guys do on the project?’ not disrespectfully; but in a chummy kind of way.  Oh, said the project manager, Ryan is the quality assurance partner and Reed is the client partner for the project.  ‘Ah, very good’, I said, feeling a little awkward that I was so informal with them. Oh well – how was I to know, is that not right?

I was ‘Switzerland’ this week, and I do not mean I ate a lot of chocolate*!   No : I stayed neutral and did not involve myself in a battle.  I was needed in two places at the same time next week (Denver and Toronto).  So I stayed out of it and let the matter get resolved at a higher level.  The final resolution is that I will go to Denver until Wednesday, and then on to Toronto to help out there.

*The Swiss eats the most chocolate in the world per capita!

It’s cool and rainy here in the mile-high city.  I went for a quick walkabout here in the 16th Street Mall in downtown : a very nice mix of restaurants, bars and shops.   It was only Day 2 on my new gig, so I’m still learning a lot about what has happened on the project so far – and who my PwC colleagues are and who my client colleagues are.  It’s important to know! I can commiserate with my own firm’s colleagues, or ask them dumb questions .. but not so when I converse with the client team members !