Voice of the DBA

Tag: business

  • The Value of Your Time

    Today’s editorial was originally published on Feb18, 2009. It is being re-published as Steve is on vacation.

    I was talking with a friend the other day that’s in sales and he was working with a client on some new software upgrade. This is a long term relationship and my friend manages the client’s use of his company’s products, which are custom software programs. There was a mismatch of expectations in the presentation of a new product and the client wanted my friend on site for a day right away. So my friend sat around for a few hours waiting for approval to book travel and fly across the country for a two day trip to the client’s site. Since this was a trip being made with less than seven days notice, the CEO had to approve the travel.

    The CEO of a 3,000+ person company had to approve a $1,500-2,000 trip for a sale worth tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

    Now I might be exaggerating a bit how silly this seems because who knows how many trips get asked for each week. And having a policy around travel is sensible since people might abuse the company a bit in trips. But should the CEO be doing this? How much time and money is wasted by having the CEO look at these? Either he spends time on them, which is an incredibly wasteful use of time for someone that should be strategically thinking about running the business at a macro, not micro, level. Or he rubber stamps them, in which case he’s trusting his subordinates to do their due diligence. In which case he shouldn’t rubber stamp the approval; let the subordinates handle the decision making.

    As a DBA, I’ve always been relatively well paid in most companies. Not $365k a year well paid, but making more money than a good portion of the IT staff. And I’ve always recognized that there are things I could do that waste the company’s money, and my time, if I’m doing them. You wouldn’t want me to take a part printers to figure out why paper is jamming any more than you’d want me to empty the trash cans every night as part of my daily work. You want me tuning SQL Servers, testing upgrades, writing code and more. That’s not to say I can’t refill a printer with paper, make coffee, or help someone solve a permissions problem, but it shouldn’t be something I do on a regular basis.

    Each of us provides value to our companies, and while we should be willing to pitch in and help with most any job, we also should recognize that we are most efficient if we do those things that are the best use of our time.

    Trust your people to do their jobs, and deal with things later if they don’t, but trust them up front.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    Everyday Jones

    The podcast feeds are now available atsqlservercentral.mevio.comto get better bandwidth and maybe a little more exposure :). Comments are definitely appreciated and wanted, and you can get feeds from there.

    Overall RSS Feed:  or now on iTunes! 

    Today’s podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • Interesting Culture

    A post from Alex Maccaw, programmer at Stripe. He talks about some things he likes about the company, and overall I think there are good ideas in here. In fact, a number of them remind me of my time at IQDestination (my thoughts), and some remind me of things that I think the Investment Advisory Network failed to do.

    I don’t agree with everything, and I think the cc to email lists, while a good tracking tool, can get people to drop into the rabbit hole and get lost. If you have good people, you trust them not to do that, but it will happen sometimes.

    I really like a couple things.

    1. The dream machine.

    2. Paper reading

    I think the first welcomes the employee into the company and gets them highly motivated and appreciative from the start. The second is a good way to build the habit of learning.

  • Creativity

    down tools suggestions
    How many ideas would your group come up with in a month of creative thought?

    At Red Gate we have “Down Tools Week” a few times a year. This is the same idea as the ShipIt days at Atlassian or the 20% time at Google; it’s a chance for employees to have free reign to work on some project, approved as being semi-business related, with the chance to present their work to the company at the end. I think it’s a really cool idea, though I’ve yet to come up with an idea that I’d want to take a week off to work on.

    When I look at companies and think about the time spent on various projects and efforts, I think much of it is useful, but I’m not sure it’s critical. All too often we get caught up in the idea that getting project X done or finishing a piece of software will make or break a company. The reality is while the item might be important, most of the time it will be later than scheduled, and the company will survive. I’m sure there are exceptions, but they’re rare. Most of the time things run late, which makes me question whether or not managers should be pressing so hard to get every project finished on time.

    What if you shelved all work from your developers (or markers, business analysts, etc.) for a month? What if you let them think about what they could do to make the company better, or improve operations, or maybe just find a way to make their job easier?  Would they innovate or just waste time? 37 Signals did just that, taking the month of June off to let people that weren’t running day to day operations work on whatever they wanted. They got a lot of ideas, some of which they are going to implement.

    It sounds crazy, but if a small company can do it, one where everyone wears multiple hats, couldn’t you do with with your department? I’m sure you could. Now if you can only convince management that “thinking time” can be just as important as the rest of your daily job.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • Leveling the Field

    Level Playing Field
    Cloud computing can level the field between large and small businesses

    I like small companies. If I had my choice, I’d prefer to work in a small company rather than a large one. I get to know more people, there’s less friction to getting things done, people can make decisions, and I get to do more cool stuff. My budget is smaller, but creativity is often encouraged when solving problems. As I read about some of the cool stuff that startups are doing, it reminds me of a few places I’ve worked.

    One of the challenges with small companies and their software has always been cost. A lot of companies look to Open Source products to cut down on their investments for this reason. However if there weren’t such a high price to the software, I think many companies would go with the “brands” of software that many of us work with every day.

    I remember working for a small company and being in charge of rewriting their inventory and sales system. As we were preparing to program the system, an SAP sales rep called our company and made a pitch to the owner. He was impressed and we spent a few weeks looking at SAP. We knew we couldn’t afford the full SAP software, much less purchasing the multiple servers it would take to run it, but SAP had just released a cut-down version of their software, running on one server, for small businesses. We didn’t buy it then, and I’m glad because we had a unique business model that really benefited from custom programming.

    These days all sorts of companies are looking to get started in new areas, or trying new ideas. Many of them don’t necessarily want to make large IT investments. It’s not only hardware and software, but also the IT expertise to manage the systems. If I were starting a business, or even working with a small business as a developer, I’d seriously consider cloud services. The breadth of offerings and features, the low investment cost, and lack of administration needed really level the playing field between what a small company and a large one can do with technology.

    There are opportunities here. If you’re looking to work with a small business, or start one of your own, look at cloud offerings. You might be surprised what you can get for very little initial investment.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.