I serve on the PASS Board of Directors, but this post reflects my personal views and not an official PASS position.
One of the things that has always interested/amazed me is how many people wait until the last minute to register for PASS, and that wait typically results in spending an additional $500-$1000 more than you needed to. Early bird registration is $1195, and that's an entirely reasonable cost for any conference, and what you save by getting the early bird rate would cover most of your travel expenses.
So why do people wait?
One big reason I've heard is that they are unsure of their schedule and what will be going on at work. I know work can present challenges, but if you asked to schedule vacation right now for November would it be approved? If so, how's that different from scheduling training? Both require checking for existing conflicts and figuring out who will cover for you while you're gone. One thing to note is that PASS allows transfer of the registration without penalty, so you can register the most likely person to attend and if things change, send someone else from your team, or maybe your manager!
Another reason is money. Businesses like to procrastinate on spend, but that's not always good stewardship of money. Why spend $500+ more than was needed to delay the decision a couple months? If the money just isn't there yet that makes sense, but more often it's just a tradition of let's wait and see. Not only does that increase your cost to attend, it decreases your ability to save money on hotel and airfare by starting to look well in advance.
From an attendee perspective the first and most important battle to win is that you need training and that you think the Summit best fits your needs. Part of a strategy of winning that discussion is to show your employer that traveling to training is possible and that you are looking at ways to get the training you need at the lowest cost to the company. If the company just insists on waiting there's not much you can do, but seriously, doesn't it make sense to register early in most cases? Not all, but most?
My friend Brian Knight is leading the 2nd annual SQLSaturday in Jacksonville on May 2nd. Right now it looks like 37 sessions scheduled and over 200 registered so far, but there should still be plenty of room if you want to attend. I'm trying something different this time, doing a lunch time Q&A session about PASS, thought it would be a chance to educate attendees about PASS and also find out what we're doing right or wrong. Hope to see you there!
If you haven't already, start with Part 1 and Part 2. In Part 2 I mentioned that I have hired Don to coach me on networking, and this week I'll share some results from our first 1.5 hour session.
Prior to the call Don asked me to identify 3 goals, and then he provided some details to build up around that. I'll condense it a little here. In general I decided to tie my goals directly to the upcoming PASS Summit because I'll be in charge of 'networking' events and more importantly, because I - and hopefully many of you - go to events like these to network.
My first goal was to meet some specific people that I don't "know". Building that list is minor challenge because I don't know for sure who will be there, but I started with a few people I was hoping to spend more than 5 minutes chatting with. One of things Don (the coach) asked me to do what write down how I could these people. I like that approach, rather than just what's in it for me, and I think it takes us to the biggest challenge of networking. If you're "just" a DBA, what can you do for any nationally known speaker or MVP? Why would I want to talk to you, or why would person X talk to me? Say I want to have lunch with Steve Ballmer? Doesn't everyone? Ok, maybe not quite everyone, but the point is that on the other side they have x minutes in the day for networking and they have to choose. Looking forward to working on this more in our next call.
My second goal is to extend the reach of SQLSaturday in the US. For this I wrote down a few early ideas, and we haven't had time to work much on this one.
My third goal was to extend my brand to include networking skills and tools. This is a personal goal, but it maps directly to the things I want to accomplish at the Summit and within my career. My notes here focus on ideas for events at the Summit and figuring out what minimal coaching/education I can do for attendees in some form to help them network better.
Our first call was mostly about me. What I do for a living, review of my goals, and then into a discussion about branding versus reputation. Don agrees with me (so far anyway) that brands are easier to create than reputation, and reputations are pretty easy to screw up. Obvious stuff, but that in turn lead to talking about my brand, which to me is currently fuzzy. Am I a SQL guy? A professional development guy? Business guy? Am I projecting a brand that matches my goal and reputation? That lead in turn to discussing brand building and I do most of the stuff already - write, speak, participate, I'm just trying to refine the brand and increase my visibility (in a good way). That in turn led to talking briefly about SQLSaturday and the PASS Summit and the MVP program, the latter being one of the things that I just don't know how to exploit in a way that fits me so far.
Lots of discussion, more me talking than Don on the first call while he evaluates where I'm at and my communication skills. For next week I have to work on a few things:
Interesting so far, but no big results or aha moments yet. I'm trying hard to be a good student, doing my prep work, listening, leaving my pride out of it. So far so good on those. I have no idea yet if 6 hours is too much, too little, or just right.
If you've got questions or comments about this minor journey I'd enjoy hearing them - might open a door for me as well.
I saw this post about Why I Dislike Newsgroups from Tom Larock and he did a pretty good job of summarizing the negatives, and then went to to discuss how the MVP forums are the exception. One of the comments was about the forums here on SQLServerCentral are also generally the exception to the rule and since I had a small part in how those evolved, wanted to write down some thoughts that have been pending for a while.
First, how do you make forums work? It's both easy and difficult, there's a bit of a strange synergy that happens at some point. I think the essence of it is:
When we first started the SSC forums I was opposed to doing it because they require a lot of work. I think most people set up forums and just let it happen from there, and while that might work, it doesn't usually turn into a community that mainly self monitors. Once we decided to proceed, for the first two years or so Steve & I posted every day, and part of the "secret" formula we found was offering prizes for the most good replies, which brought along a number of good people who really made the difference and took some of the weight off of us. A good moderator is key, someone even tempered and wise, and hard to find - but essential. We set the tone early on and somehow it never changed much, fundamentally Steve & I both have a great regard for beginners or those willing to ask a question in order to move forward, and that somehow became "community" - which isn't to say that the community of SSC isn't self defining and self directed!
If you own a forum, don't expect it to work without working. See above, and look at the places that do work and don't work. Many different ways of doing it, and no guarantees that the formula above is repeatable.
If you're asking a question, I'd like to think you've searched for the answer first. Sometimes it's knowing the right buzzword to search for, and we won't always know that. When we're beginners it's both easy and frustrating to ask a "stupid" question, but on the other hand, how else will we figure it out? That said, it's the Internet, so on any given day I may get no reply, a lot of replies, and then I have to figure out which seem reasonable - and that can be based on confirming what I thought, some sort of 'reputation' based on # of posts, bio, etc, or the number of "I agree" comments that follow the answer. It cost me a minute or two to get the answer back, so if I get anything valuable at all it's a win, all for very low investment.
If you're answering questions...well, that's the hard one. You're going to see questions that are badly framed, easily answered via search, home work assignments, and occasionally ones by people that have no other motive than to cause trouble. They'll post in the wrong forum, double post, fail to provide all the information needed, ask for a different answer than the right one, sometimes write in garbled English because it's been run through a translator. You'll get people that respond to follow up questions badly or even rudely, or become defensive, or sometimes offensive about your thoughts on a post.
Sound bad? It depends on what you want out of it, and your viewpoint.
One reason is to score points towards whatever prize is out there, another is because you want to give back. The latter I admire, but in practice as long as you help someone your reason doesn't matter much. Giving back - which takes time and effort - feels harder when they don't seem to appreciate your efforts.
So...here's the thing. It doesn't matter if they appreciate it. Either way, you're doing it because you get something out of it. Civilized people say thank you, but unfortunately not all of us act civilized on any given day, so you either learn to cope with that behave badly or you stop participating in conversations with all the good people too. There's nothing wrong with asking for more information, pointing them to a URL that explains the expectations, but why engage with the knuckleheads when they persist? I email the URL to the moderator and unsubscribe from the notifications because I will spend my time on people that deserve it, and I see no reason to make it a contest of wills to see who can type longer and louder. Said differently, I have nothing to prove, so if someone thinks I'm wrong, that they are smarter than I am, whatever, that's fine and rarely a source of much more than a smile from me.
I'm not throwing rocks at Tom here. What he expects is what we should all expect, but it rarely happens - so that means we either omit it from our tool box, or we bend a little. Not great choices, but the ones we have.
I drove up on Friday with my friend Kendal Van Dyke. Long drive from Orlando, just over 8 hours. Arrived just in time to find the hotel and then meet up with some of the other speakers for dinner. Joe Celko was there, same suit as always! Robert Cain, Louis Davidson, Geoff Hiten, Kevin Boles, Noah Subrin, and Paul Waters were there plus about 10 more, and it was a good place (Bahama Breeze) to chat and relax. Left there about 9 pm to visit some with the guys from SQLSentry before calling it a day.
We arrived about 7:30 Saturday morning at the Microsoft office, the one minor glitch being that our GPS managed to take to a back entrance to the office park and the gate was locked. We hit the 'call' button and they sent someone down to unlock the gate. The office park was gorgeous, nice rolling hills, nice landscaping, quite different from Florida! MS has offices on the 3rd floor, they had a separate table set up for speaker check-in and since we were early, no line. Breakfast was Krispy Kreme doughnuts and coffee, and since I'm known for making the hard calls when it comes to event evals, I had to let Stuart know that the doughnuts were merely warm and not really hot of the oven. Things are pretty good when I have to resort to complaining about about the doughnut temp!
Stuart was mildly busy, had the appearance of a man with most things under control, and that's not a trivial thing. Check in seemed well organized, attendees got the standard event bag with a nice plastic coffee mug with the SQLSaturday logo. There was a speaker room set up, so we stopped in there to visit and just wait a bit, I had the first session of the day at 9 am. There were 6 rooms, of those three were one big room that could be divided and was set up to seat all expected attendees - about 200. As we went over for the mini keynote I could see that we didn't have 200, finally count was I think in the 155-165 range, about a 25% drop. That was interesting and not unexpected, we typically see a 25-35% no show for these events on Sat, but we were hoping that having invested $10 (the lunch fee) we'd have more true cancellations rather than no shows, an important distinction since cancellations allow pulling people in from the wait list (Stu had to set a hard cap at 200, and had at one point 40 people waiting, as people canceled a job (sql guys you know) would automatically invite someone from the wait list).
Back to the opening, Stuart took about 5 minutes to publish some schedule changes, set expectations for lunch, thank the volunteers and others for all their help, and then got everyone headed off to the first session. I'm not a fan of keynotes but this was quick and easy and provided value - nicely done!
They divided the big room into three and I started setting up. They had a volunteer in each room to distribute and then later collect the evals (to be published soon) and as a nice tough the volunteer also had a paddle with yellow/red signs. I didn't know this, so was momentarily taken aback when the volunteer caught my eye with the yellow side, thinking maybe he was the language monitor, but was just the 5 min warning. Nice to have and well implemented. Had a minor AV snag at the beginning and while the MS guys worked on it, I did some informal polling of my group. Almost everyone was using LinkedIn, about 75% were on Facebook, about 3 hands for Twitter and the same for Plaxo, and I think no non-speakers that had a blog. Most indicated they were interested in networking, most thought that they weren't good at it, and no one had a networking goal for the day.
Session went well and I was able to spend some good hallway time after answering questions and just talking about performance related items. Then back to the speaker room, caught up with old friend Brian Kelley and PASS board member Kevin Kline, finally caught up with Jen Underwood, and met Mike Mollenhour, and then just relaxed some, wasn't feeling the best.
Lunch was Jason's Deli and plenty of soda/water, so no one should have had any reason to complain about value for their $10. No line for lunch either, boxes were in a nice accessible location, just grab a box and head for the big meeting for the lunch time presentation by Joe Celko.
Overall it was extremely well done. Stuart did a great job organizing and leading, he also added a few tweaks of his own (color coding name badges to make it easy to identify volunteers was one) and you could tell he really tried hard to make it the best possible event - and I'd say he and his team of hard working volunteers succeeded. No complaints from me, attendees seems to be having a good time. Good job!
One side note, Brian Kelley and Paul Waters are thinking hard about doing a 1 track event in Columbia, SC soon - more news as I have it.
I'm going to West Palm Beach on Apr 29th to visit Scott Klein and his group. I'll be doing a presentation on statistics in SQL Server and also a discussion of PASS. If you're in the area hope you'll attend for the session and some networking. The meeting is held at CompTec, 1750 North Florida Mango, Suites 302 & 303, West Palm Beach, Fl 33409. Pizza and schmoozing starts at 6:00, the presentation begins at 6:30.
I finally finished up reading the Speed of Trust and have to say I struggled with it. I'm a big believer in trust, it's an incredibly powerful tool (much like The Force!) that takes a lot of effort to earn, and interestingly, very little effort to lose. The book does talk about trust, but to me it covered more ground than just trust - call it side affects of trust, that while interesting (and you may find valuable), just didn't seem to resonate with me. I think it felt like I got something different than I expected, and hard to blame that on the author.
If you've never thought about how trust impacts your life it's worth taking a break to do so. I'd argue that in most cases trust is often more valued than raw skills, and trust reduces anxiety in all situations - and the lack of trust, well, that's enough to cause stress all by itself. I've never found being trustworthy to be all that difficult, just a matter of deciding that your word matters on things large and small.
Get the book if you want to explore the variations of trust, but if you've already adopted a philosophy of trust you may not find it useful.
A little further off topic than usual today, something not about technology and work for a change. Woodworking is one of my hobbies, and I find all too little time to work at it as I try to move from amateur to craftsman. But here and there I do find a time for fun, and one of my recent projects was something that had been on the list for far too long - turning a pen. My friend Steve has done these for a while, so I was interested to try. The basics of are selecting a small piece of wood, drilling a hole through it for the two pieces of the pen core and then gluing them in, and then using a lathe to turn the wood down to the right size. You end up with perhaps a 1/16" of wood around this slim metal core, and then the rest just goes together. Probably easier to watch it than read about it, so I grabbed two links from Youtube for you!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdYay-I25Rc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgoahAIj7hk
Here's my first attempt.
Using a lathe is quite a bit different than other woodworking to me. It's quiet, the lathe makes hardly any noise, and it's all curves, not much point in just turning straight lines! The investment to try it is probably $500-$750 for the lathe plus tools, but if you have a local Woodcraft store they usually offer classes at less than $100 (and supplies) and that's a good way to find out if you like it enough to spend the big money. I already had the lathe, so it was just a few pen turning accessories I needed to do the project.
Next Friday I have another project to discuss, one that is more rough construction than cabinet making!
I've had a few requests for these, so I'll take orders through May 8, 2009. The polo is a very good quality white shirt with embroidered SQLSaturday logo, the t-shirt is while with the SQLSaturday logo embroidered. I can only ship to US addresses and please allow 4 weeks for delivery - have to order them and then ship them to you. Please put your size in the comments block!
Embroidered T-Shirt ($16) https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=4950042
Embroidered Polo ($22) https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=4949988
This is cost plus approximate shipping, no profit added in for us.
We'll all heard about or lived with outsourcing, and hopefully we know it's good and bad. Outsourcing the janitorial services is a good idea, outsourcing the help desk...maybe not such a good idea. We outsource for a variety of reasons, but usually it's to save money or to leverage skill sets we don't have or want to maintain. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and that all depends on everything - so many things go into making it work out on both sides.
I was chatting with a friend over lunch lately and outsourcing came up in the context of having a parent company provide certain functions instead of having them handled by each subsidiary. The cost savings is not hard to see. Imagine you have six companies all under one umbrella company, and each one has an HR team, a payroll solution, etc, etc. Not all of that is duplication of effort, but there is some. So, the parent company takes over function X and saves some amount of dollars each year. It this outsourcing? And if so, what are the dangers?
I think it's absolutely outsourcing, and it can be better or worse than normal outsourcing. It can be better because you are saving money, and you get more control and smarter investments than you might with someone who is trying to make a profit - my presumption being that when doing this internally you're trying to cover costs only. It could be worse because you don't get much of a vote, it's usually a decree, and worse than that, you may not like the service level agreement that goes with it.
I only have limited experience with this, but it never seems to work out. First, it's human nature that those in immediate contact with those providing the service hear only one side - their side - of the story, and that's powerful, especially when you're trying to convince the main office that they are causing you pain. Next, unless you have the outsourcing run by an extraordinary leader, they will tend to grow and extend their kingdom without regard to what is good for you or your business. Finally, they aren't part of the team - their measure of success isn't the same as yours. Imagine that you have a problem with the building and you need to quickly relocate a few hundred workstations. Your team jumps in to get it done because it needs to be done. Will the outsourcers?
Every business should control it's own destiny with full profit and loss accountability. Hire a leader, monitor them lightly but carefully, and let them do the job. If they aren't doing the job then it's a tough decision to figure out is it external factors or is it bad decisions? If outsourcing - internal or external - looks like a good idea, they should be free to do that too, as long as they can implement it under a service level agreement that provides the means to end the relationship if it's not working OR they just want to go in a different direction.
My friend Will Strohl is managing the Day of DNN on June 13, 2009 at the Microsoft office in Tampa. This is sorta the 2nd iteration of it, but the first time really run as an independent community event. Will was one of the key volunteers at our last SQLSaturday and I'm expecting that work ethic plus experience should result in a first class event. I'll be dropping by for a couple hours in the morning to see how the event goes and wish I could stay all day, but I'll just be ending a month with a lot of weekend travel and will be ready to take a break by then.
If you're in Florida hope you'll pass this around in to those you know in the technical business, lots of devoted DNN people out there!
I currently write the editorial for the PASS Connector which is published every two weeks as part of my role on the Board of Directors. I'm cross posting those editorials here as well as to the main PASS blog
We’ve made some minor updates to the PASS web site recently. None that are amazing, but represent attempts to fill gaps that we think will be useful to members, and more often, to prospective members. Here’s a list of recent additions:
Waiting for deployment are pages about SQL MVP’s, the history of PASS (terrific read!), the history of SQL Server, and some great information on certifications. All of them contributed by volunteers, and we hope you find them useful. But if you find a typo, or an omission, or a page we should have but don’t – drop me a note at andy.warren@sqlpass.org. Eventually PASS should become a great career resource for you, and when someone asks you ‘should I get certified’ or ‘what is an MVP’, you’ll have a place to point them to!
Changing subjects, we recently extended our call for speakers for the 2009 Summit, but at the time we didn’t explain why, which in turn lead to speculation. Microsoft had let us know that the BI conference that runs in the same time frame was being canceled, and we decided to extend the call for speakers so that the speakers from that event would have an opportunity to submit sessions for the Summit. Our plan is to add capacity so that as we add BI sessions we don’t detract at all from the DBA market, but for many of us it’s no longer DBA or BI, most of us do a little bit of both. I’m looking forward to taking in a great BI session or two to expand my own horizons.
I was reading a book recently and it equated brand with reputation. My first thought was "aha", that brand is just a fancier/newer word for reputation and why I hadn't I matched those two up before? But as I thought about it a little more, I'm not sure the two are the same. I think of brands as the very public face we project, the one that gets our foot in the door or that causes people to contact us with work, where reputation is something that's determined by what you do rather than what you say you'll do.
I think that's an important distinction because building a brand can often just be cosmetics. Yes, it takes some work, but there are ways to short cut that and even if you don't, that brand may not accurately reflect who you are - it could be who you want to be, or who you think I want you to be.
Reputation is something you earn by being who you are. You can be nice, or not, hard working or not, reliable or not, fun to work with, or not. You can try to earn a reputation for being whatever, but you don't get to decide what your reputation is. Of course that doesn't mean you can't work on your bad habits or your rough edges to make your reputation stronger.
Karla just emailed that the schedule is set, details at http://www.sqlsaturday.com/schedule.aspx, but to save you time here are the speakers that will be attending:
Andy WarrenArie JonesBrad McGeheeBrian KnightBryan SoltisChris EargleDevin KnightDon DemsakEric WisdahlJack CorbettJessica MossKeith RoweKen SimmonsKent WaldropKevin GrohoskeMichael StarkNathan HeaivilinPam ShawPatrick LeBlancPlamen RatchevRodney LandrumRussell FustinoRyan DuclosShawn McGeheeSteve JonesSteven LaneSven AeltermanTim MitchellVincent Mayfield
Pretty decent line up! It's the first event in Pensacola, but I'll be due to the schedule and the early start that attendance is over 200 by the time June 6th gets here.
Tom has been doing a series of interviews on his blog lately and I ended up on the list. Interviewing is one of those skills that requires a time investment each time, have to build the questions and then look for opportunities to follow up that might clarify or open a whole new avenue of discussion. Is Tom ready for 60 Minutes? Read the interview, and see what you think of his questions and my answers!
