Welcome and thanks for stopping by. I'm Michael Schubert (feel free to call me Mike) and I am a Senior Application Architect, marathoner, cyclist, and triathlete in Atlanta, Georgia. Read on for more about me and my journey to earn the title "Ironman".
November 11, 2008
Thank You for Serving Our Country
Today is Veteran's Day in America. If you served, thanks for keeping this the land of the free by being one of the brave.
Posted by Mike at 11:11 AM | Comments (0)
November 10, 2008
Communication is the Answer
What single thing can you do to make people more satisfied in their interactions with you. I assert it is communication. It can't simply be conversation - but needs to be thoughtful interaction. Follow up on a previous question or direction. Provide insightful information on how a transaction is progressing. Give proactive notification when something happens that adds risk to a transaction completing.
This is a tale of two eBay experiences. I purchased two items using "Buy it now" last Sunday, November 2nd. For one item, I received an email a couple of days later that it shipped along with the tracking number. Friday, the item arrived. The other item I have received no communication from the seller on, and have even tried to initiate email communications with the seller to no avail. I see feedback showing up for this seller on similar items, and some of the feedback indicates poor communication, so at this point I don't have reason to believe I'm screwed. I'm merely concerned. And the fact of the matter is that a simple email saying "I shipped your item today via USPS parcel post" would satisfy me and give me a window to look for a package. Communication would increase my satisfaction greatly.
The same goes for the workplace. Lack of communication can zap employee morale and cause stakeholders to lose confidence in leaders. Check out this article published today in the Atlanta Business Chronicle -> Workers' morale hurt most by communication failures.
Whether you are entering into a transactional exchange for goods, in the workplace, or thinking of buying a motorcycle at home -> crank up the communication a bit and the needs of your stakeholders are likely to be better met.
Posted by Mike at 8:30 PM | Comments (0)
November 9, 2008
Tomorrow is a New Day
I had a crappy run today. I reached a point somewhere after mile 10 where my quads hurt, the wind was demoralizing, and it was just time to bag it. I guess the migraine Friday night plus the 10k race yesterday added up and sabotaged my shot at 20 miles today.
I am not making excuses. There are some days that just aren't your day. And if you have to realize that and learn from them. Sometimes they are beyond your control (migraine) and sometimes they are within your control (scheduling a 10k race the day before a 20 mile run).
I don't know what tomorrow will bring. And that was part of the reason I wanted to run today. It might rain the next time I try to run long. Work may interfere. There are a whole host of events that could conspire against me. But there are a whole host of things I can do right.
Tomorrow is a new day. I will make the best of it.
Posted by Mike at 5:21 PM | Comments (0)
November 7, 2008
Sales Force Management as a Barrier to Customer Satisfaction
During the first 10 years or so of my programming career, a number of my projects revolved around sales force automation. At Windsor Group, I worked on tools that would make our territory managers more competitive. At GE Capital Consulting, I worked on a couple of client engagements that involved customizing a sales force automation tool called Overquota. Eventually at Solarcom, we built our own tool in house, based on best practices that we had developed over the years of working with these other tools.
One common thread through each of these implementations and customizations was the desire to tag a customer or prospect as belonging to a particular sales rep. For a customer, it was fairly clear that the person who first sold them something would likely own the account. With prospects, a regional approach was generally taken. Here lies the rub - for larger companies, which region do you choose: the region that contacted you, or the region where the company's headquarters is. The response I usually saw was that it was based on the headquarters.
It straight sales organizations, that isn't a tremendous barrier. The cost of on-site sales calls is usually transparent to the customer. In fact - they are built into the margin of the deal. If the rep comes from outside of your office's region, you had better believe you are paying a slight premium to what a local representative would be able to offer.
What if it is not a straight sales engagement? What if professional services are involved? Here is where it gets tricky. I usually have seen it where the partner's local presence is engaged. For a company site in Atlanta with a headquarters on the west coast, this means you as the customer are partnering with a company that is going to provide service from the far side of the country. Every flight, hotel, meal is going to add additional overhead to your engagement.
There needs to be some intelligence employed by vendors and their value added resellers to provide the best value to the customer. Staffing projects requiring onsite resources with those 3,000 miles away does not seem practical - especially when the VAR has a local presence with a presumably local talent pool.
There needs to be a focus on putting the customer's needs first at their office location - ahead of the needs of assigning business within territorial bounds.
Posted by Mike at 8:30 AM | Comments (0)
November 6, 2008
Who is Doing YOUR QA?
I was looking for some pointers on dynamic assembly loading, reflection, etc. within the .Net framework and found an assembly the author decided to call myAss:
It really struck me that an author or publisher would want to put that verbiage out in the general domain. I went through all of the material and found many instances to myAss - so it's not like it was overlooked. Why on earth someone did not flag that do be changed to something like myAsm is beyond me.
So that raised the question - who is doing QA and what were they tasked with? Perhaps their scope was merely to make sure the code in question functioned. That would require entering all of the code into individual projects, compiling, running, and verifying their output. Perhaps they were tasked with making sure the wording was technically and grammatically correct.
A third option is that the QA tasks were assigned to someone for whom English was not natively their first language. Given my experience in high school Spanish class, I doubt this to be the case. Learning the naughtier words of the language was virtually a requirement. Sure, we wanted to know what they were because we thought it was funny. But the teaching point was more so you did not make a fool out of yourself (or you at least could reflect on why you made a fool out of yourself) if you slipped up and mispronounced a word that ended up being dirty.
The lesson for today is that you need to have a plan of what you want to QA, how you are going to do it, and who are the right resources to perform those tasks.
Posted by Mike at 5:30 PM | Comments (1)
November 5, 2008
Great News!
I missed all the campaign speeches, otherwise I would've been voting for Obama early and often. Evidently, he is going to be paying for gas and home mortgages! Thanks for spreading the word Peggy!
Posted by Mike at 8:30 AM | Comments (0)
November 4, 2008
Go Vote!
It doesn't matter who you vote for, just go vote. It's your own little revolution, every four years.
Update 12:08PM - Evidently, it is a felony in my state (Georgia) for Starbucks, Krispy Kreme, etc to give me free stuff for voting. Makes perfect sense. I'm not sure why every state does not do this.
O.C.G.A. (Official Code of Georgia) ยง 21-2-570
Any person who gives or receives, offers to give or receive, or participates in the giving or receiving of money or gifts for the purpose of registering as a voter, voting, or voting for a particular candidate in any primary or election shall be guilty of a felony.
I remember growing up that there were vans that would go into impoverished neighborhoods in Atlanta, take people to the polling place, then take them somewhere to eat lunch. And reportedly, when they arrived at the polling place they were told to "Punch #37" or whatever the punch card slot number was for the candidate who provided the transportation and the meal.
I'm sure this Google gadget is getting hammered, but I had to embed it anyway.
Posted by Mike at 11:56 AM | Comments (0)
