Oji's Redmond Hut

The Clang of One: Intensify your team's sense of Purpose

ojiako — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 01:21:00 GMT

Main Entry: ¹pur·pose
Pronunciation: 'p&r-p&s
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English purpos, from Old French, from purposer to purpose, from Latin proponere (perfect indicative proposui) to propose

1 a: something set up as an object or end to be attained : INTENTION b : RESOLUTION, DETERMINATION

Surprisingly, this epiphany hit me while dreaming (@home, not at work!) : People need purpose to persevere and thrive; at home or work, although I’m thinking about work in this context. The intensity of Purpose an individual feels is inversely related to the number of people involved in the enterprise related to the defined purpose (Sigh, even when writing you can spot the engineer by his literary devices). I’ll explain more presently, but this is hugely important to how people execute on critical projects: the sense of mission has be well honed to produce the highest quality work. I think this is important for all leaders at Microsoft (PMs of all stripes, leads, managers) and elsewhere. I worry about it on my team and in the larger Windows organization.

If there are too many people joined in the same purpose, eventually they will cease to do their most inspirational work as a matter of course. The reason is that individuals will begin to feel replaceable and thus their sense of purpose will decline to the point where they're in the game to draw remuneration and personal advancement alone. People will do their most inspirational work when they're not trying to be selfish about what they do, when they're inspired. The most precious thing you can do as a leader is to lend purpose to the lives that are being led. Thus energized, they will walk through fire and brimstone to achieve that purpose, often without any intervention on your part.

From that perspective, too large organizations and teams are evil. Or to be more precise, too large organizations and teams working towards the same old purpose are evil. Many people carve out small teams for management purposes - the mantra is more effective management!, smaller teams! These teams usually share the same purpose with an adjacent team; all part of one big machine. This is good management thinking, but what is required AS WELL is circles of Purpose for large teams. As the teams get subdivided and smaller, their purpose has to be more crisply defined and personal to that team. This ‘micro Purpose’ may feed into the larger goals, but it has to be terse, passionate and inspire intense loyalty from the team. In fact it should be used as a hiring device for the team: “who responds viscerally to this purpose?”, should be a passing requirement to get on the team.

And just to clarify, purpose does not always equate to a product vision. A product's vision is not necessarily the purpose of the team that builds it. Purpose has to give meaning to the TEAM and the people not just the product.

All organizations face a threshold where there is diminishing capacity to optimally give purpose and motivate the individuals that work in it. The tell tale signs are that the boldest and bravest begin to leave (not to be confused with when founding members start to leave, that's another theory); careerism creeps in; people are satisfied with their salaries; you know that more can be done by workers but somehow, it doesn't get completely done. Mistakes are excused and there is lack of responsibility (any failure by someone who has a sharply defined purpose results in remorse and a readiness to admit culpability) replaced by a feel-good, blame free culture (something good in this, but also something bad).

Individuals need to feel that the sound of their own peculiar noise is crucial to the symphony. I refer to it as needing to know that the clang of One makes a difference.

Go ahead, spread the gospel.

Refined and cross posted from my personal blog.

mstsc/console

ojiako — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 11:10:00 GMT

I have a headless WS03 server @ home hosting my personal web, blog, digital media etc. The original idea was just to keep my hands dirty, a forcing function to write more code. Outlook Express Program Management has been brutal on the time I have available to be ultra technical (meaning, write code). This server is headless because as a mature PC technology consumer, I am a confirmed late lagger. I will not buy the latest CPU, monitor or enclosure. I will not buy the latest RAM or WIFI router. I will however splurge on Bluetooth and UWB or other non mature PC related tech when they first get out; I will tinker with it and then stop until they get down in price before I integrate into my own lifestyle.

So for the digital media portion of my server, I get the latest SoundBlaster card with >108db SNR output, get great 5.1 speakers with >97db SNR resolution. I borrow a spare monitor from a friend to install, trouble shoot and verify. I unplug the monitor and spend a few late nights at work unable to tinker. I rush home semi-early some day and TS into my server from my couch so that I can remotely play a selection from my monstrous music collection.

And No Dice. Not a single peep.

Some error about your sound card being disabled or unavailable (my brain has refused to remember the precise error because of how traumatic the event was.) Of course I know this has worked in the past, still I am tempted to try all sorts of arcane things to troubleshoot this. Only logic and laziness prevents me from ripping out the card and checking to see if I have the wrong serial number). Google does not help (This is the place where I riff on how us techies have set our bar so low that we think Google is sent from God. Half the time you can’t find what you want if you have a search objective that is more than some simple item. Knowledge mgt is abysmal people, that’s the truth. Google may the best thing out there with MSN revving into the game very soon, but web search is still very one-dimensional way to retrieve complicated information).

This story has a good ending: For WS03, the sound card is not supported on just any TS session. It has to be the console session. WinXP’s RDP client does not connect you to the console session by default since there can be multiple non-console sessions. Connecting to WINXP does not have this problem because the only session IS the console session. After a few days of floundering, the guy next door helped me discover the switches of the mstsc command and I led myself to the Promised Land without having to butcher my server.

Typing ‘mstsc /console’ will bring up the regular connection dialog. You then specify under the ‘Local Resources’ options that the sound should be left at the remote computer.

Motivating developers

ojiako — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 06:36:00 GMT

I learned something today that doubtless, a ton of PMs before me have learned: Motivating a developer is infinitely crucial if you want to get creative work done. A developer will balk like a stubborn mule if they’re not motivated correctly to design good code.

Some clarity: I speak of developers in a general sense even though I am a Program Manager. This could be Me in another setting (Yes, I can write code, ya heard!!) absolutely.

The thing that actually happened was that there was a hard engineering problem to do with Outlook Express: we’ve been thinking about how to scratch the big itch that is the *identities* code – the part of OE that allows you to change who you are or perhaps allows multiple people to share the application and provides some isolation while they do that. Well, migration is no piece of cake! I looked at this problem a couple of times and decided that it was very expensive. Because of an unrelated redesign that was exciting, one of the key people working on the project figured out what I consider an elegant solution. This has basically put the itch back on the table to be scratched. Of course the thing to note here is that when the developer had an interest, the solution suddenly materialized. Hrrmph.

On a geek note, if you want to map a network share to a drive very quickly so you can execute some command line goodness: use PUSHD. From /?:

Stores the current directory for use by the POPD command, then changes to the specified directory.

PUSHD [path | ..]

path Specifies the directory to make the current directory.

If Command Extensions are enabled the PUSHD command accepts network paths in addition to the normal drive letter and path. If a network path is specified, PUSHD will create a temporary drive letter that points to that specified network resource and then change the current drive and directory, using the newly defined drive letter. Temporary drive letters are allocated from Z: on down, using the first unused drive letter found.

MS04-018 for Outlook Express

ojiako — Sat, 17 Jul 2004 07:13:00 GMT

Finally!! After slaving for more than a month and a half, I finally released MS04-018 for Outlook Express as a critical security release available from Windows update, OEM CDs and as a download on Microsoft.com.

All the information you need to know can be found here and here: vulnerability fixed, defense in depth fixes included in the patch and supported platforms. You need this fix if you use Outlook Express 6 (comes with Windows XP RTM) for reading or writing email, unlike the last one which left you vulnerable even if you didn’t use Outlook Express at all (Inetcomm.dll exports system functions that are consumed by other applications in Windows).

Outlook Express for Longhorn is an interesting project for the communications user experience team. We may not even call it Outlook Express! We want to make the Out of the Box mail experience very special and secure. The downside of owning the future product though, is owning the old code base as well……. so MS04-018 is an ongoing effort to keep the legions in user community of the diminutive Outlook Express happy.

blog-discipline

ojiako — Mon, 12 Jul 2004 11:33:00 GMT

It’s a been a rough couple of weeks – I’ve been shepherding a moderate severity security release to ship within the Windows organization [its not the Internet Explorer security issue so lay off] and I’ve had occasional moments with burn out potential. And in terms of my life other than work: well let’s just say things have been suffering.

Well, bottom-line is that when these things happen, my blog takes a hit. I stop to blog apropos of nothing as far as my blogging audience – meager as it is - is concerned. As I was pondering this unfortunate state of affairs, I hit upon a brand new word: blog-discipline.

Main Entry: ¹blog-dis·ci·pline
Pronunciation: blaug'di-s&-pl&n
Function: noun
Etymology: Internet English, derive from plain old ‘discipline’ of Middle English from Old French & Latin; Old French, from Latin disciplina teaching, learning, from discipulus pupil
1 : The ability to keep blogging when everything happening around you screams that you don’t have enough time because its not your main job anyway…
2 obsolete : The spanking you get when you don’t blog and it IS part of your job description.

While you’re here you should check out Dan Crevier’s blog. He has a post up about programming Outlook 2003 in C#. I think I might take advantage of that and write some add-ins when I have the time. A channel 9 interview of Fabio Pettinati and I yammering on about all the cool things we’re doing on the Communications User Experience team should be showing up sometime soon. Stay tuned.

So I met Scoble II

ojiako — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 10:32:00 GMT

I use Newsgator, make of it what you will. So I start this post about meeting Scoble [he doesn’t mind being addressed in first person as Scoble, I need to ask him if it’s something to do with branding] and because my life can get hectic in the middle of releasing some security bits to the world, I stop the post and move on to the next urgent ***** - Insert anything that can interrupt your average hard working Microsoft information worker. Long story short, I have to close Outlook at some point and when I do, Newsgator posts my half scribbled musing without so much as a ‘by your leave’! How do I file a bug???!! The regular UX flow for Outlook is to ask you to save to drafts and not send an email or post to a public folder or whatever.

So I really met Scoble. He’s helping my team get some word out on channel 9 and he came to record an opinion video of a seasoned Program Manager on my team. I heard a lot of things about Scoble before I met him, and I think the best thing I can say is that is that he’s pretty normal; He’s a pleasant dude and I liked working with him. Now all I need is to get him to link to my blog……

I’m headed out to Los Angeles to see get some companies there excited about building on the People and Groups platform, our new Communications User Experience in Longhorn Since I’ve been traveling all weekend and came to work from the airport this morning, I’m looking forward to this like [unspecified noises and grumbling]….

Anyhow, more from the road and I will try to look on the bright side, if you insist.

So I met Scoble

ojiako — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 00:46:00 GMT

I’m the developer evangelist for my team, so I have to make sure that there is a clear 20,000 foot explanation of what we are developing and slowly lead people into the guts of ‘what method do I call’. This blog thing is part of it

First Post

ojiako — Thu, 03 Jun 2004 05:05:00 GMT

The eternal darkness of the stressed mind:

Ok this is my first blog post, but don’t expect me to be nice……No sirreeee!

I should have done this eons ago! Ages! And I still have to get all the other non-blog voices on my team to get the word out on the marvelous things we’re gestating – a People-Centric platform for Longhorn.

But I promise much more. Muuuuuch more.

Captain Kirk signing out.