Is Product Placement Growing?

An article in the Independent discusses the growing prevalence of product placement amid declining ad sales. In the US, McDonald's has bought the right to have two cups of their branded frappuccino appear on the desk in front of the anchors on Fox 5 News. Product placements have become common in movies, with multiple mentions of Starbucks in The Devil Wears Prada and use of Vaio laptops throughout Casino Royale. The article concludes by noting that perhaps product placements are a normal part of life...

But what's the powder-blue sports car that Andrew Marr is seen driving over Westminster Bridge at the start of his Sunday show? A Nissan Figaro. Did Nissan pay the BBC for the plug? Once you start looking for product placement (no matter how innocent, as here), you see it everywhere. Almost as much as the viewers of Fox 5 News.

Problems, problems, problems...

... they're everywhere, aren't they?

You're on your way to work and you find that there are transport problems: the train is late again. Once at work, because you are late for your meeting - your boss is angry. Worse still, you are not given the pay increase you were promised.

All this, and more, are typical of the every day issues that come up for employees and which managers sometimes have to 'manage'. The emotional twists and turns can be unhealthy for your morale and the energy you need to be successful.

A few years ago I came across a course, "The Power to Choose", by chartered psychologist Graham Price. Research that Price had done with colleagues at Birkbeck (University of London) found that there are three main ways in which people accomplish substantial goals. The first is the well known method of goal-setting: this made up around 40% of participants in the research. The second method was some kind of spiritual enlightenment, making up close to 10%. In the region of another 40% was a third method: people somehow accepting things as they are and their goals materializing.

Price's course explained the working of this third way of reaching goals and dealing with life. The most powerful concept of the course is that you have the power to choose. When you come across a situation that is unpleasant, such as a late train, you can choose not only your reaction to the situation, but also how you feel about it. Too often people let themselves get into auto-pilot chains of thought that lead to anxiety, depression, anger or a range of other unhealthy emotions. If you can get out of auto-pilot, you can put yourself into modes of thought and then action that are more productive.

Recently Price has released an e-mail based version of the course he normally delivers in-person to audiences around the UK. Because email is a more limited form than real life, Price is currently offering this version of the course free. Available at www.helpwithyourproblem.com, I recommend taking a look at this e-mail for anyone interested in taking greater control of their life.

One on ones

One on ones are crucial for obtaining feedback on how employees are doing and also giving them feedback. I've found some templates and podcasts that look interesting on this subject.

http://www.manager-tools.com/one-on-one-key-points-and-template/

Integrity, intelligence, and energy: if they don't have the first, the other two will kill you.

An interesting excerpt:

Warren Buffett said something similar (from Thoughts of Chairman Buffett), "Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don't have the first, the other two will kill you."

Why incidents occur. What we are doing to prevent them.

I've come across an interesting video that highlights in the simplest terms possible why incidents occur: because a change has been made to the system.

The interesting segment is from the time 2:20 onwards:

They key parts from the video are where they mention:

Change is what leads to problems and incidents. The vast majority of incidents are due to someone making a change, mistakenly believing that the change is not going to lead to an outage.

Being intelligent about change will make a big difference to IT.

25% of problems come from infrastructure... the vast majority of the rest comes from changes that are wrong that have been made with the best of intentions.

The speaker goes on to tell a story about 3 programmers working together producing punchcards for a system. Taking punchcards they had, they made very careful, thought out changes. However, still things went wrong.

We have been experiencing a number of problems in the environments managed by the Operations team I lead. These environments are a series of components, software applications as well as hardware, with particular inputs and outputs. These components are connected to each other in various ways and configured through configuration files. To get a particular service playing through the TV, an engineer will need to hand craft the configuration of these series of components, ensuring the inputs, outputs and configuration of each component is correct. This is much like the story of the punchcard system that is described in the video.

The problems that we experience on our environments are almost certainly due to slight mis-configurations that are sometimes made by the engineers. As a consequence, we have started looking at automating these changes. If we are successful, we will be able to use a web interface to make the changes that are normally hand made. In doing this, we should be able to expect that the changes made by this automated system will be accurate and correct every time. This in turn should dramatically reduce the number of problems experienced due to mistaken human changes.

Getting the team talking through The Daily Scrum

Communication is key to a Service Desk - team members need to feel comfortable exchanging ideas about how to solve problems. However, working in a flexitime working environment, one by one the members of the team crawl into work. Some start studiously looking through their email. Others put on their headphones as they get on with their work for the day. In an apathetic environment like this, the practise of having a Daily Scrum meeting becomes the heartbeat to kicking off talking and chatter among the team for the rest of the day.

The Daily Scrum is a concept taken from Agile Scrum project management method used most frequently for software development. There are plenty of articles on the Internet that describe how it works, like here and here, as well as articles on how it does not work. In essence it is a daily round circle, stand-up meeting where each member of the team goes around in a circle and tells the team what they have been working on since the previous daily scrum, what they plan on working until the next one and any blockages they have to completing any work.

Unlike long running projects, a Service Desk environment is based on incidents so it is often difficult to predict what team members are going to be working on. However, the meeting acts as a useful way for members to synchronise with the rest of the team, giving everyone greater visibility of each others' work and providing an opportunity for them to help each other. Particularly when there are major incidents, the meeting keeps everyone focused and aware of progress.

A glimpse of a slick, professional team

I consider note taking to be a key behaviour of members of a world class service management desk. Note taking while investigating issues creates an audit trail that easily gives the engineer working on an issue, as well as others in the team, a trace of how something has been investigated. It allows others to be included on the investigation, allowing them to make contributions.

Without the key behaviour of note taking, the service management desk becomes prone to common problems that frustrate stakeholders of less well managed service desks:

• Lack of visibility of issues raised by end users
• Engineers progressing issues in isolation and difficulty in tracking the progress they have made on issues
• Difficulty in different engineers picking up and progressing issues worked on by other engineers
• Difficulty in work done by an engineer to be peer reviewed and retrospectively reviewed
• Over-reliance on specific engineers for specific tasks

I am currently building a service desk team, with many members of the team inherited from elsewhere. Getting their adoption of the note taking practise has been slow to happen, but today I've started to see a glimpse of the kind of slick, professional team we are working towards: able to pass issues between engineers easily, with clear visibility to anyone interested of the technical investigation done and confidence in the capability of the team rather than individuals.

Specifically, the glimpse that I "saw" was that

• Engineer 1 completed some work to build a new server to a very particular specification. He had recorded the details of his investigation on the ticket that was raised, #12. At first glance, the notes on the ticket seem excessive and as though not much thought had gone into them. They usually never are excessive and that there are notes always is the key, not necessarily the quality. The build of the server took almost 3 weeks to complete, between Engineer 1 working on other things.
• Recently, almost 3 months later, a similar request, #354, came in for machine of the same specification to be built. In the past the engineer picking up the issue would have had to reinvestigate and re-determine how to build such a machine. In fact, the task of building this machine might have fallen to the same engineer who had previously worked on the issue, as that engineer might remember some of the details of what they had done 3 months previously in the previous occurrence.
• However, because there are sufficient details on #12, a new engineer (Engineer 2) was able to pick up the new ticket, #354, and complete the work for the new server. I'm sure he sought clarification from Engineer 1 on some things, but there is enough in #12 to confidently work on this new similar issue on his own. He was also able to complete the work for ticket #354 quicker than the time taken to complete #12 – days rather than weeks. This is because he did not have to do any rework or reinvestigation done for #12.
• This alone I thought was a great improvement in working practises…. But it gets better! Engineer 2 was away today and a further request was made on #354 by the user who logged the issue. In the past, this might have had to wait for Engineer 2 to return to work because no one would have been quite sure of what had been done. However, Engineer 2 had also made notes on #354 as he progressed the issue meaning a third engineer, Engineer 3, could respond to this and progress the issue further.

We still have some way to go for stories like this being true of every incident that we deal with. However, I think it is encouraging that we are now starting to the note taking behaviour being adopted and the benefits of this.