I Am the Laziest Person on the Planet. You Should Be, Too.

I am soooooooooo lazy. Level 60 Procrastinator. For any of you that stayed current with World of Warcraft after 2008 or so, yes, I know the level cap is 80 now. Or is it 85? I don't know: I'm too lazy to look it up. I was also too lazy to max out my skill in Procrastination. I'll do it later. Maybe.

This works for me. I still get stuff done. It's even usually on time. Not always, though. Example: I intended to write this post three weeks ago.

Anyway, I'm probably one of the laziest people on the planet and I think you should be, too.

Stupid people, or design flaw?

I haven't been in consulting very long, but I've learned a valuable lesson already: You should always plan for everything to go completely off the goddamned plan. Sometimes this happens during the testing phases, and the project fails integration testing or no longer matches the business goals. Typically, this just pushes go-live back a few weeks or months (don't just blindly set a new finish date!!), but worst-case, you go back to the drawing board.

"This isn't so bad -- you should have seen the one last week..."

Other times, you literally have multimillion-dollar aircraft smashing into the runway just as they  commit to final approach. This is why system design and process design are important: prevent plane
crashes and project train wrecks. This post is inspired by an article I read about very stupid employees.

Surprisingly, the article wasn't about stupid employees, or in that case, stupid pilots. It was about bad design.

NERD ALERT: Using Vim to convert an XML statement into 1 tag per line

I'm currently working on a task to document some integration messages. They are in a text file, all on one line, and I need to add them to a Word doc.


Oh, and all the tags need to be on their own line. Example:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?><soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"><soapenv:Body><get_stuff ><user><now>2014-02-10T09:42:04-07:00</now><company>fieldserviceisnothard</company><login>yermom</login><auth_string>80fa892c2facKe0bp3n1Se6cdc2f</auth_string></user></get_stuff></soapenv:Body></soapenv:Envelope>

This SUCKS.

Or at least it did. I downloaded Vim for Windows.  I used this search and replace pattern:

I am an Organic Mechanic Completionist

I am an Organic Mechanic. No really, I am. Plus, this has nothing to do with growing tomatoes or changing the blinker fluid in my car.

Read about it here: http://randsinrepose.com/archives/organics-and-mechanics/

He also has another article about Incrementalists and Completionists. Completionists believe that it's worth the time upfront to get something done RIGHT and not have to come back in three months. That's me, too.

Read the articles. Next time you work with someone that can't seem to move past his perfect plan on paper and see the crumbling shame of reality which piles up around his project, remember that he's probably a Mechanic (and an Incrementalist to boot).

Reward Failure to Encourage New Ideas

I've been kicking around a draft article for a few weeks now, based on the topic of "failure as a means of success". Even now, that concept sounds like bullshit every time I read it.

It's not. It's one of the best ways I know of to spur continued innovation, excellence, and personal/professional growth. Thomas Edison has been quoted as saying that he had not yet failed, but he had invented over 10,000 ways to NOT build a light bulb.

Off topic: Nikola Tesla, Edison's one-time employee turned competitor, and most vocal critic, didn't manage to build a light bulb. Instead he created the Tesla coil, whose high-voltage/low-amperage thunderbolts can be harnessed to make beautiful 8-bit music.

Back on point: I never got my "embrace failure" spiel written.

Schedule an appointment

(This post is two of six in a series.)

As, I pointed out in the title of this blog as well as my first post, field service is not hard. There are about 6 steps in the process. Some are more important than others, but without quality execution at each level, your field service quality will be poor.

Part 1 was to make a sale, not a promise. Today, I'll be talking about scheduling an appointment. Of course, this can't just be any appointment: it has to be one you can keep.

Booking and scheduling is pretty easy in general. Doing it correctly, though, is difficult.