Consulting

Back in the early days of computers, or so the legend goes, when an entire room housed less computing power than in today’s iPhone, a large government agency had a serious problem: their computer system stopped working. Though it was only three weeks since the system had been certified, the startup sequence refused to complete, leaving the agency lacking critical operational capabilities. Work on the project ground to a halt while every engineer on staff checked and rechecked wiring, tubes, and relays to find the issue. But two weeks of troubleshooting amounted to nothing, and the Director of the agency was beside himself with frustration. He decided to hire the worldwide expert on such computer systems, a retired professor who was known for his sense of humor. ...

Simon Wardley recently satirized the typical response of corporate IT departments to technology change as follows: Ignore, ignore, ignore, “no”, “no”, “I said ’no,’ dammit”, “Oh no”, “Oh, f**k”. It reminds me of the classic Toys-R-Us TV commercial from the 1980s featuring children singing about not wanting to grow up. Resistance to change is not unique to children or to IT departments - it is a feature of every organization. How can you help your organization avoid being stuck, and instead drive change before it’s unnecessarily painful to “grow up”? The key is urgency. Growing up is a good metaphor for organizational change: both are normal, both feature resistance, and in both the stakes increase over time. Immature people, like immature organizations, do not reliably achieve their goals. And the longer that inertia dominates, the further behind they remain. Failure to adapt - getting stuck - can be fatal, as it was for the Eastman Kodak Company. In personal as in organizational growth the pressure to change - the urgency - is fostered by discomfort. To increase urgency you need to cause people to feel discomfort with the current state of affairs. John P. Kotter’s seminal work Leading Change offers several kinds of tactics to increase urgency: ...

The owner of a home-based baking business once described his marketing strategy to me as “my cookies speak for themselves.” True, they were delicious cookies. But he completely neglected marketing so his customer base never grew beyond friends and family, and his business failed as a result. At a recent client meeting I was reminded of that baker. The CEO of a fledgeling tech business said to me, “our differentiating factor will be our superior service quality.” ...

A very good repeat client introduced me to his own customer, CEO of a fast-growing company, with the words “you should talk to Shlomo - he does wonders.” When I get an enthusiastic referral like that - which happens often, as most of my business is via referrals - I move fast to see how I can help. The CEO and I met and began to explore important areas of his business that I typically help with: usage of cloud resources, leveraging the data collected, streamlining processes and team dynamics. The discussion was progressing quickly - in fact, too easily, too rapidly - toward defining a potential project. I sensed something was wrong. He couldn’t describe why he wanted these things to get done; all he could say was, “this is the next issue we need to tackle.” ...

Recently I answered a question on the EC2 forums about how to give third parties access to EC2 instances. I noticed there’s not a lot of info out there about how to work with contractors, consultants, or even internal groups to whom you want to grant access to your AWS account. Here’s how. First, a Caveat Please be very selective when you choose a contractor. You want to make sure you choose a candidate who can actually do the work you need - and unfortunately, not everyone who advertises as such can really deliver the goods. Reuven Cohen’s post about choosing a contractor/consultant for cloud projects examines six key factors to consider: ...