How to be a better consultant

This is a follow up to an earlier post about manageing consultants and contractors.This time I am looking at how consultants can do a better job for their customers and themselves.

There is obviously a limit on how much information I fit into one picture, but I hope it might be useful to people new in the consulting industry — you should modify this to fit your own situation of course.

Feedback is always welcome.

Beware the 9-2-5-er!

So, (first question) are project managers a different breed? Are they motivated by extrinsic incentives (like salesmen) when all the management science literature tells us that knowledge workers are motivated intrinsically (I never have been sure I believed all that science but we hear it repeated often enough from many in the agile community)?

AgileManagement

I was reading a post about project managers when this phrase leapt out and bashed me over the head, only where the author wrote “project manager” I saw “developers-who-don’t-give-dam”. It is an unfortunate fact of life that many developers display a 9 to 5, this-is-just-my-job, attitude (9-2-5-ers) that is at odds to the ‘I want to always do things better and learn’ approach required to be a member of a successful Agile team.

There are several reasons why this attitude creates a problem:

A new buzzword

I have decided that Agile is

1. Grossly overused and over hyped
2. Promoted at the single silver bullet for all projects and project problems

A lot (most) of this is balderdash! However an Agile approach is till useful in many situations but in an effort to avoid the Agile bandwagon I will be using the term “Appropriately Lightweight” — more on what this might mean for developers and application lifecycle management in the ongoing blog, I have already posted some material on lightweight ticket processes previously.

Or should that be a new “buzzphrase”?

Learning a soft skill

So if you’re a developer who interacts with the business then you have a responsibility to respect the decisions of others, and you’ll probably benefit from honing your influence skills as well as your technical skills.

Cogent Thoughts: Do unto others…

Quite right, however this begs the question “how does a young developer improve their influence skills?”.

I believe the answer lies in

An intresting idea

The Easy Access Training program is a way for individual developers to get access to training on their own time, at relatively low cost. Courses are run on weekends, we use suburban venues, and where required we ask people to bring their own laptops. We also have an unusual approach to pricing!

Cogent Consulting Services

Steve Hayes from Cogent proposes a novel approach to offering training courses. I went to a short presenation he gave at MXPEG earlier in the month and he is very good, so this could be a chance to snap up some great training at an affordable price.

Blogged with Flock

What is Alec up to?

After the dust settled from OSDC what am I doing?

1. Trying to get some things finished up for my customer
2. Thinking about my next contract (hint, hint)
3. Migrating to Ubunto Linux and upgrading to Firefox 2
4. Looking to turn my OSDC slides into a more substantial article and add some cool new featurs to the demo (e.g. two way build dependency tracking, reports, integration into cmake,…. solving world hunger)
5. Improving my Vim work habits: use more macros and scripts for Perl programming; use Vim for XML and HTML editing (including blogging)
6. Try and get much better at Test Driven Development, more on that in a future post
7. Get to bed earlier
8. Become better at all the business admin stuff
9. Get back on the GTD wagon
10. Make posts to my blog at least once every two days
11. Get a spell checker working here!

Let’s see how much sticks?

These are forward looking statements and no commitment should be inferred

Testing Applications and Suites using Perl and TAP

Perl has excellent testing support with frameworks such as Test::More, these tools present test results in a standard text format call TAP.

As far as I can tell all, of the current CPAN testing frameworks are designed to test Perl Modules (.pm files). Because of this they are designed to be consumers of the services provided by the modules under test. (Update 10/Jan/07 — Correction)

Slides and example scripts

Update 1/Jan/08 — material can now be found at http://github.com/alecclews/svnbuilding/tree/master

I mentioned some time ago that I was writing a paper about building software under configuration managemenet control. I’ve posted the slides below that I presented at OSDC today, plus the example driver script and makefile can be download from Github.

I still hope to provide a full paper with more detail later. In the meantime please feel to use and provide feedback.

powered by performancing firefox

Updated 12/Nov/08 — I’ve just noticed that Git supports the concepts of attributes. If I get enough time (don’t hold your breath) I’ll try and create some Git based examples

Why I really dislike Microsoft

Andrew suggests that people like me who dislike Microsoft are doing it for reasons of juvenile jealousy. Speaking for myself that’s actually completely wrong, I dislike Microsoft because:

• Their attempt to force Windows adoption by releasing compilers with no MS DOS support long before Windows became a standard PC platform and there were still many, many, DOS users.
• The way they treated Stac Electronics in the ’90s
• The poor quality of MS operating systems, IMHO it was not until Windows 2000 that Windows became of just about usable quality
• The fact that so much data is locked up in secret MS Office file formats
• and so on…

Once upon Bill Gates was someone I admired, but then I grew up. BTW, I am neither a graduate or young (unfortunately)

I owe everyone an apology

After attending Amanda’s excellent tutorial on CSS it appears that I have been completlty wrong in setting up my links to open in an external page, like this one.

Aplogies to anyone who has found this really annoying. I will do better in the future and hopefully I’ll go back and fix old posts as I make updates.

OK groupies, this where you need to go

For any groupies who want to come and hang on my every word at OSDC, my presentation has been scheduled for Friday (8/Dec), 11:00 in room 2.

In order to reduce the amount of clearing up could the young ladies please try and limit the number of recently worn knickers thrown on the stage. Thanks

Yet more productivity pr0n

Jesse over at Hiveminder has been busy fiddling with Google API, so Hiveminder can now function as a task management system emebedded in Google Calendar. It’s described here

I shall be trying to use this a bit more over the next few days to see how I get on, I’ll add my conclusions here.

P.S. If your are confused by the title then read this