Personal performance

Been measuring my own personal performance over the first few months of the year. All measurements really solid but dipped just before Easter. One thing I learned - once you're in a dip, it's hard work to get out of it (better to avoid the dip in the first place, if you can). It's very easy to find ways to spend your time - but to really perform, you need to work to targets and objectives. You also need to manage your energy levels - avoiding burnout whilst continuing to perform (a question of short-term benefit making longer term damage).

Here are my top tips for personal performance:
1) break long term objectives into short-term, achievable goals
2) measure your performance against these goals
3) reward yourself for achievements
4) learn to treat failure as part of the job

Any comments??

virtual panic

One European financial institution, planning a new virtualization programme this year as they look to shed costs, have been spinning wheels on getting a capacity management process implemented. If compared to others trodden the same path, this lack of up-front diligence will cost them time, handling rollbacks due to failing performance, and money as they overprovision excess capacity. Another similar institution reported 20% of all their virtualization program was subject to rollback, due to performance issues in production.

As performance issues begin to bite, panic mode sets in and organisations are forced into hasty remedial action, often requiring advanced monitoring and diagnostics in these complex environments. I was contacted recently by a tools provider targeting this market space - panic mode is very advantageous for them!

Sizing and capacity planning in any virtualization initiative is key to assuring success. Looking ahead and avoiding performance issues before they become reality is key to efficient IT operations. Aligning technology considerations and IT spend with business requirements is key to safeguarding efficiency, effective asset use and CIOs' jobs. Or, as they said in old English times before IT existed: "a stich in time, saves nine"

Baby steps

I was reminded today of the 'baby-steps' approach to improvement or transformation exercises. The conversation started with an IT Director listing his 4 key objectives for transformation: adopt risk-based approach to testing, improved capacity planning, cost-reduction, and an improved dialogue between business and technical heads. Swiftly running through these objectives, and considering any fit with our solutions, I was struggling to understand the roadmap to deliver all 4 benefits.

Humbly, I was reminded of the concept of 'baby steps' in implementing any transformation exercise - something I developed last year with another customer. By adopting a phased approach, ramped investment is aligned with successes.

The conversation ended with agreement to focus on key benefits of risk-based testing, and improved alignment. Taking the baby-steps approach makes it easier to find agreement and lead to success.

The Efficiency of "Right First Time"

Can you tolerate failure?

Some situations cannot tolerate failure: The highly political government project, the business-enabling SAP deployment or the market-leading e-business application all share a common characteristic - getting it wrong hurts.  And the most common symptom of getting it wrong?  Poor performance, poor availability, poor service - and disgruntled customers.

What happens then is where heros make their reputation.  Firefighting, troubleshooting, late-night candle-burning, bonus-generating heroics.  Don't get me wrong, it's great to be a hero - saving the day from evil, just before the clock ticks to zero.  But surely it's better not to get into that position in the first place?

Lessons from other industries

The use of simulation is common in industries where getting performance design right first time is critical to the bottom line.  Imagine building an aeroplane with control systems that didn't respond in times, semiconductors which performed worse than their predecessors, or civil engineering projects which couldn't handle the projected loads.  Scenario planning is also a favourite of agile business.  Just as a chess grand-master is thinking several moves ahead, the business planner looks beyond immediate trends and plans the impact of their next business strategy.

But, IT is sooo complex

For IT professionals, getting it wrong hurts equally as much; but here we are at a significant disadvantage.  The complexity of enterprise-class systems, the interconnected and often opaque nature of cloud services, the lack of insight into business initiatives leave us in the dark.    Whilst we're under constant pressure to reduce cost and risk, the ever-increasing complexity forces us to over-provision, to reduce the risk of getting it wrong. 

But is that right?  Is it true to say that IT is more complex than embedded avionic systems?  Probably it is not true to say that, although the rate of change is certainly higher.  Can we still afford to justify time in planning, even though the sands are constantly shifting under our feet?  In the past, we've focused just on a limited number of critical systems, or performed some pretty rudimentary analysis that makes us comfortable - and trusted in the heros.  But there must be a better way - a way that enables IT to be a part of the planning process, not just driven before the wind like a rudderless ship.  There must, mustn't there?

Converged scenario planning 

Times are changing.  Scenario planning tools have long been available in the marketplace, in the capacity planning sector, and now they are catching up with the needs of the business of cloud management.  Remember, that the agility of cloud computing provokes the need for better management of headroom - to maintain the capacity to support elastic demand, and cost - to do so at a profit.  Cloud Capacity Management solutions must incorporate and translate the needs of the business into capacity requirements, and also translate capacity requirements into business constraints.  And the universal language of business?  Currency.
The new world of the cloud demands alignment between the needs of the business and the capacity provided to it.  The cloud-enabled enterprise IT spend is proportionate to the needs of the business.  The cloud-provider has the challenge of ensuring that its revenue covers its costs and provides a profit margin to its stakeholders.  Efficient decision makers are seizing control of their supply chains, and ensuring that risks and costs are managed effectively throughout.  The convergence of cloud and consumer planning ensures transparency in that decision making process.

The new synergy

Successful business and IT leaders are getting their act together, and learning to co-operate in new fruitful ways.  Planning for IT and business initiatives through capacity management, with focus on both customer experience and the bottom line, is enabling enlightened decision makers to understand the ramifications of their alternative strategies, and understand the budget and risk parameters for their chosen plans.  

It turns out the old adage "a stitch in time saves nine" still has relevance today..

Performance in a downturn

Reviewing my activities over the last few months, it has been interesting to observe the different reactions that individuals and companies have to a downturn. Broadly speaking, conversations have led into one of two camps. The first is the more pessimistic, that cutbacks in budget are leading to reductions in planned expenditure - and that taking on new initiatives at this time would be foolish. The second camp, reveals a more entrepreneurial spirit - in that the downturn creates opportunity to develop better cost/efficiency in IT management processes and that additional value can be delivered to the business by implementing cost-savings measures.

As the CIO magazine reported recently, CIOs must show leadership to guide their organisations through the downturn. Delivering performance in a downturn is a test of guts, and presents a real opportunity to those who choose to grasp it. For some, improving cost/efficiency of their IT operations means pruning staff numbers - but for others, it means delivering increased results with a declining budget. Determination to deliver maximum value to your customer can position CIOs and IT professionals in the best place to weather this downturn.

Links:

• CIO Magazine
• HyPerformix

Model universe

A respected friend and technical expert discussed recently his concept of a Model Universe for an IT organisation. Conceptually, each and every activity that an IT organisation undertakes in delivering business value should be documented and understood using modelling techniques. Some people misunderstand business value.

Business value isn't described in computer talk, ITIL jargon, or CMMI frameworks. Business value is demonstrated in hard cash, brand awareness and market reputation. Business value is delivered by IT organisations in the generation of revenue, capacity for market access and quality of service to its customers. The value of a model universe can best be understood by removing the understanding of each of those attributes. It is the understanding that is captured and documented with a model, the understanding of the performance of the revenue generating vehicle, the capacity of the vehicle to access the market, and the quality of the service that the vehicle provides.

Without the understanding, you have a vehicle but no blueprint. You have the car, but no owners manual. Without the model universe, you have the capacity but are unaware of the limits. If you had that insight, what would you do with it?

manual vs automated "performance engineering"

When performance testing practises mature, recognising the connection between response time and system capacity, insight into the nature of the correlation becomes important. As often as there is a significant gap between a performance test scenario and potential live scenarios, the value of performance testing takes a blow. Filling that gap cost-effectively requires insight, which can only be gathered by correlating the workload, response time and system utilization. At this point, creating a performance model is the only technique that fits the gap.

But performance modelling can be a complex process, filled with uncertainty and concerns about time investments. Often, it's better err on the side of simplicity rather than drive into the details, however tempting it may be. Leadership in this field is essential to derive cost/efficiencies out of this maturity transformation; there are many complexities lurking for the unwary.

In my company HyPerformix, one recent customer success story came at PepsiCo. Doug Taylor, Enterprise Test Centre Architect, recently said "if I can shrink the amount of work I do on performance testing, it not only saves hardware and software dollars, because the machines are smaller, but it also decreases the amount of time that the performance team has to build an environment, run and environment, and test it".

Doug was able to make significant efficiency savings by moving from a performance testing model to a performance engineering model, and reduce the amount of time taken in one case from 5 months to just 1 day. Don't believe it? Review Doug’s webinar online here