Book Review-Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard

Robert Bogue January 11, 2012 No Comments

When is change easy? Switch sets out to make it easier to accomplish change in your organization, and your life. One of the things that my friends and colleagues call me is a change agent — that is like a catalyst I help drive changes into organizations. Most of the time, I describe that process as a framing process. I’m framing how things look when they’re running correctly. It’s often subtle little things that need to be fixed – a simple check on a requirement for whether it’s measurable or not. Other times it’s creating awareness that some kinds of problems are ordinary, normal, and candidly a sign of danger if they are missing.

Switch is based on a sustained metaphor. The metaphor is this. Humans are like a rider on top of an elephant. The rider is our logical, analytical, consciousness. The elephant is our emotional self with all of its instincts – and power. The rider and elephant are headed down a path. Fundamental to understanding the model is that the rider cannot make the elephant go where the elephant doesn’t want to go or stop going where you don’t want –unless, perhaps, you change the path. (the environment) The rider may be able to reign in the elephant for a while. The rider might be able to prod the elephant on. However, ultimately the control the rider has over the elephant is an exhaustible resource. The rider will get tired and the elephant will get his way.

We spend most of our lives with the rider quietly sitting atop the elephant, not providing the elephant much direction and the elephant walking down a well-worn path. If you don’t believe me, tell me about your drive into work or your drive home. If you’re like most people you won’t remember it. In fact you didn’t remember it the moment you pulled into the driveway. This is a good thing (sort of) because it means the rider doesn’t have to use his exhaustible resource on the elephant. The elephant already knows the way home. However, what are we doing with change? We’re asking the elephant to go off the well-known path. We’re using our rider to prod and direct the elephant off the common paths. If you’ve ever ridden an animal you’ll know that they have this instinctive pull to do what’s comfortable and what they expect. Get on a horse on the way back to the barn at dinner time and he’ll be in a dead run.

There are some funny misconceptions that we have about what causes change. We believe that people are ignorant of the reasons why their current path is bad. A smoker isn’t ignorant of the harmful health effects of smoking. It is, however, the path that’s in front of their elephant. A drug addict isn’t startled when someone in passing mentions that he might be harming himself. Knowledge doesn’t change behavior. Behavior change – and change in general is a SEE-FEEL-CHANGE proposition. The person has to internalize the knowledge. They have to feel the real pain before behavior will change. This works pretty well for individuals – but not necessarily so well at a corporate level.

The best part of the book for me was a question – -a single question “Suppose that you go to bed tonight and sleep well. Sometime, in the middle of the night, while you were sleeping, a miracle happens and all the troubles that you brought here are resolved. When you wake up in the morning, what’s the first small sign you’d see that would make you think ‘Well, something must have happened – the problem is gone!'” Wow. Basically you’re forcing the person to talk about a future state when the problem is gone (change has been completed). You’re also getting specific behaviors that could be created to move things in the right direction. It reminds me of one of my favorite elicitation questions “If you had a magic wand, what would you do?” Or the similar “If you could do just one thing, what would it be?”

I want to end with a final point from the book. Our rational rider seeks solutions which are commiserate with the size of the problem. A big problem needs a big solution. However, in life this is often not the case. A small course correction can make a huge impact if it’s done at the right time. (Think rocket maneuvers.) The really interesting thing is that from the top of the seesaw it’s hard to see where the fulcrum is. You should retrain your rider to think about shrinking the gap between where you want to be and where you are now. Help them slide that fulcrum just a bit to cause larger and larger changes.

While there are certainly more process oriented, more detailed, books to read on creating change – like Leading Change – but Switch is more likely to capture your heart (elephant) and mind (rider).

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

Book Review-Don’t Make Me Think

Robert Bogue January 11, 2012 No Comments

As someone who gets engaged by clients to help them work through their problems, you wouldn’t expect I’d like a book titled Don’t Make Me Think, but it’s perhaps the most accessible book on web usability that I’ve run into. In fact, I’d recommend it to anyone who has to build web sites. Why? Well, it’s short. It’s practical.

The basic premise is that when we look at something small thought bubbles form over our head and they often end in question marks “What?” “How is this supposed to work?” “Can I click this?” … Good web usability has FEWER of those question mark filled thought bubbles popping over folks heads. Obvious right, or is it?

How do we get there? Well, we’ve got to let go of some of our misbeliefs like…

We read web pages. No we don’t. We scan, skim, and flit. We’re trying to extract information off the page as soon as possible. We don’t have time to read. OK, sure the occasional article that’s particularly interesting or necessary but by and large we skim.
We make optimal choices. Seriously, who has the time for optimal choices? Sources of Power talked about how when pressed for time we don’t evaluate every possibility. The Paradox of Choice talked about the negative effects of maximizing (optimizing decisions).
We figure stuff out. Really? How much is there about your smart phone that you don’t know? If you’ve got an iPhone tap the user’s name in messages to scroll to the top. How about something simpler, explain how mobile phones switch from tower-to-tower (when they don’t drop the call)

The book includes some marvelously simple questions for determining how many question marks might appear over folks heads.

I’d recommend that everyone on a project to rebuild an intranet read the book – because it’s accessible to everyone. Maybe there’s something to this idea… Don’t Make Me Think.

Article: Building Trust on Your SharePoint Team

Robert Bogue January 11, 2012 No Comments

Quick! Define trust. No, seriously, pause and try to define it. I’ll bet you knew exactly how to define it until I asked you. If you did answer, perhaps you answered with “knowing that another person will come through for you.” That’s not trust. Rather, it’s trustworthiness of another person. Successful SharePoint implementations rely on trust in two key ways: first, your team, or coalition, needs to trust one another to be effective. Second, your users have to trust your commitment to SharePoint.

If you don’t have trust in your coalition, you’ll achieve little or nothing as backstabbing and infighting consume everyone’s energy. If you don’t have trust in your users, you’ll have a platform with no one using it. Let’s take a look at how to build the trust you need.

http://www.sharepointpromag.com/blog/sharepoint-pro-by-admins-devs–industry-observers-23/sharepoint/building-trust-sharepoint-team-141797 [Article removed]

Article: Training Search to be Your Adult Learning Hero

Robert Bogue January 11, 2012 No Comments

“Eyes forward. If you can’t pay attention, I’ll rap your knuckles with my ruler.” This may be an echo of a strict Catholic education or it may be a hyperbole of how your child is being trained at school, but either way, it doesn’t have a place in how you educate the adult learners in your organization.

Malcolm Knolwes in his book, The Adult Learner: The Definitive Classic in Adult Education and Human Resource Development , discusses andragogy – or learning for adults – and why it’s different than pedagogy – learning for children. The conclusion is that there are six key assumptions about adult learning:

Need to Know
Foundation
Self-Concept
Readiness
Orientation
Motivation

Trying to put these together into a single context; it’s clear that adult learners need to be trained at the moment in time that they need the learning (readiness), why they need to know a piece of information (need to know), that they have the foundational concepts necessary to integrate the new information (foundation) and that they have an understanding of the problem they are trying to solve (self-concept). The training must be focused on solving problems (orientation) and the motivation for learning must map to the internal motivations of the student (motivation).

Article: How to Reduce Your Application Backlog with SharePoint

Robert Bogue January 5, 2012 No Comments

In many organizations application backlogs are measured in years, not months or weeks. Here are some critical tips on how you can use Sharepoint to reduce that backlog and get things moving in the right direction.

There’s always more CIOs can do to help the business succeed.

Regardless of what company you work for, there seems to be an unending parade of requests to integrate some new application, or develop some application for a part of the business where you can’t find a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) product to solve.

Like many CIOs today, despite the unending list of tasks you have been assigned, you may also be faced with a flat or shrinking budget. If you’re in that enviable position, having the limited budget finding the right people is always a challenge. This begs the question: How do you improve your internal satisfaction and reduce the backlog of applications to build?

Book Review-The Adult Learner: The Definitive Classic in Adult Education and Human Resource Development

Robert Bogue December 29, 2011 No Comments

It takes a lot of moxie to call yourself a definitive classic. However, the subtitle of The Adult Learner is probably correct. I picked up the book because of my work on the SharePoint Shepherd Presents DVD series. The goal of the series is to make learning more accessible to people who need it. The series started with some preliminary research on the challenges of getting specific content at a time that was appropriate. I was being asked by customers – who were ready to make a move – when there would be a conference they could attend that would have what they need. Even with the conferences cranked up to full speed it was an average of three months away for someone to get to the conference that would get them the information they wanted and even then there would always be gaps. A conference organizer has to pick and choose with limited slots what content they want to have delivered. All of this lead to the realization that we needed a way for people to get to the information they needed – when they needed it.

This is consistent with Andragogy – a framework (or set of techniques) for teaching adults. Before I get too far into this discussion I should say that The Adult Learner goes to great lengths to discuss the validation – or lack thereof – of the andragogy principles. From my point of view the primary issue, raised in the book, is that there’s no effective way of measuring learning in a broad sense. That brings us to the difference between education and learning. Education is about the acquisition of knowledge or skill. Education is therefore difficult to measure. You can measure recall of the information but since usefulness – what we’re aiming for – can only be measured in context, it’s notoriously difficult to measure education. Learning, however, implies a change in the behaviors of a person and those behavior changes may be able to be monitored – except that there’s no psychometrically valid instrument to do so – yet. (Psychometrics is completely oversimplified as applying statistics to psychology mostly to measure education and learning.)

All of that is to say that we believe that the principles of Andragogy are appropriate for most adults, however, there’s not a lot of hard numbers that are available to support this belief. Andragogy was moved forward most by Malcolm Knowles (one of the authors of The Adult Learner) with what became six basic principles:

Need to Know
Foundation
Self-Concept
Readiness
Orientation
Motivation

Trying to put these together into a single context; it’s clear that adult learners need to be trained at the moment in time that they need the learning (readiness), why they need to know a piece of information (need to know), that they have the foundational concepts necessary to integrate the new information (foundation), and that they have an understanding of the problem they are trying to solve (self-concept). The training must be focused on solving problems (orientation) and the motivation for learning must map to the internal motivations of the student (motivation).

In addition to the core framework of Andragogy, there are numerous other citings and alternative views presented. The Adult Learner explores why adults choose to learn – to solve a problem, to develop a social network, or for the joy of learning itself – as well as reasons why adults reasonably reject learning.

The Adult Learner also explores the tension between Andragogy and the needs of human resource professionals who are charged with training the organization in the key skills it needs to be safe and effective. Andragogy proposes that learners should be in greater control of their learning experience – that they should be self-directed – and yet human resource development would dictate that the organization has certain needs for skills that employees and volunteers must be taught.

I believe that if you’re trying to teach adults, whether it is as a content or a courseware provider, an instructor, or a learning professional, you should read The Adult Learner.

The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases & Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly

Book Review-The New Rules of Marketing and PR

Robert Bogue December 25, 2011 No Comments

David Meerman Scott shares his view of how the rules have changed in The New Rules of Marketing and PR. There’s a subtitle longer than your arm that seems to include every possible keyword that anyone who is doing marketing might be looking for – I was not really interested in trying every possible approach to marketing. After all I’m not checking off items in a list. I want to try to figure out how to make my marketing effective.

To over simplify the message – you’re not trying to get attention – you’ve got attention – you’re trying to educate the market on your value proposition or build credibility through your content so that they’ll come back to understand your value proposition. Instead of building a site to sell to a prospect, you’re creating a place for the prospect to learn about you and what you know. As a consultant I can say that I learned a long time ago that there’s a certain amount of “spilling the candy” that has to happen when you meet a new client. That means that you have to give the client some of the answers so that they know that you’ve got the rest of the answers to their questions.

The interesting bit about this is that you can’t spill ALL the candy – you can’t solve every problem for them – but you have to create the credibility that comes with having answers to their questions. This would tend to leave you with the idea that you shouldn’t share everything you know on your web site or blog – however, this misses an important point (or two). That is that you’ll never be able to codify all of your knowledge on to your web site. There are nuances and details that can’t be communicated until you’re literally in the situation. I can tell you everything you want to know about SharePoint Workflow, professional SharePoint Development, Information Architecture, however, having to put all of the pieces together from a few dozen blog posts, articles, and presentations, there will be gaps that will refuse to be filled. (Sidebar: I’m spending a great deal of time refining my posts, articles, and presentations into the SharePoint Shepherd Presents series of DVDs to ensure that those gaps are filled.)

A key area of focus for the book is Personas and their power to help focus your marketing efforts. I was exposed to the idea of Personas through work with Microsoft. These fictional characters represented an anchor for product development – and they can do the same thing for marketing. It’s really hard to target everyone because so often in targeting everyone you’re targeting no one. So personas give you a way to anchor to a specific ideal person. Of course, the persona is fictional, just a made up person but the story of that person is the story of your target buyer or buyers. A persona consists of a bit of demographic data basis… including the age and gender of the person who buys what you’re selling as well as a picture and a made up story of their background to make them more real. There’s something magical about thinking about a specific person to focus your thoughts. Personas are a way to help you get to marketing messages with a target.

One of the other encouragements in the book is to learn the language of your customer and use those words – rather than the words that you would normally use – to improve the chance that the prospect will resonate with the message you’re sending. If you’re selling training (as I am) it might make sense to talk about ILT (Instructor Led Training) or CBT (Computer Based Training) rather than talking about training in general – or making the assumption that all training is ILT. Scott recommends researching the magazines the prospect is reading, reading the conference packets to understand what is being talked about, and anything that will help you better understand the concerns the prospect is facing and the language that the prospects are using.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you know that I’ve been reading and reviewing social media books for a while. (See: Wikinomics, Blink, The Wisdom of Crowds, Linked, and The Long Tail) As a result I’m no stranger to the idea of using social media as a platform for driving business forward. Scott delivers more push around ideas for leveraging the power of social media from giving eBooks away to participating in the social networks that operate today.

The book wraps up with the idea of using press releases targeted to the consumer instead of the press as a way to get better search engine optimization and as a way to communicate with the consumer. I can say that I’m not a big fan of this approach. Having run a web site for Internet.com where I was reposting press releases as stories I can support the idea that journalists are hungry for content they can repurpose and use, however, I never saw much response to the work I was doing.

The New Rules of Marketing and PR is a good survey of concepts for marketing and a good read if you’re looking to sharpen your focus on marketing efforts.

My 10 Years in SharePoint

Robert Bogue December 24, 2011 No Comments

I vividly remember working in publishing in 2000. We had just survived what was supposed to be the cataclysmic events of the millennium. Of course, we were not plunged into some dark abyss where power plants stopped functioning and traffic lights started showing green in all directions. Microsoft was talking about moving Microsoft Office to the server. They wanted to play in the document management space. They also had a rag-tag group of folks from Vermeer Technologies who were demonstrating interactive web sites with FrontPage extensions. The result was Microsoft releasing SharePoint Team Services (STS) and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2001 in relatively short succession.

The problem was that STS and Portal Server were as different as night and day. Portal server was built around the Exchange database engine and STS was built around SQL server. Portal server was focused on documents and had versions. STS was built around lists of items and didn’t have versions.

Ten years ago there were expensive document management systems were expensive. You only implemented them if you had a major process to automate. Lists were being created with Microsoft Access – or more commonly Microsoft Excel but sharing and managing that list data was difficult. Inside an organization the spreadsheets would fly back and forth. The lists were shared externally via email as well – sometimes unintentionally. Coordinating changes was a huge challenge.

I started building on SharePoint in 2001 with a project designed to improve the ability for a packaging company to communicate with its partners. It was innovative at the time – and it meant struggling through the development on a platform that wasn’t really ready for people to program on it. The version of the Exchange database engine that SharePoint used had issues – and it wasn’t really designed for what it was being used for so we found quirk after quirk. I vividly remember that none of the monitoring tools would tell us that SharePoint was down because deep in the core SharePoint would send an HTTP 100 Continue message if it ever couldn’t respond quick enough. That’s great if you’re waiting on the database to return a record but horrible if you’re in a deadlock situation where the resources are all consumed. It meant that we had to write custom tools to plug into the monitoring tools to detect if SharePoint was down.

The 2003 versions of the software moved Portal Server to a SQL database engine but lost versioning in the process. The net result was organizations that really couldn’t upgrade because they had built processes around the versioning – sure there were the backwards compatible document libraries in 2003 – but that was just the same as leaving 2001 around since they still ran on the Exchange database engine and had a completely different set of features which served to create confusion.

By about 2005 my entire world became SharePoint. Instead of doing ecommerce development I was building intranets and integrating systems into SharePoint. Mostly it was moving from a system designed to support external folks to supporting internal folks. The real benefit was that I was used to high-activity web development which most developers of the time weren’t used to – and in many ways high volume web sites is still a rarity.

In 2007 portal server was dropped from the name and Office was added. This reflected the much stronger integration to the Office client applications than had ever been possible – but the loss of the word Portal was the definite signal that the world had changed. It used to be that everyone wanted a portal, a place from which everyone would launch into the corporate resources. However, by 2007 it was clear that the word portal was too fuzzy and confusing to be useful. After all, we were in the age of search, not the age of portals. Yahoo had lost to Google.

In 2007 we were finally back where we started with versioning with a few enhanced features along the way, like our new workflow engine. However, the big change was less about SharePoint and more about the transformation SharePoint had caused – or at least participated in. By 2008 the document management market was starting to soften. People realized that the big systems for document management weren’t needed so much anymore. SharePoint 2007 might not handle large organization document management needs but most organizations could see value by using SharePoint.

By 2010 we finally had the set of tools in the product to support larger scale document management scenarios. Development tools were integrated into Visual Studio so we didn’t have so much heavy lifting. No longer were we hand-crafting XML, Text files and creating CAB files. Finally we can focus on getting things done rather than dealing with the mechanics of SharePoint development.

I had the honor of spending 10 months working on the Microsoft patterns and practices SharePoint Guidance – so we’ve finally got some good guidance for SharePoint development. In short, I believe we’ve finally got a platform for development.

Today, we’re thinking about enabling corporate developers to create solutions by developing code in the Sandbox. We’re looking at enabling organizations to have SharePoint hosted in the cloud. Strangely while I’m having conversations with clients about Sandboxed solutions and the cloud very little of what I do fits in either of these categories.

It’s a pretty different world than 10 years ago when I started – but I believe it is honestly a better one – at least when it comes to SharePoint.

Article: Strategies for Integrating SharePoint into Your Learning Strategy

Robert Bogue December 24, 2011 No Comments

Like it or not, 2 out of every 3 organizations are using SharePoint, Microsoft’s unstoppable platform for communications, collaboration and information management. SharePoint can be a great tool for learning organizations and it represents potential competition for a learning portal. The good news is that SharePoint’s array of options for integration that make it an ideal platform to marry up with an existing Learning Management System (LMS).

Without an LMS
Perhaps you’re just starting to get your programs off the ground and you don’t have an LMS in place. SharePoint has a series of options for you. You can start with the SharePoint Learning Kit (http://slk.codeplex.com ) which supports SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004. The basic features such as managing assignments, individual classes and training programs are supported. While there are certainly richer for-pay options which bolt on to SharePoint, you can get your feet wet with a SharePoint based LMS virtually for free. The SharePoint Learning Kit (SLK) is free and will even run on SharePoint Foundation so you don’t need a separate license to use it.

The for-fee SharePoint based LMS tools add more types of quizzes, surveys and better administration tools for a price. The good news is that from a price-perspective the SharePoint based LMS solutions tend to have lower costs because they do not have to make investments into basic document and list management, security or portal features – all that comes “for free” from the platform.

Pouring Concrete around Your Development in SharePoint

Robert Bogue December 24, 2011 No Comments

Several times over the last few weeks I’ve been confronted in one way or another with the need to protect coding from the interloping of the user and site administrator in SharePoint and conversely I’ve seen attempts to pour concrete around development that could be better left in sand so that it could be changed and moved. Through this I realized that there’s a need for better understanding around the model shift with SharePoint and its impact on software configuration management (SCM).

SharePoint’s a Different Kind of Animal

It’s often been said that SharePoint is a desert topping and a floor wax – paying homage to Shimmer a fictional product from Saturday Night Live. It’s also been said that SharePoint is like the proverbial elephant discovered by five blind men – each having a different perspective of what the animal is. Even within SharePoint you can see very different parts of the platform, however, some of the most interesting changes aren’t about the product itself but in the things that it enables organizations to do.

By removing the barriers to creation (what Microsoft calls composites) the tool allows business users to create solutions to their problems. They dynamically create storage for new kinds of information – which in the past required a database administrator to create a table or add a column. The business user can string together a list, a workflow, and some alerts and create a system for managing or supporting some business process. The agility afforded by this toolset means that changes can be made at any time. In SharePoint many of these changes are version controlled so if a mistake is made the user simply reverts to the previous version.

This agility is in stark contrast to the structure of a large scale development effort. Organizations spend an inordinate amount of time building structure around the software development process so that systems can be recovered and recreated. This effort is necessary in a world where specialized skills are necessary to create and maintain systems. You simply can’t have the payroll system changing everyday – and changing in ways where it’s difficult to explain to an employee – or the government – why a person was paid exactly what they were paid. So there are source control systems where code is maintained and controlled. There are configuration management practices which are used to govern changes to the system.

All of this leads to both repeatability – you can restore to any point in time and replicate it anywhere at any time – and control. This is desirable from a recovery perspective. These two outcomes are very desirable in a traditional system – and since traditional systems don’t allow users to create solutions on their own their relatively limited flexibility and need for coordinated activities is not a major barrier.

The real question comes when the rigidity of a SCM meets the agility of SharePoint and we have to answer hard questions about whether something should be treated as traditional code or whether it should live in the user world of agility.

Mapping the Extremes and the Middle

Even in SharePoint there’s some level of clarity that some things are software development and need SCM. If you’re deploying farm based solutions there’s a need to have a brief outage as the software is deployed – this is a clear reason to control the rate of deployments of solutions. Equally clearly if you are adding a contact to a contact list, you know that this is content and therefore should be handled like content – instead of being handled like code. That’s the easy part. Where it gets more difficult is when you look at items which are markup languages and non-compiled languages.

Consider that Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) controls the look and feel of the web site. It’s a language for expressing how the display should look. Most folks don’t consider CSS to be a programming language; it’s a markup language much like HTML. However, there is a sense that CSS should be protected like code because it has a great potential for causing issues on the site. Yet, many new web parts need their own snippet of CSS to work, sometimes overriding the behavior of the code CSS for the solution.

Like CSS, eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) isn’t a programming language. It’s a markup language with potentially huge power to change the appearance of the site. With that sort of power it “feels like” it should be a part of SCM and managed. But what about the XSLT used to format search results, or the results from a Really Simple Syndication (RSS)? It seems like our rules break down when the same technology is used for core system things and for user controlled formatting of resulting data.

JavaScript is the language for manipulating objects in HTML once it’s at the client. It’s a programming language, no question about it. This would lead you to believe that it should be a part of the SCM – but again with SharePoint we often have JavaScript that is a part of a web part that a user might add to a page. Do we restrict all JavaScript to being a part of the SCM process?

In SharePoint we also have the unique challenge of SharePoint features and the XML they contain. XML can tell SharePoint to create a content type, a list or even to create data. So does the XML that sets up your list and the sample data count as code – or content? Making the situation more challenging is the user code host – sandbox execution – which allows compiled code to run in a restrictive environment.

Does your head hurt yet?

Criteria for Decision Making

It used to be that we could make a simple decision. If it was compiled it was code – and if you didn’t have to compile it then it wasn’t “real” code. However, over the years the lines have blurred to the point where making the decision based on the file type doesn’t work. Instead we need to make decisions based on the intended use of the file.

Breaking down intended use a bit there are two key things to think about. First, what’s the worst that can happen? In other words, if the file gets modified, out-of-sync, or destroyed what’s the worst case? Second, how are changes going to be managed?

In the case of what’s the worst that can happen, you might have a style sheet that drives the rendering of the entire site. In this case the impact of the file being modified or deleted is pretty large. As a result you would want to protect against that. Conversely, if there’s a style sheet that is responsible for a minor part of the web site – it might be OK to treat that as content. SharePoint has built in version control and a recycle bin so recovery should be as simple as reverting to a previous version or recovering the file from the recycle bin.

The other side of the coin is how the changes are going to be managed. If you go the code approach to management you have to go through the configuration management process to deploy the code to controlled environments. This can add weeks and weeks of time to the deployment cycle. If there’s any need for agility you can’t treat it as code. Conversely, if the item never or rarely changes it might be acceptable to treat it as code. When making the decisions you should consider how many variations of the same thing that there may be – if there are many variations it’s harder to manage them as code.

Of course, some items, those items which are compiled code that can’t be deployed to the sandbox must be treated as code and managed through the software configuration management process so the decision has been made for you due to technical or design limitations. For everything else, the question is how you’re planning on using it.

Making it Concrete

Treating anything with a configuration management process is like pouring concrete around it. It’s certainly possible to remove something buried in concrete by breaking the concrete out and starting over – but it’s not nearly as easy as pulling up stakes and moving on. There are some things you need to pour concrete around. A backyard basketball goal needs concrete to steady it. However, Pouring concrete around the stakes of your tent may not be the best choice. Pour concrete when you need to – and avoid pouring concrete when you don’t need to.

Public Speaking

SharePoint’s a Different Kind of Animal

Mapping the Extremes and the Middle

Criteria for Decision Making

Making it Concrete

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Public Speaking