This matter about professionalism at work was raised recently, and I thought I have some 2 cents to share about, particularly to people who are just starting out their work life. This is not about professionalism in the context of your job specification, but about the work itself that you do for your company. They are not the same thing. For example, a real estate agent could be very professional in his conduct with his customers, but could be lesser so in his duties to his company.

What I’m talking about is that you have a duty to make a positive contribution toward the success of your company. In today’s highly competitive globalized economy, everyone is expected to “value-add”. Just “doing your part” is not enough. Many people, however, think it is okay to just do their part… or in other words, to get by with the bare minimum to meet their KPI.

If there were just three levels of ranking, “does not meet requirements”, “meets requirements”, and “exceeds requirements”, you should understand that just merely accomplishing your goals and achieving your KPI expectations only earns you “meets requirements”. I would actually take this one step further: If this is all a very capable performer achieved, then that person has underperformed. Yes, it sounds contradictory… meets requirements, but yet is underperforming. That’s because this person would just merely be “getting by”.

Of course, different people work for different reasons. Clearly, some people are just working to earn a salary every month. They are happy with their salary, and they are happy with what they do, and they have no wish to do more. You can’t really fault them. They are doing their job. You also do need these people around.

The problem is, as you (the person and/or the company) move up the value chain, you are expected to do more than just your job. In other words, your job is to do more than what your job specifications say.

I’m not saying you need to sell your soul and devote your life to your company, but you need to put in the effort to chip in that little extra. I realize some people might consider this “very high expectations”, but I don’t think so. Doing your job well is just merely expected. Remember that. Just doing your job well is a fundamental expectation.

Then, when I say to do “more than what your job specifications say”, I really need to qualify that it has to be in-line with the job or company objectives. That’s because there is a demographic of the workforce who are highly talented, brilliant performers, who can do plenty of extra… but just not what is really needed. They do it for themselves, not for their company. This group of people can do what you need them to do, but they will not do it. They have their own agenda.

Let me say a little about short-changing. An example of short-changing is using your work hours to do other personal things. So you do come to work on-time, and you don’t go off early… but you aren’t really working during the whole time. Most people do it at some point or other. Some people rationalize that it is alright because you make up for the lost time through working late, or working at home. That could actually be alright, particularly if the nature of your work allows for such flexibility. What is not alright is when you take advantage of the flexibility so that your other activities interfere with your work.

There are, of course, other angles to this matter of professionalism at work. I don’t plan to write a long essay on this subject, but just to share this aspect of it. How are you adding value?

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It’s actually taking up more days, because for the CCNA courses, I’ve got to spend quite a bit of preparation time for slides, labs and other materials. So it seems like there’s not much time left to get other office work done. Too many courses just happened to end up being scheduled too close to each other, not that I had planned them to be so.

The Lean Sigma course is pretty interesting. It’s very long, though, stretching for nine days over two weeks. To minimize disruption to regular work, the two weeks are not consecutive, but split one month apart. Fortunately, the main trainer for the course is pretty good. The topics, at least some of them, can be very dry, but he manages to maintain attention. I’m sure the lessons taught will be useful and practical. I wonder, however, if the whole training course could have been expedited. Perhaps I’m looking for an express version of the course.

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I am reminded of a certain course feedback that I had to complete. The feedback form asked to rank various items. Things like venue, facilities, teaching aids. They were all fine. Things about the instructor, like, his presentation skills, ability to engage the class, his knowledge of the subject matter, etc. Basically, I scored everything above average. Those were the honest answers to the questions asked. But… I felt the course failed. The feedback form did not capture the most important question: Was the instructor able to achieve the objective of the course? Did the instructor cover relevant materials?

You see, he was off-topic no less than 80% of the time. I felt almost like I attended the wrong class. I felt the need to reflect my disappointment, but the designers of the course feedback form obviously didn’t think about all the right questions to ask. (I know, there is the “any other comments” box to write my long-winded complaint… but that’s besides the point.)

That’s how it is with staff appraisals. To make comparisons simple, you ask lots of objective questions. They are measured on scales and with indices. The scoring could still end up being subjective. But, never mind that, because my beef with the system is that sometimes the most important detail slips through and has nowhere to go except the “any other comments” box.

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Yet, unsurprisingly, the official interim standing on the matter is that, according to in-house EMF experts, there is no cause for concern.

This reminds me a lot about GSM antennas. Some people protest about the presence of GSM antennas, and call on the telcos to provide official statements on the health impact and safety of such transmitters. But of course, they will just refer to information published by equipment manufacturers, regulatory bodies, etc… all of them would definitely have concurred that they are harmless, otherwise there wouldn’t have been GSM antennas anywhere in the first place.

Well, the blessing is that the EMF paranoia has resulted in an EMF meter becoming available, and which I could borrow. How fun. So I started going around measuring everything… work table, monitor, notebook, handphone, speakers, etc. Surprisingly the biggest culprit was the transformer for the speakers. Apple things are pretty EMF-free… practically none detected from their power adapters.

Handphones are often prime suspects. Well, the Nexus One fared pretty well. None detected except from the top-left corner… where the reading was just around 2 – 3 mG. That seems pretty okay. I was just thinking about the iPhone 4 antenna saga. You know, about the problems with their bottom-left corner. I wonder if that’s why other phones are better than the iPhone 4, but perhaps this is just totally unrelated… EMF vs signal reception.

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It’s not a question of working “over time”. I recently spoke to some people who talked about how they come on the dot, leave on the dot, and believe they don’t owe anything to their organization after office hours (unless they are working with over-time compensation). That’s not the point.

It’s about doing what your role in the organization calls for you to do. It’s about being dependable to do what you need to do. It’s about being responsible for what you’ve been entrusted with. I think these are the minimal requirements.

I’m not even asking for initiative, teamwork, leadership, creativity, analytical thinking, etc.

Some people aren’t even willing to meet those minimal requirements.

Some people choose what they prefer to do, rather than what they need to do. Of course, choice and flexibility is something we should accommodate. But… hey, if you were employed to do A, you don’t come to work wanting to do B instead! It’s not like you didn’t know what you were in for.

Or others who spend organization time and money to do A, because they like to do A, even though they have been categorically told the organization doesn’t want to do A.

All of us have limited time and whatever resources. The same goes for the organization. It’s just so unproductive when pockets of people have their own agenda that doesn’t gel with that of the organization.

The one thing I’m most astonished about the SAF is how it hasn’t collapsed… despite how it is mostly made up of unhappy people who don’t want to be in there.

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The problem is that some (or perhaps many) people think that IT projects are just like non-IT projects, and they run IT projects just like non-IT project. IT projects are different, and you need to manage them differently. Sure, there are some principles of project management that apply the same way, but it is a fatal mistake to treat an IT project the same as a non-IT project. Perhaps that’s why IT projects sometimes fail.

Non-IT projects like, say, construction, renovation, or relocation, are what I consider “traditional” projects. These projects are “easy”. Alright, I know the people who do these sort of projects are not going to be pleased that I make their work sound simple. But here’s what I mean. The projects are straight-forward because there are results that can be seen, results that can be measured objectively, man-effort that can be estimated, timelines that are deterministic.

IT projects don’t quite work the same way. You could have consumed 90% of the time, but have little measurable results. It’s right at the end, perhaps that last 10% of the time, when things come together, something we call “integration”, that present the biggest challenges. That’s where things fall apart. You have to manage risks. You have to foresee problems. You have to make backup plans. It’s like playing a game of chess where you have to map out strategies way ahead of time. There may be standard patterns to follow, but there certainly aren’t standard solutions.

I talk about risk management because, really, IT project management is about reducing risks. The goal is to reduce risk level to 0%, at which point, it means the project is “deterministically completed” and you can speak about committed delivery.

The traditional non-IT projects don’t quite work the same way. So in a complicated IT/non-IT project mix, the interaction becomes a little problematic.

What is the point of asking me for a best-case scenario expedited completion time? An estimate that removes all my rubber time, and assumes everything happens on-time and works perfectly right-away? Maybe it’s nice to know, from high-level planning, what kind of best case scenario we’re talking about. But you cannot do this for committed timelines!

Say you are upgrading the computers at the Singapore Stock Exchange over the weekend. Let’s say trading hours begin at 8:30am on Monday. Do you want your project to complete by 8:30am in the best-case scenario? Or do you want a firm commitment that it will complete by 8:30am? Actually, better yet, do you want a firm commitment that it will complete sufficient early, so that if it screws up, you can activate a well-tested backup plan to restore full operations by 8:30am?

This is so simple and such a no-brainer. But I am just so shocked to have to argue over these nonsense about fixing a timeline. How can you plan an IT project based on best-case scenarios?

When I was “new”, I used to grossly overrun my operational maintenance schedules. Then someone told me this: Estimate the time taken, multiply by two, increase one order of magnitude. So if you think it takes 2 minutes to implement a change in a network device, multiple by two to get 4 minutes, then one order of magnitude to make it 4 hours. Alright, maybe this is an exaggeration. But really, you will grossly overrun the time that you think is only actually needed. With experience, we learn how to make realistic estimates of task times. Even with experience, I am still overrunning my estimates from time to time.

IT is the lifeline for many services and applications. Even more so for network. The phone, for example, already runs on the data network in many companies. Do you want to come to work knowing that the phone will work, or merely wondering if the phone will be working that day? You probably don’t even actually think about it, because you assume that, obviously, the phone will work. Whoever actually thinks it is acceptable for the phone to not work?

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I have been in such a situation where, being part of a sub-organization seconded on a short-term to another sub-organization to help out on a certain project, that I found such silo structure so ingrained in just about everyone’s attitude in that other sub-organization. I had considered myself an “outsider”, because there was little interaction between our sub-organizations (it’s not a silo-y matter). So I found it so strange to be rallying people from that other sub-organization to get things moving. I was thinking, why is it they could not work with each other?

That was a long time ago. I was thankful that it wasn’t like that around me. Or is it?

It’s been a lousy week. Organizational problems, people problems, lunch-date problems. A simple phone call to ask a question can be treated with so much animosity. It seems like alliances have shifted. Or, maybe they hadn’t existed in the first place, and it was just a mistake to think that they did. Simple communication can become so complicated. Simple coordination can become so complicated. I’m particularly peeved when even a simple thing like setting an appointment can screw up. It’s so depressing.

I guess I like a technical job because technical problems seem so much easier to handle. Even those impossible technical problems don’t seem that hard. Human problems, on the other hand, even the trivial ones are in fact complicated.

But anyway, I wanted to rant about silos, because the things that I hate about it seem to be happening. It appears to be getting into a sad state of affairs. To be able to work in a silo-less environment is a great blessing.

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First off, it is PMS time again. PMS is Performance Management System. It is time to do year-end review. I’ve always thought the timing of such reviews are very strange. It’s only early September. There are a good 3 months more to go before the end of year, and we’re doing a year-end review now. It’s even more strange when you consider that the mid-year review wasn’t too long ago. The timing wasn’t so “off” when PMS was first introduced, but over the years, it seems upper management’s clock started to skew.

Let’s gripe about students for a moment. Specifically, our computer science students. I feel “old” complaining about the younger generation, but the truth is I think year after year, our computer science students are getting more and more hopelessly clueless about computers. How many times have I seen our dear students behaving as if they were top-level corporate executive, asking for help to setup or fix simple things, for which there is good accurate documentation, but they don’t care about it, just want someone to do it for them, they don’t care how it is done, just make it work.

I was rather surprised, a few years ago when I attended a seminar by APC (the UPS company), to find an Arts and Social Science undergraduate part-timing as product pre-sales. I wondered where had our computer science students gone to. Probably struggling with installing Java in their notebook.

Time and again, I “spy” to see what sort of complicated technical problems they run into. A student claims to have followed a simple step-by-step instruction to the dot. There’s just like 5 steps. One of those steps said to copy 2 files to a specific directory. She says yes she’s done it. You look in the directory. The files are not there. Oh dear, she’s totally stumped. Probably she didn’t know how to copy files. Sometimes I think anything beyond double-clicking an icon is too complicated for our students.

Later today I’m planning to pop by to see what the Linux NUS user group is up to. They have been awfully quiet imho. I seem to think the OS/2 user group I was involved in made a lot more impact, even though our “user base” is significantly smaller. OS/2 is now extinct, but remnants of our history remain embedded in the Internet history. The Linux community has struggled for years, sometimes I wonder what real progress have they made. I’ve too many things to rant about Linux, I shall save it for another day.

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