Ball juggling

Back in October 2006, one of the CSC Australia sales reps rocks up to my desk “That price quote Wayne gave us for support 4 different versions of SheepBotherer, is unacceptable, the customer won’t wear it AND I want you to change it!”

Who’s doing the work? “Ah, Wayne’s team.”

Wayne has a [...]

Newsflash: Steve Riley has left the building!

Sheer bloody madness.  First Jesper leaves, now Steve has been re-structured out of a job.  First heard Steve (and Jesper) speak at TechEd 2005 in Brisbane.  I think the talk was “SEC301 – Common security screw-ups we have known and seen.”  Best darn security presentation I’ve ever sat though.  Was worth it for that [...]

Performance Management, the one where we pay lip service to the concept.

At my last employer, there was a focus on “Performance Management”.  I always felt, even as a team leader, that we paid lip service to the whole process. eg.  we were going though the motions.

Performance Management has many goals.  The primarily one is to ensure that the team is working towards/contributing to [...]

Lessons from Scoble – why PodTech failed.

I used to think Robert Scoble SUCKED.  I found his work at Microsoft Channel 9 sucked because it was all Microsoft-centric.  Gee, what a surprise eh?  Bloke works for Microsoft, so OF COURSE he’s going to be all "Hoo Rah Microsoft".

Glad I’ve changed my mind (ie. I was wrong) and now have him [...]

On top of your game

It is truly a pleasure when the phone goes *ring* *ring* and the following occurs:

“I’ve got a problem with a printer freezing.”, says the desktop support tech (Tina Brown).

Have you tried:

reinstalling the printer driver? reinstalling the print driver? disabling all the unnecessary network protocols? locking the printer port to a particular [...]

Good first impressions – receptionists

It’s been my experience in IT, that good first impressions count, and often those first impressions are formed by your reception staff.  If your reception staff seem to directly descended from the SS-Helferin guards from Ravensbrück, then you have problems.

Your reception staff should be:

neatly attired well spoken helpful smiling, and optionally: attractive.* [...]