Reading from the blog stream today I came this: Does this blog make me look fat? By Ed Cone. The article talks about how some people envisioned blogs playing out and comparing it to what actually happened. Having read and skimmed it I got me thinking about my blog and what I’m doing with it.

Perhaps you are like me, an occasionally bright and talented technical superstar out to build your own free lance consulting practice. Because you have the technical side of things down you begin focusing on the other stuff. Things like marketing and sales. It doesn’t matter that you can build ESBs and SharePoint portals while trying to shave another second off you lap time at ECR if you don’t have a customer to pay your for that ESB or portal. Worse, without that customer there aren’t any track days to be had either.

So you develop some strategies for getting those customers. One of those strategies is to blog. How is it really working out for you? Do customers actually hire consultants because of their nifty blog? Does getting 1000 hits a day bring in customers to a consultants blog? I suspect not. Being a hip on the edge technical geek I’ve had a blog sense the very beginning. Not a high traffic blog, not even an active blog a lot of the time. But it has always been here.

But the questions I have are:

• Is having a blog worth the effort to a freelance technical professional?
• How should a blog fit in to a freelance technical professional’s marketing strategy?
• Are there KPIs we can use to determine our effectiveness?
• How long will it take for a blogging strategy to begin showing results?
• Most important of all: How many customers will close the deal as a result of the blog and how will I know it was the blog and not some other (possibly better) channel?

There is also a flip side to this: I don’t filter too much of what I put here. I post about my hobbies and personal life right along with professional stuff. Is that really a great idea? Does that scare away customers? Would I be better off separating the two? Would I be more attractive to clients if I posted my political opinions here too? If I’m not going to filter out my personal stuff, why not go all in?

I think I have some answers to this stuff. But I need to organize my thoughts around it. I also would like to develop some proof about my thoughts. By proof I mean actual traffic, customers, posts, and other data to actually support or disprove my hypothesis.

Most of the time it is pretty easy to work with Windows server without using RDP (remote desktop). However, on occasion for various reasons you just have to jump on the box directly. What sucks is when other people on your team for whatever reason can’t get stuff done without using RDP and so they end up squatting on the console of the server preventing you from jumping on too. What really annoys me about this is when not only can they not work remotely, but they can’t bother to log off their session when they are done. When that happens, until somebody logs out nobody can get on. At least not until somebody gives them some help. And here is the help you need:

Everything you need to help your friends is in two commands: Query and Logoff

First use Query to determine who is camping on your server:

This will give you a list of RDP sessions on the server you specify. Look at the state column that are not active are fair game. Say session 2 needs killing:

Now you can take care of console squatters without having to waste time asking people to follow RDP etiquette.

In short, two commands:

Query session /server:[servername]

Logoff [sessionid] /server:[servername]

My current gig is wrapping up and I’m looking for a new project. 

You can download my resume from here.

I’m looking for something with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, BizTalk 2009 and/or SharePoint.

Please contact me if you have any questions.

This is a bummer.  I’m setting the publish date on posts but it does not seem to be working.  Guess I’ll just have to make it a daily task to go manually click the publish check box in BE so whatever is in the queue shows up.

If I was a real programmer I’d take a look and see what is going on.  Too bad really. :)

Right now I’m involved in at least 4 different projects for my client.  For two of them I do most of the delivery work (coding, QA, administration) for the rest I get to play architect.  The fun aspect is dealing with the interactions between projects.   All of the projects share dependencies on resources.  I have 3 people including myself that can do delivery work (coding, configuration, etc).  The others are analysts and project managers.  I’m not really counting the infrastructure side but they are also seriously resource constrained.

Resources are not the only dependency we have though.  We also have dependencies between projects in things like deploying ISA server so that SharePoint can expose portals to the internet without us leaving gaping holes in the network.  Then our KPI stuff is dependent on us getting BizTalk setup so we can have BAM to collect the metrics that make up the KPIs.

So how do you manage all this crap so the CFO and CEO don’t get out chainsaws and go all Friday the 13^th on the IT staff?  The easy answer would be to deploy Project server and get all those projects loaded up.  That way we’d be able to show how all of the staff is way over committed (like 600%).  We’d also be able to draw attention to the scheduling of the projects so that things would get done in the right order.  For example: deploy ISA before the SharePoint portal.  We’d also be able to show the impact to other projects when the hardware for the ISA server arrives late.

That way when the CIO shows up in your cube asking questions you don’t do my standard Shaggy impersonation squeaking out a “rutro” when he asks “why isn’t the BOD portal live yet?”.

So you don’t have Project server and no budget to get Project server, what then?  Rosary beads and running shoes perhaps?  A CHL (just in case you see the CEO carrying in a box with a STIHL logo on the side)?  There are SAAS tools available that might help, I’ve not checked in to them yet.  Another option might be a really big white board and post it notes.  Put the tasks on post its, make swim lanes for the projects and position the notes in the order they need to occur.  It’s caveman tech, not ideal and won’t work for IT shops doing really big jobs (complete transformation), but it will at least give you a prayer of keeping some type of track on what is going on.

In all honesty though if your shop is doing something really big like my client is they really need to budget in the cost of something like Project server.  Trying to manually track all the moving parts simply isn’t realistic.

I don't generally look at my own blog.  However, today I need to look up some information I posted a few weeks ago (how to put IIS log files in a database) and I noticed that somebody had commented.  IT was a spammer.  Some clothing place in the UK.  Didn't realize I was popular in the UK.  I know I'm big in Japan, so I guess I'm global now.

Anyway, I'm switching comments over to require approval.  Wonder if BE has a captcha thingie for comments that I could add.

Lets see – Six Sigma, PMI, CMM, PAG, Scrum, Agile, DSL, so on and so forth.  With all these management techniques, architects, outsourced over seas developers, and meta program things you’d think organizations large and small could deliver projects on time and on budget.  And yet….they can’t. 

You’re almost better off taking the project budget to Vegas and playing black jack.

All of this stuff misses the point – invest in better software developers and you’ll get better results.  No amount of managing crap developers is going to turn your beautifully planning and risk managed project in to a success.