belogg by zed mannix

“Simplicity” – a magical word constantly repeated by my CEO still resounds in my ears. How to understand it? It’s a tendency to find simple solutions instead of complex ones, that’s my very basic definition. From a former boss of mine I heard an uncountable number of times the term “KISS”. “K.I.S.S.”, Keep It Simple, Stupid”….I guess we’ve been just implementing the “K.I.S” with just the second “S” At least that’s my humble impression.

You know, I am a computer science professional, I like using well-known standards, certainly keeping an eye on the latest researches and discussions going on in the IT world. I was used to apply the RUP approach (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Unified_Process) because it is generic enough and simple enough to precisely represent the analyzed piece. The RUP uses UML (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Modeling_Language) as a its notation. The UML – a symbolic, visual language created in order to express the problem and the problem’s solution from several business and system perspectives. “A picture is worth a thousand words” one says, that’s what I believe when it comes to the IT world.

My new boss says that this “UML thing” cannot be serious; those childish actors skeletons, it cannot be the professional world! He’s heard it from an anonymous person in one of the top US universities so it must be true! And by the way, these document templates, which by the way had been quite full of UMLs, we’ve been using so far were just scaring the users off. They were far too complex whereas our aim is “simplicity”!

So we simplified the templates, unfortunately over-simplified…but I reckon that now everything is fine. We are consistent at making things simple, oh yeah! But….wait a second….what kind of modeling tool we chose to sustain this great “simplification” tendency? To make a long story short, “we” selected the IBM (former Telelogic) System Architect – the simplest, most user-friendly tool of the world!

Unfortunately the System Architect is not the simplest tool you can get and it’s totally misaligned when comparing to the size and needs of my company. I would go so far as to say that the tool is just enormous and cumbersome, you can do everything in it, you can customize every single bit. But…we just need a simple, robust modeling tool with functions which the SA tool does NOT have!

Well, long live the “simplicity”, another success!

It’s been already some years since I joined the elite team of to the mighty EU crusade. I did not know what to expect where I first applied, so I guess I just did it for fun and to find myself a challenge. I must have somehow impressed my interlocutors during the conference call I had! And come on, it was the NASA of Europe and they really considered hiring me! I estimated my chances to be rather low but still I wanted to at least have a memorable experience. And guess what, I was invited to their HQ for an job interview! It was a rainy day as far as I remember…After some minutes of waiting in the reception hall I got kindly requested into a small, a bit dark, meeting room where two guys joined me just after. I had talked to them over the phone something like two months before the interview and my reception was rather positive. Now I was about to talk to them live.

The interview got pretty usual. They asked my about my relevant professional experience and gave me a few practical questions which I found unbelievably easy to answer – provided you are a real IT person having some practical experience. Afterwards I got a practical exercise, to model some problem domain using UML. It was a piece of cake seriously. BUT I was fooled a bit! I  was told that I can call one of the guys interviewing me using the desk phone if I had some questions relating to the requirements. I was communicated like “Call the person X if you need details of the requirements”. So I did not call, why would I…the requirements were quite clear to me and so was the exercise itself. But well, that was a kind of trick which I still don’t know what it was supposed to prove or disprove. Believe it or not but this call I was given a chance to make turned out to be a part of the interview! So basically I just proposed what I thought would be the best solution taking into account the provided business description. Well they got me; I did not call the ‘project stakeholder’ in order to get some actual requirements…. Still, I managed to ‘sell’ my ideas BUT then I really struggled in the next exercise – an Excel test….I seriously never learned Excel, I was intuitively using its basic functions so I failed at Excel test trying to approach the problem using fancy VBA functions! but in fact the solution was so simple, unbelievably trivial as one of the guys showed me after…So I was certain to have failed on the interview. But you know what? I did not. They actually hired me even though some internal people applied for the same position….I waited for like one month for their answer and it came around Christmas 2006. I almost forgot I applied for this job. And they sent me a nice e-mail from HR starting with “Dear…We are pleased to let you know….”. I was really surprised and at first glance just wanted to respond “Dear…It was just a joke from my side but it was still nice to meet you” But having considered pros and cons, I finally decided to take this challenge sailing in the unknown waters…

Seriously my professional world got upside-down. When I joined the company I was meant and strongly believed to get a chance of helping the business in optimizing processes and in proactive finding creative IT solutions for the business departments. This was my understanding and this how all the job description was formulated.

Why did I joined? You might guess I was unhappy before, right? Not at all, I was really doing what I was educated for: collecting requirements from the business, proposing software solutions and the enhancements, performing detailed analysis and whenever possible proposing new ideas. So why did I want to leave? It’s quite simple in fact. I wanted to learn the world much more, get precious experience in analysis in new business domains and last but not the least, to earn better money. So there you go. I joined a company which I thought to be the NASA of Europe. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite what I naively expected. This is a bit of a context for you.

There are a lot of things I would like to tell you about but it’s just too much, so I will try to dose it all reasonably. You will travel with me into a world of absurds, like Alice in Wonderland. In parallel I will try to share with you my thoughts on the latest events and discoveries in the IT world, in particular where it comes to the gadgets and the newest technologies which make the people’s life easier, more comfortable, more tailored, like we all expect.

Warm greetings!

This seems to be my first post of the blog….Actually I was about to commence a blog a few months ago but I just did not know where to start. So what this blog is all about? Well all the absurds of my daily work life interlaced by my thoughts on the latest technologies, gadgets and all the fancy movements in the IT world!

What am I doing where it comes to the professional life? I actively participate in the management and analysis undertakings of The God Project Of All Projects in my company. It has been recommended to us by one of the Top Consulting Companies of the World. They found magic where I find a daily routine Well, actually The Project has exploded into a set of projects managed by people in my department who are overwhelmed by a huge number of tasks, do not have sufficient experience or are just simply incompetent. I hope I belong to the first of the aforementioned categories You would perhaps think how come I manage projects being a Business Analyst….Well….that’s the point; the paper definition has nothing to do with the reality.

My daily life is like doing everything and nothing: a bit of the IT support writing SQL scripts and making sure that the ODBC data sources are properly installed on the users’ machines, trying to mend the falling pieces of the projects happily moving towards damnation, elaborating some crazy templates highly “recommended” by my boss, or helping one guy from the top management in using his beloved LaTeX (which is obviously not a standard tool…) Would you believe that? After over ten years of relevant experience I am given all this stuff, like a support guy! Officially I am one but calling me a Business Analyst is a very big semantic abuse. I am everything but a Business Analyst, in fact!