IT Career Management

Everyone that works within IT will either have been, be or have worked with contract staff. It’s often the experience that while these relationships start out on a positive footing, with clear goals, they often end up under delivering over time.

Common signs of trouble

Show me the money

The contractor hasn’t asked for any sort of feedback or performance review. Often this is coupled with some prior success. We can all be guilty of becoming over confident in our ability. Ensuring that you get feedback and holding supplier style reviews are vital in both looking for improvements (which surely everyone is looking for) and ensuring the relationship doesn’t just become about the day to day work focus activity.

‘I want, I want’ but I can’t tell you why

They start making requests for paid training and holidays that aren’t in the contract. While training can be a worthwhile investment it has to be linked to execution and value creation. Simply asking for the latest Project management certification or risk management course without demonstrating clear value to their engagement (rather than their focus on future employment) doesn’t work.

Customer focus

Contractors can forget that they are a supplier and that your the customer. A critical but not uncommon occurrence. After a period of time and relative success they stop looking on the relationship from your needs but instead focus on their own need for security.

This in turn is totally counter productive to their aim which might well be to maintain employment. As their view turns inwards they often miss the real opportunities for the future. Doing their very best for the customer, improvement, meeting needs and offering insight falls away and we’re left with an end date and a PO.

One team, one perspective

While its great that agency staff see themselves as one of the team, they started acting like an FTE (full time employee). They become embroiled in office politics and start grumbling about the air conditioning or vending machines. Joining the culture of the organisation can’t and shouldn’t always be resisted but losing that external perspective is value destroying for both parties.

Loss of focus

Losing what I’d call focus by seeing rate increases or long contract extensions as a right particularly when coupled with a challenging working environment isn’t helpful. When this is combined with a failure to demonstrate value alongside that increase in length of contract or cost the problem is compounded.

Mind the gap

Gaps in the contract can become all consuming. That’s to say that the contractor is aligned to one employer and they have zero tolerance for recognising the benefits of maintaining (and not destroying) a relationships with multi customers. Burning bridges by not seeing out contracts as they near an end or using threats as a negotiating tool is completely unacceptable. The mode of work has changed for us all , a single employer for our forty or so years of work is going to be unheard of. Keeping relationships in tact and not getting drawn into short term needs will pay dividends in the future.

Not cut out for contracting ?

It isn’t easy. It certainly isn’t easy to do it well. If your only comfortable with a rolling contract and only work your contacts and build skills when the contract is about to end perhaps the lifestyle isn’t for you. If you think you should get paid what you do as a contractor because your brilliant and take the rate as confirmation of that greatness you’ve going to come unstuck. You will achieve a rate above FTE rates either because you bring a unique or limited skill or maybe, just maybe, its just because your off the head count, competent, focused and flexible.

The future of contracting

It’s clear that with increasing use of contract and temporary staff off the companies established head count this type of working relationship is only going to increase. More and more of us will work fixed term contracts. Business aren’t willing to make long term commitments. What is vital to its success is keeping a firm eye on how it’s delivered and how both parties view the relationship. A collaborative relationship built on value creation, skill and capability which fits with business needs will see both parties meeting their respective goals.

If you need to move a WordPress website or reorganise urls you’ll probably want to setup 301 redirects to ensure Google and your viewers can access your content if they use the old URLs.

A 301 is a http response that signifies that the requested page has permenantly moved to a new url.

There are a couple of plugins for WordPress that will handle the redirection for you. But one of the problems is that rather than keying in URLs into a configuration page you might well want to import the redirections after some offline editing.

Bulk 301 redirection in WordPress

I’m using the Redirection plugin.

You can import URLs in csv file format (source URL, target URL).

One thing you’ll need is a list of your existing URLs. With a list of URLs you can then easily modify both the target and source.

This php script from scriptbin will query WordPress and output a list of posts, pages and attachments (I.e. Images).

Just save the php script to a file (with a .php) extension, drop it into the WordPress folder and load the file in your web browser.

Once run you can grab the list, create a csv file with source and target URL and Redirection will import it and away you go.

Simple bulk 301 redirects in WordPress.

Credit where its due, I’ve been a customer of eukhost for a couple of years and have always found there support to be top notch. Recently I got a bit heavy handy with the file browser and accidentally deleted the WordPress files for this very site.

Now my posts are safe in the WordPress mysql database. I could have just reinstalled the php files and pointed to the database in the config file. But all the customisations and plugins sit in the folder structure. Which not impossible to create again sure is a bit of a pain.

I logged a call with eukhost Linux support to request a data restore. 12 minutes later my data was back  and all at no charge.

Wow.

Now its not always that quick but a support call at 2100 on a Friday night and in just over ten minutes you have your data back is impressive.

Thank you eukhost!

I took the CRM dynamics 2011 customization and configuration exam 866 recently through a Prometric centre having very recently taken an QA training course on the same subject.

Thankfully I passed.

Prep wise I’d recommend the course or obtaining the Microsoft course material through Microsoft’s customer source portal for dynamics.

I blogged about how to access that in an earlier earlier post.

Next time I think l’ ll follow the eleaning that is again available through customer source. Next stop Dynamics crm 2011 for Applications.

How hard is the exam

There is an NDA which every on has to sign up to so I can’t go into specifics. The exam does cover a broad range of topics with configuration and customisation. How to customise and apply those customisations, security models etc.

The good news is this is a limited subject, you must understand managed an unmanaged solutions (and their behaviour for different users), security and relationships.

On reflection I would say the exam covers real life, not a test of syntax, if your using dynamics you should be fine.

I’ve just spent three days taking a CRM training course with QA training in London (Tabernacle St) namely Microsoft’s dynamics customisation and configuration MB2-866.

The course is a blend of theory together with practical labs.

There is little excuse for not knowing whats on the course as the printed training manual which is given to all candidates is the Microsoft print which is available on their customer source portal (access to this is via Microsoft’s passport via your customer support contract or if not available by signing up to the 30 day free Dynamics trial – if you go the 30 day trial route access comes a day or so after you have signed up). Customer source/also gives you access to Microsoft’s CBT courses which operate in both online and offline mode,

Day 1 of Dynamics 2011 Customisation and Configuration

Focus is on security using and manipulating the business unit functionality (hierarchy) and security roles to create a hierarchical functional access structure. In fact the day hardly talks about customers (accounts and contacts), its all about users and what functions they have i.e. what they can do or not do in Dynamics.

The course then moves onto teams and users (the creating of with appropriate security profiles).

Queues within Dynamics

Queues are introduced, given the ability to share tasks for instance as a queue or bucket of work rather than assigning each task or record to a user. For example marketing campaigns or lead reviews can be added to a queue to share with teams. You can have queues for any entity which is a change from CRM 4 though they need to be enabled.

The day also introduces supported customisations, reusing customisations, ISV products and dynamics SDK.

Day 2

Creating entities, and relationships between those entities is the theme of the day. 1:N, N:1and N:N. With relationships includes behaviours, parental, referential, referential restricted and configuration cascade.

Entity mappings are also covered, which at best allow for speedier data entry by coping data from one entity to another, note no relationship is maintained post the create.

strong>Dynamics labs

I like the way the labs work. And if you haven’t been on a Microsoft course for a while or ever its a definite improvement. Each lab starts out with a problem and rather than guiding you click by click (which can become a race without spending much time thinking about what your doing) you are then presented with three approaches from a basic outline to the full click by click guide (you just choose one option).

Microsoft Dynamics Tips

A couple of basic tips to get you started:

Error handling is a little weak when working with multiple records. Often the error is with one record in this case break down the task to a single record so the actual error message is displayed rather than buried.

If a function is greyed out check the ribbon ‘Actions’ for a way forward.
When creating an account for example you have to save the record before the additional functions become available.

You can create multiple top level business units to separate data but if you need to join data later across BU’s you will have to use the likes of Microsoft’s reporting services to consolidate.

To try switching users in dynamics use the shift right click ‘run as’ on internet explorer.

To create a test dynamics environment you can either perform a back up in SQL, restore it to a new db and us dynamics deployment manger to add it or just export all the customisations and then import them if the data isn’t important.

Make sure users delete function access is controlled if you don’t fully understand the ramifications of deleting parent relationships and any knock on cascade effect.

Use the export function to manipulate data. For instance if you need to change the data type of a field. Create a new field, export and mark the check box to support re importing, manipulate the data (move it into the new field for example) and reload.

Use a plugin from codeplex called meta data browser (which has an export to excel fuction) to extract all entities and fields if you want to compare base with changes (just look for the new prefix).

Advanced find is powerful check it out.

Course review

Overall very good.

I much prefer the style of the labs on offer via a hyper-V VM. The printed material is good as was the standard of the tuition. The course itself is the perfect fit to help you get to grips with Dynamics.

The course is not aimed at end users aside a brief 20 minutes spent on an overview of dynamics. I don’t think you need much, if any experience of Dynamics’s before the course. If your organisation uses the product I suggest you ask a few questions before the course on how they have set up the business units, security profiles and the approach to customisations.

Downsides – the coffee was questionable and the WiFi sketchy.