Category: Business

I’m sure you’ve noticed an overwhelming them in my posts this month.  Well, most of my free time has been devoted to getting ready for our big conference.  I did get to spend some time doing development (just completed the new Service Contract Metrics for our SM Dashboard.  WooHoo).  In addition, I learned how to make Netweaver Gateway services to feed our new IPad application for Production Supervisor and I extended my Web Dynpro skills by converting Production Execution into an ABAP Web Dynpro interface.  But the rest of my time has been about the new website, new white papers, and helping my co-founder Mike get our booth ready for our coming trip to Vegas.  I do promise to get back to more SAP posts when April rolls around.  Right now, our business is looking for a big return on our investement at the conference.

If you happen to be attending the SAPInsider MFG conference in Vegas the first week of April, we would love to see you.  We will be at booth #100, and Mike Golden will be doing a presentation at the conference showing off my handy work for Proximity.  I may not be a Production Execution expert, but I am pretty proud of what we did with that application.  More importantly, the mobile side of our business is starting to take shape.  An IPad app and a Web Dynpro app will both be promoted heavily in April.  In fact, if you’re around, come and demo it in person.  If you’re interested, go to JaveLLinSolutions.com and click the contact button.  I’ll be happy to send you a URL and a login to try out the web dynpro application yourself.  As soon as the app gets published in the AppStore, I’ll do a new post on that as well.

Alright, enough excitement on my part.  All I can say is things are coming together for me, and I owe a lot of that to you guys that read my blog.  It has been very encouraging for me to know that so many of you follow my blog.  Thanks so much,

Well, I recently did the cutover from our development site to our new and improved site for JaveLLin Solutions.  Like I mentioned last time, Optimize Press certainly added a new level of difficulty to this task.  Now, thanks to a little book I bought a couple years ago, called WPClone, I can take an existing site and make a duplicate of it.  Last time around, I was able to make it work with a minimal effort.  There’s always the ramp up, because…  well, I don’t do this very often (thanks god).

So, I followed all the steps, everything was going fine (expect for my network issues throughout the day.  Thanks AT&T).  So I got everything going, I went to test the new site.  The home page worked fine, but every link kept going back to the test site.  After some digging, I found that I needed to not only update the DB_NAME, but I had defined the site at the bottom of the wp-config.php file.  So I had to manually edit this, and then things started working again.  Except….

The nice header that my partner put together didn’t come across for any of the pages.  UGH!  So I spent the afternoon manually adding the logo and color to each page.  What a pain.  Of course, I needed to go through and check all the links (since some of them were also hard coded to the test site).  Nothing too terrible, but it sure would’ve been nice to have someone else take care of this.  I did a post a while back talking about hiring someone hourly to do a job for you…  Again, for the money we spent for someone else to learn on the job, we could’ve had someone else deal with this headache for me…  Oh well, being a small business guy, it’s good to learn how to do this for myself 🙂

Thanks for reading,

Our big conference of the year is coming up quickly and we’re in the middle of all our prep work (thanks to my business partner, Mike, for taking care of most of this).  Well, this time around we are going to be a presenter as well as just a vendor.  So if you’re planning on going, check us out at booth 100.  I’d love to meet you in person.

http://scm2014.wispubs.com/LasVegas/

It’s  a fun show with lots of info.  Hope to see you there,

Well, yet again, I learned a valuable lesson.  Last fall, I spent a considerable amount of time enhancing SM customer portal application.  I’m pretty excited about the stuff I added to it.  The problem is that I got pulled off to do some stuff for our upcoming conference (turning the production execution app into web dynpro, and creating the RFC’s for a mobile IPad app).  Why am I rambling about this???  well, I was just on an airplane and I thought I’d jump in and put the finishing touches on the Rapier changes I made 3 months ago.

Needless to say, I quickly found that I forgot much of what I did.  I remembered the functionality, but I didn’t remember the details.  And in typical Piehl Fashion…  I didn’t document what I had done.  So I have a bunch of configurable options…  but I no longer know what the flags did or what the possible options are. To further compound the issue, I rolled back my test system, so all my test data is long gone.  So now, in order to wrap up a little bit of work, I’ll have to build test data and dig into my code to figure out what I did.

The lesson learned…  single handle your tasks.  Finish something completely before moving to the next task (if you can).  Now, if you cannot do that…  document what you did before you move onto the next task.  It’ll save you a lot of headaches in the future.  Now, back to create test data =)

Thanks for reading,

Now, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in all of my consulting, it’s that schedules and scope increases just don’t mix.  Have you ever been on a project and heard the phrase, “this is the date, and it can’t change”?  Now, this statement on it’s own isn’t a problem.  If project management did their job, the schedule is reasonable, and the date is achievable.  Now, this statement suddenly becomes a huge risk when you throw in additional work, additional scope, or poor original planning.

So, why am I talking about this?  Call it a cautionary reminder.  There are several key things to get right when you plan any project (even if it’s completely controlled and implemented by yourself :> ).

1. Plan your initial schedule with a reasonable end date.   a. Get sign off from the business on their requirements.
b. Factor in some fudge time to make sure that the inevitable rework can still be done.
c. Keep in mind that if you depend on multiple resources, they may not be as invested in the end date as you are.  Don’t assume they will work 70 hr weeks just because you will.

2. Stick to your scope.  The business will always come back and say “I forgot that I need this too”, or “I can’t do my job unless you give me this”.
a.  you need a process.  Typically, this should involve a trip to the steering committee.  This way, someone else can make the call if the new work will be included in the project.  And of course, they will be aware of what those changes will do to the end date of the project.

In my experience, #2 is the biggest issue most companies encounter.  None of this is rocket science, yet I see the same mistake made over and over again.  So, this post is a little bit of venting, a little bit of advice, and mostly a cautionary tale.  Scheduling matters, and you can’t keep piling 15lbs into a 5 lb bag.  No matter how loud you yell or how hard you push, it either won’t fit, or the bag will break.  Either way, it makes more sense to put the most important 5lbs into the sack instead of waiting for it to burst.

Thanks for reading,

It’s been a pretty rough couple of days.  Yesterday we said goodbye to Fargo.  For my close friends, I’m sure most of you remember our 12 year old Weimeranier.  Saying goodbye to my buddy was so much harder than I ever expected.  So as I sit here, it’s hard not to be sad…  but at the same time, I’m trying to remember all the good times.

I still remember the first time I met Fargo.  I was one maybe my second or third date with the girl that would later become my wife.  We went skiing for the day at Welch Village in MN, and we went back to her place.  She told me she just needed to let her dog out, and then we’d go inside and have a beer.  I figured, no big deal.  Suddenly, he sneaks right past her.  Takes one look and proceeds to sprint around the neighborhood for the next 10 minutes.  She finally managed to wrangle him back into the house.  Thinking the adventure was over, we sat down on the couch and I went to kiss Julie…  Suddenly, I glance over, and here’s her dog, maybe a foot away from me, just glaring.  To this day, I don’t know if I was in his spot on the couch, or if he was mad I was moving in on his woman 😉

He just might be one of the craziest dogs I’ve ever met, but by far, he was the best.  A lover to the core.  Great with the kids, he put up with the cat chasing him around, and I loved how fast his tail wiggled whenever I came home from a business trip.  Our home won’t be the same without him…  but will live on forever in our memories.  If you knew Fargo, I’d love to hear your favorite story about him.

Anyway, thanks for reading…

Just recently, my wife told me something that kind of made me angry at first, until I stopped to thinking about it.  We were talking and she told me she likes to spend her free time being active, I like to spend my time on my computer.  At first I got defensive…  I like being active too, but I just don’t have the time.  But I stopped to think about it, I do have the time, but my priority is my business.  It isn’t a matter of what I like to do… it’s more a matter of what I need to do.

One of my favorite gurus, Brian Tracy said in one of his programs that in order to succeed, you need to be working while everyone is sleeping or playing or watching TV.  I guess I took that heart, maybe a little too well.  My goal is to launch my software business so that I can do what I want, and be here with my family, not traveling to the client site every week.  So, with that one end goal in mind, I guess I’ve chosen to make my business my free time.  Which I have to say, isn’t a whole lot of time anymore, now that I have 2 kids.  ha ha ha.

The whole point is that your free time can be fun, it can be productive, or if you’re really lucky, it can be both at the same time.  =)  I don’t know if I’m quite there yet…  but the result will be worth the price when it all comes together.  So if you’re like me…  just keep that goal in mind.

Thanks for reading,

Well, for those of you who’ve read me my stuff for a while, know that my website hasn’t really changed in a while.  Well, we used the exact setup for the JaveLLin Solutions website as well.  I was able to transistion this over to my partner to run (I still have to write my own content…  but at least he’s handling the day to day stuff).  Well, he wanted to update our look, so I said ok.  We purchased Optimize Press, and he started playing.  Like anything, it’s a big ramp up period, so he found someone that was willing to help on their off time for an hourly rate (don’t get me started on this one).

Well, I thought great…  I have a ton of content out there on the web, so it should be more than enough for someone to chunk it up, shuffle it around, make it look better, make it sound better, etc…  Damn, was I wrong on that.  As it turned out, it was nearly as much work to have someone else come in.  Even though the concepts of SM are second nature to me, when a complete SAP outsider looks at the data, it’s pretty much jibberish to them.  So, I spent a lot of time re-writing my own content.  In the end, will it be a better product?  probably?  do I feel it was worth the huge investment of my time and our limited business capital, not at all.

What’s the lesson for today…  there’s a couple that i leanred.
1.  For anything like this, do NOT do an hourly engagement.  The person Mike picked didn’t know SAP & didn’t know Optimize Press.  This turned out to waste a lot of time, and in essence, we paid for them to learn a new skill.
2.  Make sure who ever you outsource this to has at least MOST of the knowledge you need.  Like i just mentioned, no SAP knowledge, and no Optimize Press knowledge made things go a lot slower and cost a lot more.  It also increased the amount of time Mike and I had to invest in rewriting our own content, or bringing back content that was trimmed out, but was very important to the message.
3.  Make sure the contractor understands what you really care about.  And even more important, make sure everyone is on the same page of what needs to happen.  For example, my big hot button was to get some template pages setup, so we could just plug and play our content.  And I wanted landing pages to direct people to for our new White Papers.  Mike was interested in changing the whole look and feel.  Not that I was against this…  but it wasn’t my priority.  Anyway, get on the same page before you do anything.

Good luck and thanks for reading,

Well, in my latest experiment with making a new SAP system, I found out the value of RAM in the system.  Now, I already knew that more was better, but I guess I couldn’t really quantify it until this past week.  I started building my system on my laptop, while I was waiting for the new server to arrive.  No big deal, my laptop had 16GB of memory, so I allocated 6GB to my virtual machine.  I had my system on a USB 3.0 HDD (this part is important later) and I installed a bunch of support packs (probably around 50-60).  I had the job running, and it went for nearly 48 hours.  Not terrible.  The problem came when I left my machine within reach of my newly climbing baby girl.  She managed to pull herself up the small table my laptop was sitting at, and yank on the USB cable.  Ouch…  3 days of work down the drain.

So, having learned the hard way yet again, I moved the system to my new server.  It was finally ready and properly set up.  Since I had a lot more memory available, I bumped this system up to 10GB.  Luckily, I remembered the steps I had done the first time around, so the setup to install went much faster.  When I kicked off the support packs, I was able to finish the job in roughly 18hours.  I then installed another dozen or so, ran SGEN, and the whole process took 48hrs.

So, just a word to anyone out there with their own systems, more memory really makes a huge difference 🙂

Thanks for reading,