I like to have a choice. Adobe's subscription only policy is a bit too fascist for my liking.

This may be a bit of a rant but it's something I'm trying to think through, so any feedback would be appreciated. I know most of your are pure IT and don't get involved in other aspects of a company's business, but some of you do.

First, the background:

My company has recently started a project to replace our existing, old ERP system with Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Two key reasons for doing this are to improve the efficiency of our backoffice operations, partly through streamlining our business processes, and to integrate other areas of the business into our ERP system that are currently using paper-based or stand-alone solutions.

This project was my idea and initiated by me, but now has full board support. I'm Project Manager, our CEO is Project Sponsor, and we have a permanent project team of around eight. I anticipate pretty much all staff will have some involvement in the project at some stage. I've split the project in to two phases, each of which are expected to last a year. I intend to go live with the new ERP system at the end of phase one, and at the point the old ERP system will be retired. I hope to devote around 80% of my time just to working on this project, leaving 20% to manage the rest of the company's day to day IT.

The problem:

I've been involved in these kinds of projects all my life. Probably the biggest problem I have faced is getting other non-IT team members to commit their time and effort into making the project a success. And I believe one of the biggest reasons they don't commit is because they see the project as "an IT project". I've been begging the board to see this project as "a business project", with a relatively small amount of IT.

I also don't think people understand my role as Project Manager. I'm not in charge. A lot of my project management work will be administrative rather than strategic or tactical. I have no power over other team members. Ultimately, the CEO is the only one that can ensure people commit and meet deadlines. I need to ensure the CEO has skin in the game so that he'll take action if he sees the project might fail.

I think these kinds of projects have become less IT focussed as the years have gone by. That is because they've reached a level of maturity and reliability that means they pretty much run straight out of the box. There aren't really any bugs in a modern Microsoft ERP system. It is isn't going to crash. Everyone has access to really good documentation and training. It used to take a couple of days to install a new ERP system. I could probably install Dynamics in under an hour and that includes Windows and SQL Server. But people still see it as an IT project that is of little concern to them.

Some people will commit. They'll read the documentation. They'll watch YouTube videos. They'll write a detailed specification for any changes they'd like. They'll come up with suggestions and ideas. They'll prepare for meetings. And they'll review their current business processes and look at ways of improving.

Others will just say "I just want it to work like our current system. I'm too busy to help you. Just show me how it works when you're ready to go live. Oh, and if it doesn't work just like our current system I will go apeshit on you and call the project a failure."

They might say, "So, how do you raise a sales order in Dynamics?". To which I feel I should reply "I have no idea. Why don't you figure it out?". Because what they're really saying is "I can't be bothered to figure any of this out, you do it and then let me know". Only that will result in project failure because I simply don't have the time to do it all on my own. No-one could.

Getting non-IT people to engage in what I would call "business projects" and what they would call "IT projects": that is what I'm struggling with. My first step is to persuade the CEO that this is definitely not, and should never be, an "IT project".

Discussing this with my wife last night over a drink, she said "You normally need to address these problems using either the carrot or the stick. Your problem is you have neither a carrot nor a stick". To which I replied "More wine?"

About to setup these bad boys:

Yes, money is a great motivation, as I often point out to my bosses.

When I mention this people often mention Maslow's hierarchy of needs. But I find people who believe in Maslow are normally people with plenty of money already.

I use a free account at Wordpress.com but am about to switch to Wordpress on a hosted account with my own domain name.

My experiences with Oracle have been pretty shitty. I wouldn't call them excellent. I also feel they're as happy to screw you over with changes to licencing and licencing and support costs just as much as Microsoft.

My most recent experiences with Microsoft have related to InTune and it was pretty good when I finally got to talk to someone who actually knew about the product. They were Eastern European and the line was very clear and their English was perfect. But the first person I spoke to hadn't even heard of it.

Are the Spiceworld talks available on the interweb? I'd like to hear @Minion-Queen

Peter Taylor has listed the 6 typical phases of projects in his book "The Lazy Project Manager". They sound about right to me!

1. Enthusiasm
2. Total confusion
3. Disillusionment
4. Search for the guilty
5. Punishment of the innocent
6. Reward and promotion of the non-participants

I'm obviously trying to avoid the above.

@scottalanmiller said:

Could be for shifty reasons, of course

I'm not shifty, honest

I always have a backlog of minor helpdesk tickets that are often user profile related. Partly to offer the least inconvenience to users and partly because I'm a sucker, I mostly do these kinds of tickets after hours when everyone has gone home. Whilst most of my colleagues are at home watching the telly and sipping a beer, I'm often still at work, alone, fixing their minor bugbears.

The other advantage is that if the user isn't around, I'm not under any time pressure to complete the job. So I might be working on several jobs at once.

I also don't normally know exactly when I'll work on the ticket, so I can't let users know in advance, it depends on my workload, and whether I can bothered to stay late. An unexpected bit of warm weather and bright sunshine will normally see me finish early and head to a beer garden, leaving my helpdesk schedule in tatters.

I believe Apple deliberately don't allow any wifi sniffing apps, so you're out of luck there.

I use inSSIDer on a laptop, but I'm not sure that's free anymore.

I always do a left-click move. I find it makes it easier to see that everything has moved. I've never had a problem, but perhaps I've been lucky. I thought the delete wouldn't happen until the copy is confirmed as successful, so in case of a power cut, the source should remain. Basically, it comes down to whether I trust Windows not to screw up more than myself. Maybe I should trust myself more.

As for the SW thread, my guess he's mixed up source and destination, so it's deleted the file from the destination (which should have been the source).

Because I make sure I have enough storage so that if one host fails, I can move the VMs onto the other host(s). So with two hosts, I have to keep 50% of the storage free for failover. With three hosts, I only need to keep 33% of the storage free. So I'm getting up to 66% disk utilisation with 3 hosts, versus 50% with 2 hosts. Kind of vaguely similar to RAID5 vs RAID1.

To put it another way, with two hosts a host failure results in a 50% loss of resources, whilst with three hosts it results in a 33% loss of resources.

/MIR is great and I've used it loads of times. But as with all powerful command line tools, an administrator needs to proceed with extreme caution.

@coliver said:

I was told by our SAP vendor that they can't guarantee performance if it wasn't on a physical box.

I'd be interested to know how they could guarantee performance on a physical box. Surely there are too many variables at both the hardware and software level to guarantee anything?

By daughter was distraught this morning when she couldn't get on to Netflix to watch her daily fix of Spongebob Squarepants.

@scottalanmiller said:

Remind them that the world's biggest databases, once doing literally trillions of transactions per day are all virtualized and don't use individual disks like that.

Quite. It's ironic that Microsoft is explicitly saying that their preferred installation is hosted on Azure. The majority of their marketing for the latest release of NAV is focussed on Azure. You won't currently get any Microsoft employee saying virtualisation is bad.

I'm not engaging my partner. I'm just telling them how it will be. Life's too short to argue about the merits of virtualisation to people who only like to stick with what they know.

It made sense to me.

@NetworkNerd said:

If you are going to do it, make sure you have the RAM you need to do it, and the IOPs available to that VM so you will get the performance you are looking to achieve.

That's a physical issue rather than a virtualisation issue though, isn't it? You need the same amount of available RAM or available IOPS regardless of whether the box is physical or virtual. Isn't the only true issue that a hypervisor adds a small overhead which may impact performance? Apart from that very small overhead, what's the difference really?

I suspect when people complain about poor performance from virtualisation, their issue is actually that they are running on poorly specified or poorly configured hardware. Underpowered hardware is underpowered hardware - that's not a weakness of virtualisation, that's a physical problem.

I got an unbelievably massive quote for a pair of HP SANs running RAID 6. From the cost, it would be easy to assume that they would rock performance wise. But actually, when you looked into the figures, performance was very mediocre. My vendors reasoning seemed to be "it's ok, they've got 15k disks". I could understand a situation where you spend $20k+ on SANs and then went "oh, that's disappointing performance" and then blamed virtualisation, whereas the reality is that you just spent too much money on mediocre gear and would have been just as disappointed if you were running physical machines off the SAN.

It's weird.

I'm hoping to have my ashes scattered on a mountain in the Lake District, but my wife is moaning about having to make the walk. Will hopefully have my kids do it for me.

@MrWright4hire said:

.we should all learn how to except others and new generations as they are and avoid forcing our own standards on them.

People can talk how they like in their private lives, but professionally we should conform to standards so that everyone can understand each other. IT needs standards. I understand and can converse in American English, even though I'm not American, because I accept that a lot of standards in the IT industry are American. That's the common language so I have to respect that. I don't talk American down the pub though, where I might slip into my local dialect.

Doesn't mean standards can't evolve though, so long as everyone is clear. It's the first time I've ever heard of "etsee", but if that becomes the standard I'll just learn to adjust.