PSC Labs

PSC Tech Talk: Change Management

Marky Roden PSC Labs, Tech Talks , ,

“It’s all in the way we listen”. It’s the PSC motto and especially relevant when it comes to helping clients migrate platforms. With our knowledge and experience we’ve seen that technology is often not the problem in our projects, it is people. Humans are masters at making systems serve our needs, but in general people don’t change quite so easily.

In this light hearted presentation with a serious message, one of our most experienced consultants, John Bigenwald (@john_bigenwald), talked about how he approaches change management when helping client migrate platforms. While this is not “Technology Talk”, it is something we do every day at PSC and relevant to every technology project we do.

Tech is easy – People are hard

Not to minimize how hard developers have it, but code can be refactored and changed without having to hurt it’s feelings or years long emotional attachment to the application.

Why do project fail?

Based on research done by a French company, of their own internal projects:

  • 11% of large projects fail because of quality
  • 39% of projects fail due to a lack of planning resources and activities
  • 57% of projects fail due to “breakdown in communications”

The problems are with “soft skills” and not “hard skills”. Staying in contact with the program mangers as we are going through a project is critical and essential to its success. Communicating with the users not only buys us good will, but gives us better insight into how they work. During this time we also uncover many issues which, left unaddressed, could cause the failure of the project.

Lewin’s Change Management Model

No one starts a project intending to fail. There are three stages to Lewin’s Change Management Model:

  • Unfreeze
  • Change
  • Freeze

In a survey 75% of the project managers expected that there would be some form of failure in their IT projects. It is the expectation from the outset based on history and experience telling them not to expect success. Even 15 years ago, The Harvard Business Review stated in an article that:

“Managers expect to be able to plan for all
variables in advance, but they can’t.
Nobody is that smart or has a crystal ball that clear….”

Unfreeze is the key to the change

How you prepare the organization for change will be the driving force behind the whole process. You have to create a sense of urgency, build coalitions and create a vision for change.

  • Preparing the organization to accept the necessity and/or desirability of a change. It involves breaking down the existing status quo before you can build up a new way of operating. You need to develop a compelling message showing why the existing way of doing things cannot continue.

John then went on to draw an analogy between “change management experts” on tv and real life.

In the “Property Brothers” on HTGV they work with people buying a new house and renovate it. As they walk through the show there are issues uncovered and they all need to be handled within budget. The news is not always good and pleasant to have to deal with, but the home owner has to determine what is most important for them to have implemented to call the project a success. They never know what’s going to be behind a wall at the start of a project.

In “The Walking Dead” tv show people are living in a post-apocalyptic world where they have to survive by using their experience and wits to avoid becoming one of the hordes.

There is a point to this….I assure you 🙂

Creating Urgency

The status quo is unfrozen only by creating a sense of urgency. Stalling and slowing the process is not only a high risk, but gives people who want to be obstacles, leverage to not change.

In the Walking Dead a zombie horde in the camp really creates a sense of urgency. But that urgency is driven by fear, which often leads to bad decisions. A poorly thought through decision causes someone to do something unexpected which puts the whole group at risk.

In the Property Brothers they create urgency by painting a vision of the future. This provides the impetus for change. Besides designing and building a new home, an integral part of the brother’s job is to paint of vision of the future. This allows the client to better handle the unplanned nightmare behind the wall. The overall goal is the overall goal and that which is in front of us right now is only an obstacle on the way to the goal.

So how do we create urgency? Hire some zombies to crash the office?? No…..

Urgency is created by a desire to achieve a vision. The greater the vision, the better the promised future, the greater the urgency to reach that future. Losing a ton of money in a certain area, does not necessarily sway the budget lines for the overall plan. This is only one example but the thought process is the same. Without a sense of why this needs to be done now, why is it important enough to move to the front of the queue? Without a sense of why a change will improve the program, your job, your life, there is no urgency to make the change – inertia will win.

Building coalitions

As projects evolve your change agents can switch and they aren’t always the people you think they will be. In the Walking Dead the group’s leader was a former deputy. Others in leadership are a housewife and a survivalist loner. You would not have chosen them as a team to start with but they need to work together for survival. Over time people are lost from the group and new members join as needs change. In the same manner, hidden structure, long term friendships and who is impacted by the change can drive the dynamics of the coalition.

Create a vision for change

Going to the Walking Dead again……they are always talking about a better life, it drives them forward. They don’t talk about how one direction has fewer zombies over there, they talk about the better life when they get there.

In Property Brothers they do not talk about the size of the house, they talk about entertaining, having dinner with the kids and how that will give you a better life.

Unless you have a clearly defined vision for where we are going, and some people to help you get there, and a sense of urgency to do it….. your chances of failure are higher.

Big thinking precedes great achievement

– Wilfred Peterson

Conclusion

Understand what is driving the change. Use that knowledge to paint a vision of the future. Logic drives technology; Emotion drives people.

 

 

 

 

PSC Tech Talk: UX Design – Not just making things pretty

Marky Roden PSC Labs, Tech Talks , , ,

Many companies used to treat design and user experience second-class requirement when creating technical innovation (most people my age will know what I am talking about). Functionality was more important than how easy a product would be to use. As has been the case for many years though, this is certainly no longer the norm. The expectation for design, function and “how it makes me feel” is assumed in the same manner that requirements need to be met.

Our Senior Design Consultant Jay Kasturi gave a presentation on User Experience design, which to a room full of hard core developers was a challenge in itself.

UX Design – Not just making things pretty

Jay spoke about the history of user experience which has its roots in industrial design/human centered design practices and precedes the world of web development.

“UX is the design of everything
independent of medium or across media
with human experience as an explicit outcome
and human engagement as an explicit goal.”
– Jesse James Garrett

The goals of UX are to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through the utility, ease of use, and engagement provided in the interaction with a product.

UX focuses on the user, paying attention to how the user is engaging with the senses, the body, the mind and the emotions. Beginning from these considerations we work to gain a better picture of the user’s capabilities, constraints, and their experiential context. This is the foundation that user research provides and from which iterative design and development can proceed.

The emotional capacity of UX has only really been addressed in the last two decades. In the book the experience economy they talk about how we have for a long time we have discounted experiences as entertainment only and that is not an accurate description.

How does UX and design thinking work together?

Design thinking is a simple solution framework that anyone can use for innovation. Using it we can empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test our assumptions generated during the process and ensure that we are meeting the needs of the users.

Jay went on to show her vision for how UX is composed of many facets which together build the bigger picture of creating a website for a client.

UX and development

In development, users and roles serve a specific purpose in mapping the architecture needs and flow of an application. But through UX we can develop personas and use cases to uncover user tasks, edge cases, and unmet needs that could be translated into features and find/address usability concerns.

Simply put, developers can get pretty clear requirements of how an application works – but often times how stakeholders envision the application working for themselves is not how others would use it. Just because a functional requirement is met, does not mean that an end user will find it intuitive to use. This is the gap that a thorough UX process will bridge.

UX and UI are not interchangeable

They do touch on each other and do share a great deal of information but it’s important to delineate what each terms is referencing. User interface design is concerned with layout, typography, the visual flow and consistency of elements/components. UI without UX can create products that are visually great, but may not serve specific user needs or make actively confound their tasks.

Examples

Jay went on to show a Personal and Journey map she created for a client which spoke to how the user journey prior to and through the app, and beyond it. Going through this exercise with the client helped contextualize and prioritize key moments in the user experience:

We also saw examples of wireframes with callouts on the page for a different client:

 

Conclusion

Jay’s UX experience and knowledge has had a significant positive impact on our projects since she join PSC last year. Being able to show some of the cool things she has done, and spread the word internally of how she does it made for a very powerful and well-received presentation.

 

PSC Tech Talk – Microsoft Bot Framework

Marky Roden Bot Framework, PSC Labs, Tech Talks , , ,

Starting in early 2016 cloud vendors started to promote the concept of bots as a cool new feature and new way for users to interact with their applications within the enterprise. Understanding the general acceptance of a bot as a user interface, the push to gain traction in the space began in earnest.  Seeing this shift in emphasis in the vendor landscape prompted PSC Labs to create an investigation team for a short-term project.

In this presentation Adam Lepley (@AdamLepley) presented the first of a number of talks (here, here and here) he has given on the MS Bot Framework, how it works, why it was created and how easy it is to use.

What is the Microsoft Bot Framework? 

The bot framework is as the name implies a framework for building “bots”. What this means as a developer is that in C# and JavaScript Microsoft has created libraries containing methods and functions for simplifying the creation of an interactive chat bot. Once the created the framework also provides the ability to publish the bot to many chat “channels” like facebook, slack, teams, skype, SMS and others.

Chat bots are not a new concept. Various web sites and chat clients have been leveraging varied forms bots for many years, but mostly with the emphasis on consumer facing applications.  Targeting chat applications also comes with the benefit of building on a platform the user already is familiar with. It also removes the friction of leaning a new application and lessens the burden on developers on creating complex custom UI.

The Plan

Within the lab we always like to learn about a new technology and then make a plan to better understand it and demonstrate capability in it. The Plan was initially to download the examples, install, learn and then expand on what we learn and make our own examples with broader applicability to PSC clients.

We looked into:

  • How to create a bot
  • How to deploy a bot to different channels
  • How to add Artificial intelligence (LUIS)
  • How can we build something applicable to our clients / What else can we play with?

What did we find?

Adam discussed and demonstrated how easy it is to create a bot using the framework. He was able to build a hello world bot in about 10 minutes and publish it to a point where we could actually interact with it in the meeting itself.

The investigation team created the three bots aimed at demonstrating increased productivity gains and enhanced user experiences:

  • Common data capture – The ability to quickly and easily view and create timesheets from a bot.
  • Predictive Analytics – Using Machine Learning techniques to return projected sales results back to users based on Product information hosted in an external database.
  • Cognitive Services – Using cognitive services and natural language processing to demonstrate free text entry in a bot to create task logging on an external site.

The common assumption is text is the primary integrations when using chat clients. This is mostly true when two humans communicate over chat, but as it relates to bots, we have a variety options Microsoft provides with its abstraction.

The bot framework supports text (plain and rich), images (up to 20 Mb), video (up to 1 mins), buttons and the following rich content cards…

In addition to the rich content cards, Microsoft has released a separate service which enables you to build more complex card content layouts which can be rendered from data coming from the bot framework. This also exposed more native platform specific custom rendering of cards.

Timesheet Bot

We set out to build a bot which would help fill out weekly timesheet for our consultants. Our bot has two main features: displaying and creating a weekly timesheet. For displaying the previous week’s timesheet, used a carousel card which can display a collocation of cards representing the days of the week. Each card also has a set of buttons which can either link to additional actions within the bot, or external links to an existing website.

Product information Bot

We created a bot demonstrating the ability to search a product database which in turn triggered an external API call to an associated Azure machine learning service. Users can interact with the bot via a series of question and answers. e.g. “What product are you searching for? Please select one of the following”. The results are then fed back to the bots in the form of a chart graphic. This bot demonstrates a powerful way to access a variety of on demand reports right within a chat client.

Productivity Bot using Natural Language interpretation

We used the Azure LUIS service (Language Understanding Intelligent Service), which is a part of Microsoft’s cognitive services and uses machine learning to help derive intent from text. Users can use an unstructured text request to “create a task” or “create new task” or “I want a new task” which the LUIS service derives the intent to be “Create a Task”. Using the secure integration with and external task tracking service (Trello) the bot is then able to ask the user the necessary questions to create a task based on user inputs.

Conclusion

Bots are being used today by startup and some commercial enterprises trying to break into the corporate enterprise space. Our time spent with the Microsoft Bot Framework has convinced us that bot are ready for the enterprise and there are use cases for them effective implementation today.

 

PSC Tech Talk: How does blockchain work and what is cryptomining?

Marky Roden PSC Labs, Tech Talks , , , ,

This week one of the Labs team members Toby Samples (@tsamples) gave a presentation on How does blockchain work and what is cryptomining. We are looking at Blockchain in the Labs right now and with the considerable press around cryptomining and how you can even hack a website to do it, we figured it would be good to educate everyone internally and also come up with some policy around preventing this as part of our delivery excellent to clients.

What is blockchain?

Well simply put it is a distributed digital record which enables the ability to prove that every transaction within the “chain” is correct and has not been tampered with. Most people know the association of blockchain and bitcoin.

Blockchain works by “hashing” the contents of a transaction and adding them to the “chain”. Once the chain is started the next link in the chain is created using the hash from the previous chain. If the contents of any link are changed the hashes will not match and the chain is broken.

The implication for bitcoin transactions on a massive scale is that every transaction is recorded in the chain, which makes the chain large, which makes validating the chain expensive and processor intensive. (One bitcoin transaction costs as much as the energy for a house for a week)

In a financial ledger it is critical to the confidence of the company/investor/buyer that bank records are accurate and no-one is faking the numbers for their own personal gain. But there are many other potential usages which less “volume” but just as much use.

Bitcoin and other distributed cryptocurrencies allow for transactions to happen all over the global and more importantly transaction validation can be a distributed process. It is not instantaneous that the transactions occur.

When a digital transaction is carried out, it is grouped together in a cryptographically protected block with other transactions that have occurred in the last 10 minutes and sent out to the entire network.

Miners (members in the network with high levels of computing power) then compete to validate the transactions by solving complex coded problems. The first miner to solve the problem and validate the block receives a reward. (In the Bitcoin Blockchain network, for example, a miner would receive Bitcoins). This is a really nice article explaining how the proof of work, works.

Explaining How Proof of Stake, Proof of Work, Hashing and Blockchain Work Together

So what is cryptomining?

Cryptomining is using a computer to do the coin mining processing. This is generally cost prohibitive to run as an individual. Unless you have a powerful gaming pc and are making a long term investment, it is not really a financially viable thing to do for an individual. The process is relatively simple: you create an online account to process financial transactions (you get paid), sign up to a service which will give you transactions to process, and install a program to churn through validations. Once you sign up to a service the validations are transmitted to your computer for processing.

It becomes illegal (cryptojacking) when you commandeer  someone else’s machine to do the mining for you. Why not have someone else pay for the mining while you reap the profits for the validation?

Where this becomes especially nefarious when services like coinhive allow you to make your website customers do this mining for you. Some people are starting to use this as income from their websites rather than advertising. Coinhive offer a service whereby you can add a coinhive js file to your website and then anyone who visits that site gets a javascript load of coin mining assigned to the computer and it churns away while you are on the page.

What happened earlier in Feb 2018 became international news when a remote 3rd party js library site used by UK and AUS government sites was hacked and these .gov sites started to behave like coinhive processing sites. See this great blog for more details (The JavaScript Supply Chain Paradox: SRI, CSP and Trust in Third Party Libraries).

There are ways and means to prevent your site becoming victim to this JavaScript attack as the article describes. The tale is cautionary and it is important that awareness of this kind of behavior is out there.

Conclusion

Blockchain is not just for financial transactions, there are many other real world applications for it. Understanding why how cryptocurrency works in principle, and the necessity for Coin Mining it breeds, gives us a better preparedness to prevent its illegal usage.

 

PSC Tech Talk: Azure API Management

Marky Roden PSC Labs, Tech Talks , , , , , ,

In this presentation Alex Zakhodin (@AZakhodin) talked about his experience implementing Azure API Management within a large client.

The situation

The client is a globally focused customer currently providing certification services to their clients. They wanted to be able to provide a new service to their clients so that they are able to access their certification data in real time through a consumable, monetized service.

Client challenges

The client’s main application and multiple data sources are on premises and would not be moved to the cloud, so a hybrid application needed to be created and managed.

The client wanted to be able to securely manage traffic accessing the APIs. They needed to be able to track not only the number of users calling the API but control the amount of access over time.

The payment model proposed for this service also needed a way to track everything to a discrete level; the number of hits and the volume of data provided.

PSC solution

PSC implemented a solution using Azure API management which enabled the client to Abstract the data, Govern the process, Monitor the usage and provide the flexibility to on-board new services at any time.

The Azure API Management platform creates an API proxy model to facilitate the monitoring of API traffic through a centralized set of end points. This allows for developers to expose their internally hosted services without risk of exposing a direct connection. It allows for administrators to configure access to the data (down to users), provide limits to the amount of data accessible over a period of time, and to then create accurate reports on the volume of usage for billing.

The platform provides the ability to track traffic geographically and determine volumes and accessibility. For a globally application the end points and data can be made available via geo-replication.

For developers the API management portal provides the ability to not only track usage but also see how the APIs are performing.

To take advantage of the cost pricing models available in Azure, the wherever possible Azure Functions were used. In this way the client is only billed for usage. The direct cost per transaction means that the cost billed to the end client per transaction is easily manageable and competitive.

Conclusion

The Azure API Gateway platform is a mature, enterprise-ready, capability which allows for the creation of a hybrid cloud/internal architecture for companies to monitor, track and monetize their services in a secure and consistent manner.

 

PSC Group Tech Reviews

Marky Roden PSC Labs ,

One of the coolest parts of my job is being an enabler of others. Since the inception of the PSC Labs we have given the opportunity for developers/managers/designers to give what we call “Tech Reviews” and share some of the cool things they have worked on in recent months.

The tech review platform serves many purposes (beyond the free pizzas for those attending in person). The reviews enable:

  • Cross sharing of ideas and experience across the company
  • The opportunity for those unaccustomed to giving technical presentations to learn from others in a safe friendly environment
  • Sharing some of the cool stuff we are playing in PSC Labs and sharing some thoughts and ideas on the future solutions we believe PSC will be able to provide our customers

In just over two years we have had nearly 30 tech reviews broadly crossing almost every aspect of the work we do at PSC Group. We have also had nearly 20 different speakers which is amazing. I was concerned when we started that it would always be the same few people giving the presentations but I was very happily proven wrong. The most any one consultant has done is three. Topics have varied from PGP Encryption, to Azure API Gateways, to formula management using PLM software, to the process of building a HIPAA compliant network on AWS for a Medical practice.

We use Skype for Business to share the presentation with those who are unable to attend in person. We record the presentation and post it internally to the Office365 Video portal so that anyone can use it for reference at a later date.

In the coming weeks I am going to start to blog about some of the Tech Review we have had in the past and the new ones as they are happening. I really want to share the ideas and concepts and demonstrate the breadth of interesting work we get to do at PSC.

 

 

 

PSC Director of Technology Solutions

Marky Roden PSC, PSC Labs ,

I am very humbled and excited to have been given the title of Director of Technology Solutions at PSC Group.

It has been a fascinating and varied 5 1/2 years since I joined PSC. I am very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work in almost every role at PSC and experience how client delivery excellence is achieved at all levels. I get to professionally hang out with some of the most talented people I have ever had the pleasure of working with. It’s so much fun!

I am really excited about what 2018 holds. PSC Labs is going strong and we continue to receive reassuringly positive feedback from clients who truely value our role as trusted technical advisors. In 2017 PSC successfully branched out into a number of new and challenging emerging technologies and we have plans a plenty to continue to learn, evolve and grow.

I love what I do and I am very grateful to have a job which gives me the opportunity to be the best I can be, and still challenge me to be better.

It’s going to be a fun year, but then it always is… 🙂

Speaking at SharePoint Chicago Dec 2017

Marky Roden PSC, PSC Labs , ,

I will be speaking at the 2017 SharePointFest Chicago conference December 8th, at McCormick Place, Chicago.

I will be talking about how O365 adoption can be made easier by having and internal emerging technologies team try and solve some simple business problems and lead to a broader adoption of the platform within an organization.

This will be the third time I have spoken about “the Labs team” this year and I am really honored to be able to speak at SharePointFest again this year 🙂

————-

BV 205 – Enabling O365 adoption from within – How an emerging technologies team can make a big difference

Too often when an organization makes major technology shifts, it is often not the technology change which causes problems, it’s the people and how they adapt to change. While we often associated this to end users, the same is just as true for developers. If we want to retain our best development talent then we have to give them a part in the transition. Allow them to understand it and own it.

With so many new technologies and capabilities being exposed within Office 365 and Azure, many business are frankly overwhelmed with the possibilities and often fall back on the bare minimum of mail, calendaring and SharePoint. This talk will demonstrate cost effective measures to keep developers engaged while providing benefit to the company in a mutually beneficial manner.

An internal research and development team can create a sustainable balance of creative knowledge growth for the individual, matched with a method to future proof the overall organization. How changes in technology affect the success of a company need to be understood, managed and the effects managed. With the unrestrained freedom to explore emerging technologies and without the constraints of today’s corporate development policies your best talent can achieve great things, stay engaged, and more importantly stay.

In this presentation Mark will discuss and demonstrate how a creative “labs” team can lead to short, medium and long term benefits for any business willing to invest in people and technology.