A common proverb goes something like this:

Catch a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

The point of this is that I can only go so far if you catch a fish for me every day. If you teach me how to fish so that I can do it for myself, then I’m good to go with or without your being around. I need to learn how to take care of things on my own.

Teach me how to cook: a story

I confess that my wife is the one who does most of the cooking in our home. If you’ve seen me, it’s obvious – my body shape indicates that she’s fed me well (heh). But I don’t want her to do all the cooking all the time, and I recognize that it’s a bit selfish on my part to expect her to cook for me. Especially when I can step up and do more cooking.

The problem is that I don’t work well with clutter. I cannot begin to think about making more dirty dishes when there are some that already in the sink. I have to start with a clean kitchen, or at least clean enough for me to cook. I was taught to clean as I cook, so that the cleanup time and effort are minimized. How can I do that if there is a mess waiting for me before I even begin?

Yesterday afternoon my wife decided to get started on dinner, but she wanted me to make lunch. I obliged but was soon overwhelmed by how busy our small apartment kitchen had become. I vented my frustration.

“Never mind,” my wife said, “I’ll do it. I’ll make lunch.”

“No,” I told her. “I need to learn how to deal with this.”

So I took a step back and expressed what my real concern was, and we talked through it. And, guess what? Our daughter said it was the best spaghetti she’s had in a long time!

Teach me how to do my job – another story

I knew when I started my job as a Business Analyst that it was going to be intense because I’ve had so much to learn and so little time to do it.

At work I’m very involved with getting our clients set up with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and everything about our customization that goes along with it. Different people have specific skills and responsibilities, and I’m still learning every day what my role on the team is, since it’s evolved.

So I’m bent on figuring out how to deploy new and import existing CRM organizations, pursuing my coworkers to let me know how I can help move the implementation process along to please our clients. What pieces can they teach me to do so that the end result can be done?

Sometimes my coworkers will take care of something I’ve had a question about for me. I’d rather have been taught what I needed to do. I recognize the element of timing. But still, I love when one of them makes the time to show me how to do something so that I don’t necessarily need their help if they are not around.

I’m being vague on purpose, because this doesn’t apply to a specific thing about work. It applies to my work overall.

Back to fishing

I haven’t literally been fishing in many years, but I can certainly appreciate what the proverb is saying. I recognize my own need to delegate and train others in what I know how to do, both in my paid work and volunteer work. It’s not so that they can take my job. Rather, it’s so that the job can be done, maybe even better than what I can do by myself!

I look forward to it because I’m focused on making the result the best it can be.

Comments!

I do so love comments.

What I need

Examples and short vignettes of how you’ve seen this in your life. Build on what I’ve shared here. Add to the conversation.

What I don’t need

Put down remarks or unsolicited advice on how I should have or could have handled these situations better. Blatant self-promotion. (Remember the Comment policy.)

Make it a great day!

In a recent interview I was asked if I was unwilling to promote other networking groups. It would seem some are under the impression that only a select can create community events.

The case for more local community networking groups

Now, if you’re active in the social media community in Cincinnati, you might be tempted to think that we’re reaching saturation and that the community cannot handle any more networking groups.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

I love the stories that data tell, so let’s look at some data.

Consider this, via Wikipedia:

According to a 2008 Census Bureau estimate, the Cincinnati Metropolitan Area had a population of 2,155,137 making it the largest MSA in Ohio, and the 24th most populous in the United States.

That’s 2.1 million people.

Now let’s look at some data for the New Media Cincinnati social media networking group that we created in October 2007. I’m most familiar with this group, and as such will not comment on others.

• Second Saturday attendance. In January 2010 we had the largest ever attendance at a Second Saturday event: 70. That’s 0.032% of the population of the Greater Cincinnati area!
• LinkedIn group members. At the moment there are 339 members of the New Media Cincinnati LinkedIn group, or 0.016% of the metropolitan area. That number probably should be adjusted downward because there are people from outside of the Cincinnati area who are part of the group.
• Twitter followers. At the time of this writing, there are 2303 followers of @newmediacincy on Twitter, or 0.107% of the population. That number also needs to be adjusted downward because there are a number of duplicate Twitter accounts and many outside of the Cincinnati area who follow the news about the group.
• Facebook fans. I just checked, and there are 308 fans of New Media Cincinnati on Facebook, or 0.104% of the area’s population.

Understandably, many of the population will never be interested in what New Media Cincinnati is doing to get involved. Even so, these numbers show that we’ve only barely scratched the surface in reaching the Greater Cincinnati community.

It’s time to stop swimming around in the fishbowl and look outside of it. Or build another onramp so that more people can come in and join us.

We need more training groups, workshops, more bootcamps, more unconferences, more tweetups, more networking events so that people can understand how to use social networking tools effectively.

No one group is capable of meeting everyone’s needs. And every one of these groups needs volunteers who can help make things happen.

It’s time for you to step up and do something.

Related link: Being Active in the Community by Jennifer Navarrete

Joe Wessels, the host of the CinDaily podcast, had me on his program yesterday to talk about New Media Cincinnati and specifically the recent “tempest in a teapot” situation that occurred over the past week. It was a great opportunity to tell the story of New Media Cincinnati and how this social media community has evolved over the past few years.

Direct link (mp3, 55.9 MB, 61:03)

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I’ve been checking out the numbers for How I Got My Job episodes, and I thought it might be instructive to share what I’ve uncovered so far. This discussion will get a bit technical.

Methodology

I have Google Analytics installed on the site, and I’m also tracking Feedburner statistics.  But for the purpose of this post, however, I’m going to concentrate on the statistics available throughAwstats, and the next paragraph will explain why.

In the Summer of 2008, I decided not to get a LibSyn account and instead host media files on a subdomain of my own site.  It wasn’t until April 2009 that I turned on Awstats. So I have about 5 months worth of download data that are unaccounted for. Nevertheless the data from April 2009 to the present I do have.

Because the files are served from my media subdomain, “pages viewed” essentially is the same as “mp3 files served”. I’ve filtered out only the files for the How I Got My Job series, since I name them in such a way to easily identify them, beginning with “higmj”. I don’t number the individual interviews. Neither do I name them in such a way to date them. They are meant to be evergreen.

I expect files that have recently been released to have smaller download numbers than those that have been around awhile. I also expect that the number of downloads will continue to increase over time, as people discover them.

Individual interviews

So, here is some data for individual interviews, from April 2009 to beginning of February 2010:

• Total # of individual mp3 files available: 61.  This means that, in addition to the promo file, there are currently 60 interview files.
• Total downloads of all files: 35857. Close to 36,000 accesses of the mp3 files for any purpose: clicking a play button, downloaded through the feed, or otherwise.
• Highest individual download: 2203.
• Interview with the highest individual download: Health Educator – Ann Ronan. I bet she never thought she’d have an audience of over 2200 for her story.
• Lowest individual download: 110.
• Interview with the lowest individual download: Educator – Kevin Imfeld. Released only 2 days ago.
• Average number of downloads per interview: 588.

Cumulative monthly downloads

Here are the monthly downloads per month, for all interview files, April 2009-January 2010:

• Average: 3566
• Maximum (Dec 2009): 6273
• Minimum (Sep 2009): 1846

Parting thoughts

I bet if I asked anyone I’ve interviewed whether they’d ever expect to be telling their story on average to an audience of close to 600 people, they would be surprised.

As I look at the list of the top downloaded files, I can point to some reasons why these are currently the most downloaded. From what I remember, most of these had to do with a lot of promotion in social channels (Twitter,Facebook, LinkedIn). I have noticed that there were times when I hadn’t promoted as much, and the download numbers were off.

I’m encouraged by these results.  This is an interesting exercise, and I look forward to sharing more updates as time goes on.

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crossposted to Get That Job!

Yesterday was a down day. I don’t think I’ve felt so down like this in quite a long time. It was quite an emotional day of dealing with insecurity, anxiety, stress, and self-doubt.

As I think back to what contributed to this, I can definitely see that, among many things, I was very tired from having overextended myself earlier in the week. In addition, I haven’t been as active physically lately. I’ve loved taking our dog for long walks and using that time to relieve stress and haven’t been doing that as much.

I think down days are good for us, and I’m grateful that I saw it as only temporary. When we’re in those down periods, it’s good to explore why we’re feeling what we’re feeling to see what we can do to get back up. For me, it was taking a long nap and getting out of the home and going for that long walk with the dog.

I’m grateful to have great emotional support from my family. I’m glad my wife encourages me the way she does, and that I have a daughter who thinks I’m the greatest Dad ever. Because it’s so easy for me to look in the mirror, or be told on the phone or in an interview or a rejection letter that I don’t measure up to expectations.

I’m grateful for a network of friends who think very highly of me and let me know. I need to be reminded of my accomplishments, to be encouraged, just as much as I encourage others.

So I spend time in prayer and meditation. I find that music to help me with my mind and listen. I watch funny movies. I check out these 37 Videos That Will Blow Your Mind (thanks again, Chris Ryan, for pointing me to the link!).

And I blog.

Over the holiday break I thought about where I’d like to be one year from now. As I mentioned on the last episode of the Journey Inside My Mind podcast, “Turn the page“, most of my work in using new media technologies has been highly experimental. I’ve tried things out just to see what would happen. I’ve begun a lot of projects with zeal and enthusiasm, and I’ve had to realize that I don’t approach them with the same amount of passion to make them the best that they can be. Two of the strategies for managing multiple online identities are to shelve or even trash projects/accounts/properties.

In many cases I haven’t cared about what others think as much and how what I’m doing affects others. I still believe, as Miles Davis (affiliate link) said, that “an artist’s first responsibility is to himself.” I also recognize that nothing I’ve done has been in a vacuum.

I think as I approach 2010 with incurable, tough-minded optimism, that the following three words will be my guide, my mission:

BE MORE USEFUL

In everything I do in 2010, any project, task, event, blog post, podcast, update, and so forth… my mission is to be more useful. I will have this in the forefront of my mind. I will work to make the projects I work on the best that they can be, considering how what I do can be more useful to you and others. I will work to say YES as much as I can, but not necessarily all the time.

Happy New Year! Let’s begin.

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Over the past month, I have been working on a project to automate payroll entry for a client that has close to 300 employees and is growing. Naturally, it is the company’s best interest to get this payroll automated as much as possible.

To do this I’ve been developing an application to bridge the payroll info to Microsoft Great Plains Integration Manager.

One of the criteria I’ve used to evaluate a client’s payroll is a consistent layout in a good format, so that I can tell the program where to map regular hours, overtime, cash reimbursements, etc. In some cases I’m able to tweak the payroll to make it into a layout that is consistent enough for me to automate.

This particular client is a construction company, and the only electronic version of the payroll is a text file that is not delimited. The file is basically a report from the client’s system, and it has page headers and department footers, as well has breakdowns of withholding, etc. Most of that I can ignore in the program.

My colleague was able to import it into Microsoft Excel, using spaces as the delimiter. From there I saved the file as tab-delimited text, the format used in the other bridge applications I’ve developed.

The big problem is the inconsistent layout, which has come from using spaces to delimit the text, depending largely on how much detail is on a particular line of text. Look at the following 3 lines of text:

• E 22 Per Diem – C AZ 3 99
• E 22 Per Diem – C AZ 3 XYZ111 99
• E 22 Per Diem – C 99

In each of these lines, the payroll item is Per Deim, and the amount is 99. When you space-delimit the lines the amounts are in different columns.

This is just one major aspect of complexity that has come from my attempt to automate the payroll. After talking it over with my boss, we realize that we’ve come to the point of diminishing returns.

I’m off this project until there is another way to parse the payroll information and am able to move on to another project that’s in the queue.

Related tags: microsoft+great+plains integration+manager payroll+automation microsoft+access vba programming application+design peo daniel+johnson+jr

When I was initially developing the bridge application a couple years ago, I had set up the Close button on several forms to be the Cancel button. That way a user can just hit the Esc button to close the form, if they prefer to use the keyboard.

As the applications for various clients have been used, this feature had become more of a bane than a benefit. It turns out that users hit the Esc key to Undo what they have typed, but the application would close the file. This results in some records being incomplete, causing errors when the application is processing.

While you can try to anticipate the user’s experience as much as possible beforehand, some bugs still show up.

No big deal. I just removed that functionality from every bridge application we have in use so that program behaves in a way that users expect it to behave.

Here’s a project I worked on where I learned an important lesson.

The client was a global consumer products company, and the project was to convert an Access 2.0 application to Access 95, which was a conversion from a 16-bit environment to a 32-bit environment. I’m not even going to claim that I understand what all that means, except to say that there were a lot of procedure calls to the Windows Application Programming Interface (API) that needed to be changed over. This application was used to facilitate preparing the company’s profit/loss and balance sheets for all of their business units around the world. Hereafter, I’ll call it the “financial reporting application”.

Where I went wrong was that I didn’t test portions of the program as I converted the code. It demonstrated a skill in programming that I needed to learn, and I learned that lesson the hard way because, once the program was “converted”, i.e., all the code compiled correctly with no errors, there were other application errors that began popping up all over.

I created a tool to help me keep track of all the errors and the steps taken to resolve them and provided the client with daily progress reports.

As I think back on it, I would have done much better if I had taken more time to understand how the program worked in its prior environment and tested the program incrementally as I revised the code.