Programmer, Analyst, Learner, Leader, Gamer

Yeah yeah, call me indecisive. Now that I’m officially a manager within a global, public corporation… I think having a blog titled “O RLY, YA RLY, NO WAIH” isn’t very professional. I’ll still keep the blog’s original intention in place, this is my mental break place where I collect my thoughts. It will continue to be witty, crazy, and filled with gaming stuff. I just wanted to maintain a pseudo professional ring to it.

With the following announcement, it’s official. I’m now the manager of ESP “North”. I will have a few developers, QA, and technical support staff working for me maintaining the current (soon to be legacy) applications for ESP, while the veteran developers work on re-writing the application as a C# / ASP.Net / Web service based application.

Just another thing that is adding to my busy schedule as I am currently wading through 23 resumes that are growing every 15 minutes or so as more resumes come in from the job posts I made. If you are interested, please look for my post on Portland Craig’s List.

It is with much regret that Mark Heins is announcing Victor Laurence is leaving the Comply Plus Development Team. Conversely it is with much fanfare that I am announcing Victor as the Manager of the ESP North Development Team. Of course this will be a smooth transition

 

ESP is in Mountain View California and can be found on the web at http://esp-net.com/. ESP was acquired by IHS the same day as Dolphin and is one of the organizations in the Environment Domain. ESP currently has 6 Software Developers and a few colleagues in QA and Tech Support. We are currently seeking 2 Software Developers and at least 1 QA and 1 Tech Support Engineer to work alongside Victor in our Lake Oswego office. We will be working on existing ESP products, as well as, the future roadmap. Victor will work closely with the existing team in Mountain View which is managed by Randy Chandrupatla on the Software Development side and Tony Bamberger managing QA and Tech Support. This approach will provide good coverage and cross-training for this extensive code base and allow the developers at both locations to create similar look and feel products for the entire product offering in the Environment Domain.

 

Please join me in congratulating and supporting Victor.

Between the Warhammer Beta, college, my car being broken into, changing job roles, possibly other opportunities, house hunting, preparing out household budget, moving finances, keeping my head screwed on, meeting with mortgage lenders to get pre-approved for a future home purchase, finding the PERFECT place, signing paperwork, working with a homeowner/landlord who’s not even in town, dealing with getting new teeth put in my mouth after fracturing two of them, and now packing and preparing to move by the 15th starting this weekend (wears me out just saying all that)…

Let’s just say I’ve been busy. More details forthcoming as I find the time to post.

Today I was asked to move (or at least start the transition) onto the development team for our newest flagship product which is going to unify all of our existing products into one suite. I was intially asked to fulfill a simple Flex developer role and one 30 minute conversation later, I had pitched a completely different role. Here is the pitch I gave the manager of the team after our conversation.

Victor’s position on the <FLASHSHIP-PRODUCT> team would leverage his well rounded knowledge to fill a very specific and needed role. Working as part of the <FLASHSHIP-PRODUCT> software development team, his duties would include the following.

He will contribute to the development of the product as a front-end Flex designer/developer, but he will also have a major focus on documenting the development processes. He will do so by working with <FLASHSHIP-PRODUCT-MANAGER> and other stakeholders to better establish project goals, specifications, budget and timelines. This would involve collaboration with various business units, then using that understanding of business operations to help build solutions to meet the department’s internal information needs as well as the customer needs. He will analyze business processes, identifying causes of problems and making recommendations for process and design improvements. He will use his knowledge across a spectrum of technologies to determine the best solutions to design problems. He will also work to establish testing procedures to ensure the application is thoroughly tested during development and prior to release.

EDIT: This was the response.

Thanks Victor.  I appreciate the effort and enthusiasm for writing that up.  I should be able to make it pretty much a done deal.  I’ll send <VP-OF-THE-DIVISION> a quick email to get confirmation.

So apparently I am an epic fail at advertising. Aside from a few select places on the net, my attempts at advertising so far have not… gone well. :-(  Call me a little overly ambitious, but I advertised my new side project on 27 different places across the net. Most people said things like “good luck with your gold sales” and other such comments. MMORPG.Com didn’t shun me though which is promising. My hopes are that the few places which haven’t shunned my advertising will start to spread the word. Hopefully my story gets Dugg as well and more and more people start to get exposure to the site.

Once I have a ton of people signed up for the newsletter then I will announce the beta launch of the site. You know after dealing with this advertising crap, I think back to my days of owning my own business. I loved doing the work, but hated the advertising.

I guess since the word is out, I might as well announce it here:
http://www.mmoleader.com

I am a very honest person. I like speaking my mind. I especially enjoy spreading good news. This is why I am HORRIBLE at keeping secrets. I really… really… want to leak information about the top secret project I’ve been working on. Every time I go to the site to customize something new, do data entry, putting up articles I’ve written over the years (to help jump start the site) and otherwise do things to make the site more and more awesome, the more I want to tell people about it.

I’ve told my guild and I’ve told people I know and trust, but I want to tell everyone else out there who is going to be SUPER excited about this project. My site has a very focused user group that I’m targeting, but that user group will be very interested in this site. Right now Kerrie is working on the branding design for the site including logo design and other things which will give us a professional look. Also I know a friend who is an Internet journalist who is working on pointers and will get back to me soon. I also have a friend who’s mom is an Internet marketing consultant who has been doing it for so long she works via word of mouth through contracts for big customers and not under some big agency. I don’t have any upfront capital for any of these people, but they are willing to help out which is great.

I can assure you this, the subject matter is… related to the MMO industry. I’ll leave the rest of the clues up to your imagination to figure out.

Yesterday Scott sent out an email that’s really got my grey matter flowing. It is a 111 page PDF document (WITH NO BOOKMARKS, ARG!!!!) that illustrates and describes the core values and core competencies of IHS and how they line up with the 5 separate paths (not including management path) of IHS. Software Quality Assurance, Technical, Development, Program Management, and finally Business Solutions. I’m obviously on the Software Engineer path right now, but my desire is to be on the Business Solutions path. Actually, technically right now I’m on none of the paths, but hopefully that’s going to be fixed soon.

The nice thing about this document is that I have not only a visual picture of the path (Business Solutions Architect, Senior Business Solutions Architect, Principle Business Solutions Architect, and Executive Business Solutions Architect), but clear job descriptions and the core competencies IHS views that play a role in job performance / reviews. An extra bonus is that it gives me even MORE excuse to talk to my colleges about it and share my career goals openly while telling them WHY I’m interested in that path even more so than the engineering path. I had a very long conversation wtih Don and he agreed with me that from my passions, education, and experience that the Business Solutions Path is there I should be going.

NOTE to Self: change the Dolphin Software category it IHS…

Excerpts from Harvard Business Review

A number of our conclusions about the future of business leadership were unanticipated. For one, individuals you’d never expect to identify—and who’d never expect to be identified—as “high potentials” for real-world management training end up taking on significant leadership roles in games.

The closest thing I can liken the leadership of an 80-person modern raiding guild to is the management of a medium-size business

Quite an interesting and powerful article I must say, particularly coming from Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and IBM. It makes me a bit proud of my online leadership accomplishments over the last few years. 

So today I decided to resurrect HILYMI as a Warhammer: Age of Reckoning guild. I assure you, this is NOT an April Fools joke. Don’t ask me why this came to me on a day like this but continuing frustrations about TR and seeing posts on the HILYMI forums motivated me to do it today… /shrug.

I will continue to hate Warcraft, but I miss the guild. I don’t like what Blizzard has done to the game. It is not the game for me anymore. I’m not interested in going back to Warcraft, but I’m not happy in Tabula Rasa. It’s a great game, but it’s not the kind of game I want it to be and will never be. Warhammer, now with the big budget of EA, is shaping up to be an excellent game.

25 years of Games Workshop universe complexity.
Financial backing of Electronic Arts.
Realm vs Realm game play from Dark Age of Camelot.
Instanced PVP and PVE concepts from Warcraft.
Instanced raiding. World event raids.
Truly the next generation MMO.
I pre-ordered my limited collector’s edition copy on Sunday.
 

I was talking with Krommy in AIM chat and he mentioned “Isn’t Warhammer still in Beta?”. Yes, Warhammer is due in the fall. Yes it’s quite early to be discussing the guild’s future in Warhammer, but these things take time.

Discussions take time.
Revamping the website will take time.
Finding lost brothers will take time.
Gathering our forces will take time.
Re-forming the officership will take time.
Re-writing policy will take time.These things will take time.
 

I want all of it worked out BEFORE the game starts. That way we have time to enjoy the game and have a strong clean head start in the universe. We have a lot of lost time to make up. We can start that journey now.

I’ve been busy the last few months. This little bit of self reflection will give you some insight into what I’ve been going through with recently, particularly within the last few weeks.

My journey into leadership began many years ago when I was the sole IT manager and programmer at a small commercial real-estate management firm. I was coached by the President on ways to improve myself as a leader. I was challenged to find better ways of doing business and how to communicate those changes to others. This journey expanded when I was encourage to pick up the leadership torch as a volunteer leadership position in an online community of over 100 individuals. This expanded later when I left that community and again was pulled (almost reluctantly) into another organization which is now around those same numbers. Right now I hold a second volunteer position that involves leading communications and facilitating change goals for a community of thousands of people, compiling feedback, and delivering reports to key players in a much larger organization. Over the years people have described my leadership style as democratic, pragmatic, and visionary. How did I develop such strong leadership skills in such a small amount of time?

The key factor that has been advantageous to my journey has been RAPIDLY growing environments. The real-estate management firm was constantly in a state of change. During my time with them they grew to a handful of people to over 65 people. In all of my volunteer leadership positions, they have taken place in an even more rapidly changing environment growing from a handful of people to well over 100. My exposure to rapidly changing environments has allowed me to learn how to properly lead change. Furthermore, I’ve had the power to experiment with various techniques of leadership (learned through formal education as well as self study) with little to no fear of “ruining a good thing”, especially with my volunteer leadership positions.

The more I learn about leadership, the more I realize that the average person doesn’t understand the difference between management and leadership. The more I learn about leadership, the more I realize that this is a product of history and the way individuals in business were trained to manage, and how individuals have learned what “managers” are like. When two organizations come together, one who understands management and the other than understands leadership, a serious challenge presents itself. This challenge is one that we will face going forward. 

P.S. Yes, I fell off my wight loss plan. I’m still struggling with a lack of a real schedule in my life.