Computerworld - August 22, 2011

ing with user management and
lay out the objectives and scope of
the project and engage in some
discussion. He’d then say,
‘This will take six
months and cost
$1 million.’ He
would then sneak
a peek around
the room and,
if no one had
fallen o; his
chair, he’d
quickly add, ‘for
Phase One.’ ”

BI & Analytics
Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . 25
biperspectives.com/magazine
CenturyLink . . . . . . . . . . C3
centurylink-business.com
CommVault . . . . . . . . . . C2-1
achieveoneness.com
Digital Spotlight
on Converged
Infrastructure. . . . . . . . . 19
www.computerworld.com/s/
pages/digital_ci
dtSearch ............. 29
dtsearch.com
IBM Intel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
ibm.com/systems/consolidate
IBM Non-Intel . . . . . . . . . . . C4
ibm.com/facts
Microsoft
Market Pulse .......... 9
www.computerworld.com/
whitepapers/
MicrosoftMarketPulse
Verisign ........... 22, 23
verisigninc.com/connect
ADVERTISERS’ INDEX
This index is provided as an
additional service. The publisher
does not assume any liability for
errors or omissions.

HAL MAYFORTH

That Would Do It

Support pilot fish gets an e-mail from an associate: My BlackBerry has gone kaput!
The ear speaker stopped working. I can only use it in external speaker mode. Who
do I need to arm-twist to get it replaced? Fish sends a reply instructing the user
to power o; his phone, pull the battery, hold the power button down to drain any
residual power in the unit, then replace the battery, turn it on, and call back if it still
doesn’t work. Then fish gets an instant message: Ifigured it out. Followed by a phone
call: “Do you want to know what the problem was?” Sure, says fish, figuring the
user got it wet or something. “I was
at Starbucks, and I was sitting very
near my car, which had my Bluetooth
headset in it — turned on and still
paired and connected to my phone.”
jor retailer — and his boss has an
amazingly good record of bringing
projects in on time and on budget.
“Those were the days before we had
all the fancy metrics and project
planning tools that are available
today. So one day I asked him to
enlighten me on his technique for ac-
curate project estimating,” says fish.
“He said he would go into the meet-

Critical,
Redefined
Support pilot fish
gets a call from a
user: “My applica-
tion won’t run under
the new operating-
system version that you
just released. It’s a critical
application. Can you get it to work?”
OK, says fish, I’ll take a look. And with
the code in hand, he starts trying to
get the application working. But after
trying every reasonable combina-
tion of configurations and settings
he can think of, fish has to conclude
the user is right: This app just won’t
run. He calls user back and explains
that something must have happened
between the new version of the OS
and the old one, and he promises to
test the app with the old version to
see if he can tell what changed. User:
“Oh, that’s OK. The app didn’t work
with the old OS version, either. I was
hoping you could get it to work with
the new version.”

There’s No School Like Old-School Flash back about 30 years to when this pilot fish is working for a ma-

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