So how we deal with "Community Content" production and the "Obvious Fear"
I often get asked about training my competition or letting out the secret sauce formula. I really think this is a BIG fear especially for guys who are coming from Integrators and Consulting firms who service the enterprise. Some of it also comes from the misconception that they have some secret sauce in the first place.
I thought big companies had great methodologies, standardisation, project management, risk mitigation you name it they had it, I thought they made money by reducing variation and providing consistent solutions, supported by highly scripted service desks, with SLAs and defined escalation points, handing up problems to increasingly smarter highly technical people who could replace anybody with a small VB script.
I have done some sub contracts for some big Integrators and Software Vendors and I don’t think that their propaganda matches my experience, while some very good individuals produce great outcomes the experience of these guys does NOT automatically mean that the whole organisation have a secret sauce recipe and more so, most of the Systems Engineers deploy their own version of best practice and with a good deal of variation even between builds in the same project.
So I have no doubt that the small business focused communities have a great many differences in the people who come along and their desire to share, this is stark contrast to my experience with more Enterprise focused communities.
I have had some Senior Engineers from some consulting companies openly say “why would I come along to a User Group? What could you possibly teach me” (how about humility you knob jockey?). Others don't come because they are not goal’d on going to things like that.
This not to say that Enterprise Focused IT Pro Groups members are evil, just that SMB IT Pro Groups are different, and I would like to explain the good and not so good of the communities I participate in, and the motivations for, and methods of, contribution I see.
SME Community Participation.
In SMB communities are see far greater standardisation of builds due to shared step by step guides, books and blogs pointing to the way an individual has done a certain thing on SBS.
Visual Guides and how to Videos
Now the phenomenon of people just following a guide as a substitute to thinking is not new, if I had a dollar for each of the builds I have seen that are exactly the lab example from Microsoft Official Curriculum…. That is not to say that Step by Step Guides are not a good thing I think they have huge value and have done some myself and they help people to choose similar options as others who have been down the same road.
I am starting to think that a Video that does the same thing as a Step by Step guide is more effective as it allows a conversation, one way granted but the producer can explain options and why things are being configured the way they are. In a written step by step guide the writer is lucky if the text gets read at all, (man is it tempting to put misleading info in the screen shots ;-D)
Here are two examples of installing CSM for SMB 3.x, I am not making a judgement call on a demo vs a full guide but might later:
Small Business Server Books
I sometimes wonder just how many books we need on Small Business Server 2003? I even found one today I had not heard of before, but I think the count is around six or seven, they all vary in depth and technical usefulness but I must say the thing that made people pay attention to the early ones from Harry Brelsford, was the story of Springer Spaniels, an imaginary company that the books walks through a deployment for. These made the reader think about the deployment and I still see many folk deploy against Harry’s Best Practice. (Guys please remember Best practice in 2003 may have been a 10GB C drive partition BUT in 2008 how about making it 60GB or more it is not like you are buying 40GB drives anymore)
Presenting at User Groups
I think Consultants sell consulting and I think this fact is missed universally by consultants who work for other people and are focused on their utilisation.
I have noticed a shift toward selling guides to help people do highly technical things and with varying success. I also notice the trend toward charging a subscription for content on private web sites, this has been happening for quite a while but I’m not sure you will ever see me going that route.
It is my opinion that showing people what you can do, free and openly will not cost consulting sales. I think that when I see someone who can do something that I can’t do or can’t do yet more specifically, I think about how I would engage this person to do the service delivery on my behalf. Why provide a sloppy first cut of an offering that a professional who has already read the manuals so to speak can do, better in less time.
Is this to say I believe everyone should publish the detail of all their offerings to the web and then compete against the people who are “borrowing” your IP without the development costs. Well that would be up to you, personally I would consider a new approach:
- Creating a step by step guide does not give people enough knowledge to customise or maintain most solutions
- Clicking next 15 Times does not make an offering
- Scripting the steps and doing an automated deployment is worth keeping in the consulting toolkit (a one hour session would not cover how to automate usually)
- Deploying a series of features using the press next method makes for expensive manual deployments, making an offering that automates the build based of Group Policy deployed software components, is time efficient.
- Defining the build in step by step form that provides the same outcomes as the scripted one, helps standardisation which I think is a great idea.
So what am I saying thinking about presenting to your peers about what you do well will not cost sales and may even increase partnering opportunities with other SMB IT Pros. Contribute to the community what your are comfortable with but remember well configured standardised deployments help everyone in my opinion.
I am looking forward to what the Sydney SMB IT Professionals will come up with this year.