Tag Archives: Assistance

The exceptional value of a great technical community

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There is a tremendous value in being an active community member. You learn form other people experiences. Both their successes and their mistakes. They learn from you. All this at the cost of the time and effort you put in. This, by itself, is of great value.

There are moments that this value reaches a peak. It becomes so huge it cannot be dismissed by even the biggest cynic of a penny pinching excuse for a manager.You see, one day bad things happen to even the nicest, most experienced and extremely competent people. That day, in the middle of the night you reach out to your community. The message is basically “HELP!”.

Guess what, the community, spread out across the globe over all time zones answers that call. You get access to support and skills form your peers when you most need it. Even if you have to pay an hourly fee that would still be a magnitude cheaper than many “premium” support schemes that, while very much needed for that vertical support, cannot match the depth and breath of the community.

For sure, you don’t have a piece of paper, and SLA, an escalation manager. That might upset some people. But what you do get are hard core skills, extra eyes and hands when you need it the most. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the exceptional value of a great technical community at work. Your backup when the system fails. Who ever has committed community experts as employees or partners or owners of a business indirectly has access to a global network of knowledge, talent, skills and experience. If you truly think people are the biggest capital you have, than these are the gems.

I’m Not Your (FREE) Personal Assistant

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Volunteering in the community

As active community member and MVP I spend a lot of time and effort sharing information and experiences with the community. I also assist colleagues & peers across the globe when they have questions or issues I might be able to help them with. It’s part of sharing and caring. Just like my fellow community members & MVPs I blog, record video’s, web & screen casts, present at conferences & user groups. I hang out for the Ask The Experts moments of opportunity at both local and international. When possible I also attend the ChalkTalks nights like the one that local user group WinTalks organizes where people can bring their questions or problems to discuss.

The impossibility of answering the questions

I share a lot of information, ideas, opinions and experiences. Asking me directly, repeatedly, to give you quick & fast solutions for your current issues, problems and consulting challenges is not the way to go however. For one the complexity of the issues and the situation as exists is often ignored in these question. So it’s impossible to answer them in that fashion.

Also, as is the case with most of us, I’m a very, very busy man. A tremendous amount of knowledge many of my peers and I share is freely available to the community and we absolutely love doing that. If you ask a question on a blog post or contact me I will try and answer if it’s not too much work & is relevant to the blog post. It benefits everyone to see the question and the answer. But for real support you have forums and vendors service desks that are a lot better suited and have dedicated staff or thousands of volunteer eyes. For consulting engagements to solve the complex issues you’re running into you’ll just have to hire the expertise or make me an offer way too good to decline. When hiring expertise, you do get what you pay for if you do it smart. I’m not to blame and will not pay the bill for your previous bad hires, pseudo experts, marketing based decisions that got people into a pickle.

Keeping it real

We all have jobs with lots of work that we need to do to pay the bills. So we cannot be a free support desk, ad interim engineer, consultant or strategic advisor. This means e-mails and DMs with consulting questions or easily searchable questions are ignored unless the problem is personally interesting to me as a learning experience or it’s indeed “the opportunity of a life time”. The latter is highly unlikely.

You need to realize that you need to design your solutions to whatever level of complexity you can handle or afford. Many make this mistake. I understand all the issues around acquiring, building, maintaining, retaining & hiring expertise. Really I do, I do not live under a rock in the wilderness. It’s hard to find expertise and it’s hard to market expertise. So basically we end up with “best practices” & partially mediocrity. For good reason, that’s where you have to be and stay if you’re not willing/capable to pay for expertise. For a lot of commodity solutions that’s how it should be.

If you need better support & consultants than you currently have you should really consider hiring some of my fellow MVPs via their companies but don’t be surprised to be paying anything from € 200/hour and up for proven highly skilled experts for short very specialized assignments. Don’t balk at this, Ever hired MCS? Or a plumber? Right, these people are true consultants, not what passes for them nowadays but what is actually contracting or body shopping. Nothing wrong with temporary augmentation of your labor force, but is not high expertise consulting. Microsoft PFE/MCS aren’t expensive for the value they provide and the time and effort they put in. Next time you need to pay a plumber after a DIY project has gone wrong you’ll realize this.

You don’t have to engage experts. But if you do, you’ll need to bring a big wallet. You need to understand that your unwillingness to pay does not dictated rates, let alone value. Banks, doctors, shops, government … they only accept money and they laugh at me when I tell them I’d like to pay with some ones else’s gratitude.

Some of the people in my network know I have helped many in the past and know that I do this as a service to the community and learning experience. That benefits everyone out there, just like I benefit from them. That’s my choice, in my personal free time. I can assure you that neither those people or I  take this sort of help for granted, let alone demand it.

I can’t fix you being stupid, lazy, cheap or any combination of the above.

  • You’ll have to do your own searching of the internet via Bing or Google for you.
  • You’ll have to read the articles, blog & documentation.
  • You’ll have to analyze your own issues and come up with an plan of action.
  • You need to realize that developing yourself and skillsets is a time consuming, sustained effort. I understand you have other priorities, but that doesn’t mean I have to pick up the slack and put my own aside.
  • You’ll need to face reality. If your business needs something, they’ll need to make sure they are profitable enough to afford it.