2011: A Year Of Learning

Hello everyone. I feel like I have abandoned my blog but I have been quite busy lately working in a few projects. I have been writing though, with two blog entries and two articles for the International Legal Technology Association, ILTA.

What I want to accomplish with this post is not only summarize the highlights of my year, in terms of my career, but also what I learned from each project and situation and how I grew as consequence of them. So here I go.

Writing

I thought it was appropriate to start with this blog. It was launched in February with a goal of posting at least once a month but most importantly adding value. I did pretty well until the end of the year, when I got busy with our Windows 7 Roll out which I actually blogged about here and here. I feel like I continued to improve and define my writing style, and I learned how powerful social networks could really be. I never thought that I would reach over 1ooo people in three different continents with just a few posts and I hope I am adding value. Furthermore, I confirmed something that I know and practice; not taking action in your ideas and projects is a bad habit. Keep posting is a commitment that I made to myself and I am happy with the results primarily because I also participated in our ILTA Connected Community blog, but there are a couple of entries that I started and I think that would have been great and timely but never finished. So the take away is that once we have an idea or commit to something we must take action and finish it.

Many of you know that I serve as the Servers Operations & Security Peer Group VP for the International Legal Technology Association, ILTA and we launched a new blog which we hope will add value to our members. You can read not only our posts, but other formidable entries regarding Legal Technology here. In addition I wrote an article on Network Security for ILTA’s Risky Business White Paper and another for their Peer to Peer Magazine which describes how I work on strengthening my mind to achieve results and goals which you can read here. Again, I was reminded that I really need to make sure that I know and understand what I am writing about, which is the case, because of the impact that it could have in others. I re-affirmed that the goal is to add value.

Technology

I was pretty busy at Nexsen Pruet early in the year with infrastructure projects that included enhancing our dual MPLS network architecture by adding a second router to each location (formerly dual-homed in a single router). I learned more about BGP and EIGRP routing during this project and that while our network got more robust, it also did get more complicated. I also learned that Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity (DRBC) is an ongoing process that needs to be tested and adjusted properly as network and system topologies evolve. Besides, I again confirmed the importance of keeping good network and systems documentation up to date.

Four other major projects took place: an upgrade to our Video Conference infrastructure (VC), which I posted about here, the introduction of Application Level Monitoring through Riverbed’s Cascade appliance, expansion of Mobile Device fleet by introducing iPhones and MobileIron as our MDM solution, and a merger. I learned that while our VC system was heavily used the quality of experience by both the participants and IT folks in our team was very poor. Yes the investment was hefty, but the user experience has improved dramatically and in the last 2-3 months the adoption of desktop video both internally and externally has grown and is already in demand for 2012. That in addition to the ease of management tools of the new systems has probed the investment worthy.

We now have a better idea of what is going on in our network as far of traffic. We had been using Netflow collectors for a while which gave us a good picture of who was doing what, but I now personally have a much stronger understanding of how our applications interact with users and each other. Cascade gives us a great picture of all pieces interacting in a user action within our network and when there is a problem, it could tell us where it is, whether it is the network, servers, or clients. We are still on learning mode with this tool.

The introduction of iPhones and a merger kept me busy for a while. Whereas I learned a lot about mobile technologies and enhanced my knowledge of general security practices, I also discovered one a new passion on these two projects: Project Management. I have been managing projects since I became the Network Manager at the firm especially around telephony and facilities having c0-managed the last office move from a technology standpoint. The reason I like PM and that I will make an effort to continue to learn about this topic is because it gives me skills outside IT that I feel I need in order to continue to advance my career, specially so Risk Management, an area of great interest to me at the moment. I am not at a PMP level yet but I think that I am doing well and in fact, I have been tasked with building our Technology Project Management practice at the firm and now have a very talented PM reporting to me.

The rest of the year was dedicated to our Windows 7 and Office 2010 rollout. I learned so much that I don’t know where to start; from how many specialty applications we are running, to how attorneys and their staff work and use those apps, to how successful you could be when everyone is on board and rowing together towards the same goal. This was the most rewarding, and one of the most successful projects that I have been part of, and again, project management and planning was the key. My role during the project was of Deployment Manager in two different offices and Project Manager in two others. I learned a lot about how attorneys at different offices and practicing different laws work, and how unique their practices are. The most satisfying part of the project though, was seeing how so many talented people in our Technology Department grew during this project. This project also let me understand how important making adjustments while staying focus is; things go wrong, get delayed or even completely pushed out of the initial plan, but you must remain focused on the end goal and adjust as you go, which means that you must evaluate where you are constantly.

Leadership

I will never want to stop learning on this area, period. It is such a broad and complex, yet intriguing topic that I think evolution is the key to its mastering, if there is such thing. Anyway, as mentioned earlier I lead a group of legal technology professionals for ILTA. I got appointed as the VP for the Servers Operations Peer Group in August. One thing that I learned firsthand is how important succession is. My predecessor, Bob DuBois, did a great job getting me ready for the transition by assigning task with great visibility into both our team and the whole organization. Task that might seem trivial such as participating in calls with his peer officers or running our meetings really built confidence and got me ready to take it to the next level. This is something I have been doing since day one I became a manager but I had never seen in practice. I got promoted to a management role like many others because of achievements and results in the operations area without little management training or experience and it was a little tough at the beginning, but while adjusting and keeping focus made a difference then, I can now appreciate how much better it could’ve been if we planned ahead. I also learned how to deal with a larger team and building a new team, not to mention how different it is to manage your team at your company compared to managing a team of volunteers.

I also learned that leadership is about value, communication and helping others grow. Bob did a great job helping me transition to my Officer role and I recognized that and will always try to apply it as a way to help other grow. As we were getting ready for full deployment of Win7 my director and other project leaders recognized that the 3^rd party Project Management that we had hired for the project would not be a good fit going forward. He did a great job getting us to a point but things started to not go so well during the first office deployment. My Director approached me and asked me to take over as the Lead PM because we had discussed moving PM under me based on success in projects that I had led. Because of my passion for this area I was excited and honored by just being asked to take over such an important task. However, I also recognize an opportunity to build and help someone grow. We had hired our current PM a few years ago as a PM, but he never really had a chance to lead any project because of many different reasons. I saw this as his chance to grow into the role and gain credibility. He had just completed his Project+ certification and I ask my boss if he would be willing to let him lead the project instead. He hesitated a bit but I asked him to trust me, and most importantly, to trust him and he agreed with the condition that I stayed on top of it behind the scenes, which I did by mainly emphasizing communications. The rest of the project was a big success and I was greatly satisfied by seeing this person succeed when people doubted him.

So what is it about value? This year, during some hard times when the dark side wanted to take over me, I really had to dig and rediscover my core values. I learned that if I stick to those my whole life will make more sense to me and my family anyway, and I will in turn, be able to add more value to those around me. I thank Randi Mayes, Executive Director of ILTA, for her wise words on this topic and continued commitment to helping ILTA's officers and volunteers to grow.

My most precious take away about leadership, is that I am now learning how to apply all of these concepts to my personal life. While I think that friends and family have always looked up to me and willingly followed me, I never saw it as an opportunity to lead. Leading my family is my most important task and growing together as successful people is my most rewarding and precious treasure and I can now do it with a leadership approach which is enhancing our already strong relationship and making our core values stronger. It doesn’t get any better than that!


That's it. It was a year of learning, and it will always be. I will soon post on what is ahead for the 2012 year. I hope that it bring energy, health and prosperity to all of you and your families.


Here to a great 2011 and an even better 2012! Happy New Year!

Win7/Office 2010 Deployment Office 2, Days 3 & 4

Last week I covered the first two days of our Window 7 & Office 2010 deployment in this blog. Today I am going to tell you how we close the deal during days 3 and 4.

Day 3. Closing the Deal

After a relaxing night closed out with a walk at one of Hilton Head beaches’ shore we were re-energized and it showed as soon as we got to the building. The first group, the support team, got to the office very early to be available to help the office staffers that got newly imaged PCs with the new OS and Office Suite as well as some new or upgraded applications, including our iManage DMS application. The deployment team arrived to the office later that morning to continue working on re-imaging machines and addressing escalated issues.

“Any change, even a change for the better,

 is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.”

Arnold Bennett

Yes, there was a lot of change and the next few days, and weeks will bring a lot of adjustment for our firm while dealing with a new interface that touches pretty much everything they do in a daily basis. However, I can’t emphasize enough the great performance delivered by our Training Team. This showed during the whole day. While there were a lot of different activities going on at the same time, the day went very well; I really had expected more issues and questions from our users but they held up and dealt with the massive change extremely well and they actually did bring up some very valid questions. Once again, Kudos to our Training Team here, and they were not done yet.

After a nice group lunch in the office the big test for our team arrived; attorney training. The challenge wasn’t only to engage them and keep them involved but also efficiently deal with the many activities going on at the same time. We had two people doing floor support, two folks conducting attorney training, and three re-imaging the rest of the machines of those in training. Once I finished imaging one of the machines assigned to me I saw the need of switching my role into that of a Project Manager. Issues were still coming up and the vast majority was being efficiently and promptly handled by the support team, while some would need more advance troubleshooting and help from the engineers back at The Mothership. Thus, I saw the need to become the central information repository and I started to centrally compile all issues in our log dedicated to that. We always intended to approach the project this way but we had to deviate a bit from it for many reasons. However, we were able to quickly adapt and react to the new situation and get that PM role going again, which will now be part of all future role outs as it should. The PM will focus on being the “Central Communications Center” as well as the data collector so everyone can stay focused on their tasks. So I started walking around and making sure that everyone was doing what they were supposed to while collecting information that we needed to pass on to the rest of the team.

At the end, we were able to re-image all remaining machines and complete both support and training. It was a long day for most, but the preparation and planning that went on for months paid off again. I think that the main challenge for most was adjusting to the new iManage interface and Idol search engine as well as the obvious adjustment to the Office Ribbon.

Day 4. The Attorneys & Training; Need I Say More?

I do indeed! But this time I wasn’t impressed because of the amazing job that our trainers did. They really engaged the attorneys who also did a great job embracing the new interfaces and really going for it and trying to make the most out of the new systems.

“Change brings opportunity.”

Nido Qubein

As I mentioned these attorneys were really trying to adjust and make the most out of the system. They had great comments about the iManage EMM plugin for email management, which was not being used by all of them; some were exploring the IDOL search engine and began to like it a lot; heck we had attorneys using Win7 Snipping Tool!!! One of then used this tool to create a Memo and here is how she summarized her experience: “This upgrade has revolutionized my day! I did a two-page memo faster than I've ever been able to do before”. Now, getting this type of comment on Day One, I mean like the morning after the attorney was trained and facing massive change?…Priceless, for everything else, there are Windows XP & Office 2003!

Now, there were still issues and one that we are looking at how to better handle in the future is synchronizing OST files over the WAN. When a person travels to a remote office and logs for the first time to a different computer, Outlook will start synchronizing its caching and could potentially cripple the bandwidth to the office depending on the situation. The way we approached the initial deployment was by bringing OST file from last production day, in this case Friday, with us so that we could sync up locally without going over the wire. The switch to cache mode presents a new challenge not only during the migration but on an ongoing basis going forward, especially for offices with small bandwidth capacity. I will be looking at how our Riverbed Steelhead can help here.

Thanks to the amazing work of the support team, the deployment team was ready to return home by 3:00 pm. Our trainers remained behind and assumed support responsibilities the rest of the week which went very well. In fact, I’ve been checking with our service desk analysts and the call volume from the offices that have been converted have been very low according to them.

We are working on the next deployment which starts this upcoming weekend in our main office here in Columbia, SC. This will be the largest deployment so far and will tell us a lot for the rest of the way but I am confident that our team will deliver once again. From this point on I will be

occasionally posting updates about the whole project as we go on. I will continue to be in some of the deployments as either the Operations Manager or Project Manager. Meanwhile, my team is coming behind the Win7 team rolling out Endpoint and Media Encryption using Credant's Mobile Gurdian at the offices that have been migrated to the new OS already and I will be blogging about that project as well.

Win7/Office 2010 Deployment Office 2, Days 1 & 2

"Always plan ahead. It wasn't raining when Noah built The Ark"

Richar C. Cushing

So here we are, delivering Windows 7 and Office 2010 to Nexsen Pruet's second remote office in as many weeks. But first, a little background. First of all, I had not blogged about this project before because I have been in and out of it and my role has been changing. I have been primarily responsible for testing a few applications under my area to ensure functionality in the new environment. However, this week I am the on-site Operations Manager, which could translate into the on-site Project Manager/Do-What-Needs-To-Be-Done Guy (and everyone in the team really does what needs to be done anyway). I am responsible for making sure that the deployments are completed and that issues are addressed and compiled in a central place so that we can go over those before our next deployment. Finally, I'd like to add that this project started very early this year and there have been many phases. We started with brainstorming around January/February, to then go over a Branding phase in March/April. Around April, we began testing our many legal specific applications used by our Attorneys; to then begin creating and fine tuning images. It took until early August and 9-10 versions to get the right image. Developing the outstanding training material took a few months as well and delivering training started in July with Technology Department members first, and then to our pilot group. Last week we deployed the new desktop to our Myrtle Beach, SC office. This week is Hilton Head Island, SC's office turn. The best part of the project? EVERYONE in our department has had an impact, all of the eighteen people that conform our team, including temporary personnel has indeed contributed in a positive way, just as our very supportive and knowledgeable vendors have. But this is about the deployment phase, "The Real Deal". Let's take a look.

A team of six departed Sunday afternoon from Columbia, SC to our Hilton Head Island office. This team includes our Service Desk & Training Manager who oversees the delivery of training as well as floor support; the Operations Manager, who oversees the deployment of the images as well as the many applications and customizations required by each end-user as well as issues logging, one deployment engineer, one hardware and deployment technician and this time, our Director of Technology made the trip to compliment the team and contribute where needed. In addition, twelve others remain at our main office in Columbia holding the fort. Last but not least, I am proud to say that this is The Best Team and Technology Department I have been part of during my 12+ years career.

Day 1. Setup and Deployment

The team got in the office by 6:00 pm and by 8:00 pm the "Technology Operations Center", the Training Room and the temporary Video Conference room were all setup and tested. I have to admit that I thought that we had too many people, but boy was I glad we did! It did paid off. I was amazed of how well and quickly we worked together. This gave the training team the opportunity to go rest at the hotel to prepare for next day's class with staff.

Once everything was setup the deployment team started deployment of images to staff machines and we quickly ran into an issue. We are using Microsoft SCCM to deploy images and we are using our local File & Print servers as local Distribution Points to minimize WAN traffic. Well, the images did not finish deploying to the server. Now, I was out for a week at a Technology Conference and I kind of panicked for a minute and I think that so did our Director, but our Engineer who has done an incredible job on this project even well before we started, was prepared for it and had multiple DVDs with images for each type of machine at hand. I think that we may have lost perhaps a total of 15 minutes or so before we started the deployment. Our engineering and project management teams had prepared a couple of very detailed sheets, one with all the specifics about each machine that we had imaged with information such as specialty applications, printers, drive letters, and anything else that the end-user would need in order to complete their job; and the second sheet contains step-to-step details on how to deploy application and what to check off.

Imaging the machines may have taken about 30 min in average for each. Then we went on to deploy and test most of the applications in each workstation. I tell you, this is very tedious job and what took the longest because of how focused and detail you have to be in order to get everything done properly. We finish around 1:00 am, primarily because we were in such a roll that we just wanted to keep going. After all, we had the whole Monday to complete the deployment ahead of us.

Day 2. The Real Deal

Monday morning I met with the Training team and our Director joined us to go over what we had accomplished the night before and what was left to do before they head to the office to start training the staff. I followed the meeting with a 3 miles run around town, which was very helpful to help me prepare for the day.

The deployment team, including myself, got to the office later that morning while training was being conducted to finish the customization of the machines, which really wasn’t too much after all, the work the night before. Things such as printer drivers, and a couple of specialty apps were the only outstanding issues and they were completed by lunch time. I have to give credit to our Training Manager here; she did a magnificent job in terms of Coaching, Mentoring and Leadership while introducing this incredible amount of change to our users. Want to know why? This was our Trainer’s very first time teaching a Class in our Firm. We did hit a couple of issues but the planning and preparation that went on for months paid up during execution, a perfect example of the 80/20 rule, which if executed correctly does pay off big time.

The day could have not ended in a better way. Our seventh team member, one of our great Service Desk analyst arrived that night to do floor support along with the rest of the team and we head to dinner. After enjoying a great seafood meal at local restaurant, all seven of us took a walk at the beach, which was not only relaxing and needed but it kind of served as a team building experience. IT WAS AWESOME! We looked like seven children having fun!!

Meanwhile, back at The Mothership

Kuddos also to our EVERYONE back at our main office in Columbia. They were so responsive when we needed them and the communication across teams was incredible, another stepping stone for delivering this effort effectively. Our DMS, DBA, AD, Exchange and Network Engineers as well as our main Trainer, Service Desk and Project Management teams were always at hand when issues aroused and were able to quickly address them. In addition, they were also tasked to hold the fort and support day-to-day operations of the firm and they get as much credit as the onsite team does, especially being so shorthanded.

Days 3 & 4 include deployment and training for attorneys as well as support and I will tell you more about it at the end of the day tomorrow, but I can tell you that it was an exciting day for everyone.