The Blog for People Who Risk Life and LIMS on a Daily Basis
For many of the middle years of my business, I would take the New Year as an opportunity to revisit my business, make new plans, and come up with great ideas for the New Year. In the past few years, I find myself being more reflective than anything else.
Ever since the US Thanksgiving holiday (i.e., since the of November), I’ve received quite a lot of contacts about consulting work both from potential end-customers as well as from larger consulting firms looking to subcontract. It’s been pretty crazy, actually.
People get into arguments about what programming language is best to use for laboratory software projects. Some people argue for C#, others for Java, and we get into heated discussions about which languages are “real” programming languages and which should be dropped to the bottom of a deep ocean. In the end, for most projects, it doesn’t matter.
I’ve worked for, with and as a project manager, and for and with managers, as many of you have. Among them, some have been great, others horrible, many mediocre. What brings this to mind is that I was having a conversation with someone not long ago who was talking about their project manager and just making some general comments, neither positive nor negative, but merely descriptive. In hearing the comments, I realized both that the person had no idea what a project manager actually does and also that their project manager doesn’t actually do project management. As an aside, I’d been reading “The Spy and the Traitor” and realized that story is relevant to this (which I will get to later in this post).
Even though GeoMetrick Enterprises does not supply training services, most of us do eventually have to take part in training, whether assisting trainers to understand a new implementation or in taking training, ourselves. Some training is better than others and people learn in different ways, but some ideas work for very few people, regardless. Here are the ideas that are ineffective in training, but are actually seen all too frequently.
Finally, GeoMetrick Enterprises has made its move to Carroll, Iowa, which now makes this the center of the LIMS universe (to us, that is!).
Right now, as I’m trying to do my own business development for the season, what I’m getting is lots of people asking if I know anyone to do validation work. But all the validation people seem too swamped to take anything new on. Is validation actually the place to be?
I had announced that the GeoMetrick Enterprises office will be moving. Now, I’m fairly certain that the move date will be in early September. I have notified current customers. Unlike past office moves, this time, I plan to take off a week to make the move in a leisurely fashion. I will be giving more information on the exact week of the move at a later time. Obviously, ongoing customers have priority with me during that week. For anyone wishing to contact me about starting new work who contacts me, that week, I will probably put you off until the following week.
Recently, Stack Overflow sent out information on its new Code of Conduct. Being a volunteer community, if people cause problems, they can’t fire the person but one form of redress is to kick the person out of the group. One method with which to make that fair is to make it clear what is and isn’t acceptable. Thus, a code of conduct is a good tool to put into place.
You might think you’re reading the wrong blog with “music” in the title but bear with me. First off, I do post what I think of as a “fun” post, every once in a while, usually in the summertime, when most of the project teams are off on vacation. Today, I want to talk about the music of our industry.