<P>Note:  This file has moved to <A HREF="/notablog">notablog</A>.</P>

     Lemme tell you a little anecdote.  Many moons ago, my then-boss,
a very office-politically savvy and hands-off macro-manager kinda guy,
came to me at 6pm the day before a big 9am meeting and said "How you
feeling about the meeting with the business folk tomorrow?"

     And I said, "Well, not very comfortable, I've been told this
week's meeting is going to be big and important, there're going to be
some important people there this time, and that they have all these
great expectations of some sort.  But I'm not sure what they're
expecting me to produce, and I don't have a sort of partially
functioning system to show them yet."

     So he says, "well, explain to me where we are?"

     And I say, "Well, I have the design pretty well laid out."

     And he says, "Explain it to me."

     And I talk for about twenty to thirty minutes, at one point
sketching a little diagram of the different programs (java servlets &
java RMI servers, message queues, mainframe services I'm talking to
via the message queues, etc) and how they communicate and the sequence
of events.

     And he says, "This is great, this is terrific, you really have a
handle on this.  Okay, here's what I want you to do.  Make up a really
spiffy power point version of this diagram, and a step-by-step
explanation of how the different pieces talk to each other, how they
interact, and hand it out at the meeting tomorrow."

     Which I did.  Well, I convinced him to let me do the first draft
in pen, I hate Powerpoint and Visio is better but massive overkill for
a diagram like this, drowning in the options, so I got a flowchart
package that's sort of between the two now.

     And it bowled the business folks over.

     Now, they probably only understood a fraction of what I told
them, and probably retained even less than that fraction by the time
they got out the door.  But the key point is that I created something
tangible to show them what the past several weeks of my time had
produced.

     I also gave them a clear demonstration of my understanding of
both the problem and the solution, and my ability to describe them in
a comprehensible, systematic, methodical fashion.

     This is partially a trust issue, yes, and partially simply their
desire to have some understanding of what's going on, and partially a
political issue (visibility of what I did).  But a big part of
understanding and communicating as a technical person dealing with
non-technical people is that they are drowning in uncertainty.

     You cannot give them absolute certainty.

     However, you can at least draw lines around the uncertainty, you
can sort out the certain and uncertain elements, guestimate the impact
of them, organize the overall picture.
 
     See the second half of <A HREF="bonusplans.txt">bonus plans</A>
for thoughts on one half-decent approach to doing this.