Grandpa Ham – Grandpa Can do IT!

This is a somewhat out of context post for this site, but today is an out of context day.  I am sitting in the surgical waiting room and Walter Reed Hospital in DC while my wife of 33 years receives the kidney transplant she has been waiting for for 2 1/2 years.  We both thank God for this chance to extend her life and make it whole again.  Even more, we thank the donor, and the donor’s family, for having the courage and generosity to help others in their time of grief.   Donor’s who die with healthy organs can save seven lives: two kidneys, a heart, a lung, a pancreas, a liver and a small intestine.  So sign up.  I have.  It is a chance to live beyond life. And to gain the eternal gratitude of folks like me and the person I have loved for so many years.

I have been working on the FEMA contract now for about a month. The Disaster Management team is a good team. The project has a real mission of service to those who put their life on the line for the American public every day. Of course it is a Federal program, meaning that it is difficult to coordinate and rife with bureaucratic impediments to immediate success. Of course, because it is a Federal Program, we team members can take a somewhat longer view. We can do a little more planning and actually define requirements before we are off into development land. Better planning versus more bureaucracy. It will be an interesting balance.

Today is my last day with the Virginia DMV Systems Redesign Team. I will miss them. On the other hand, I leave them in good hands: their own home-grown expertise. Hopefully, the “fertilizer” I have provided over the past 18 months will help them grow as their re-engineering effort continues. I look forward to their success.

For those of you who wonder if Grandpa Ham is really a grandpa, here they are! Two of my three sons and all 5 grandson on the same couch. What a bunch of Hams!

I just just singed an agreement to go back to work for DM-OPEN.  I will be sad to leave my friends at the DMV.  They had truly become family to me.  But the Virginia Commonwealth budget issues were just to much to overcome.  Still, I believe they will carry on with a successful redesign project.  I always said that my goal was to become dispensable.  I guess It happened just a little earlier than we planned.

Luckily, I have been able to return to my roots in Emergency Management.  I am now working with the folks at Eyestreet Software to revitalize FEMA’s Disaster Management – Open Platform for Emergency Networks.  More later on this very real mission in life.

The Virginia DMV just got another budget whack. It means that I am part-time for a while and eventually no-time, unless they can find a way around the latest hit. Looks like I made a mistake when I did not take the offering I referred to in my 30 August post. It was a mistake of loyalty. I am going to miss the folks I worked with a lot. So, I am now available full-time to for any other folks who might have a use for my help. DMV references are available.

My last post was some time ago. At that time the Virginia DMV had asked me to stay for another 1500 work hours. But, there was a bit of a glitch. The Virginia budget crunch meant that the extension package approval had to go to the Secretary of Transportation for approval. This took two tries and a lot of effort by my DMV sponsors, but they got it through. In fact the package actually was sent to the Governor’s budget office for final approval, but it got done!!!!

In the meantime, I let a couple of friends know that I could possibly be available. I got two very good offers, one in Emergency Management for a long term contract. The other shorter, but including at least two trips to Australia. In the end, I chose to stay with my DMV colleagues. They have become family to this grandpa in a very real way. There are even a few family squabbles to deal with. But these are good people, and this opportunity is so unique that I cannot walk away until my job is done. It is also true that I owe them a lot for all of their efforts in support of my extension. So, I think that I made the right decision.

I originally thought I was in for 3 to 6 months. It has now been one year and I have been approved for a one year extension. Here is a secret for all you consultants out there. Empower your customers! Emphasize the value that they bring to their own projects. Teach them how to do without you. My experience tells me that you may find that the environment you help create gives you more opportunity in the long run. Not less. My point — you do not have to be come indispensable (“all contractors are dispensable”). You just have to add more value than you cost. Multiplying the value of others is a good way to do that.

The third time is the charm. Ten years ago, I wrote a paper on systems analysis and requirements definition for the Army Systems Engineering folks in Monmouth, New Jersey titled “Just in time Analysis.” It used mission decomposition in IDEF0 to identify needed use cases as an inventory of work to be done. Five years ago, I developed an internal process document based on the Iconix Process for Battelle to use in development of Disaster Management Interoperability Services software for the Department of Homeland Security.

I am back at it. For more than a year, the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has been following a customized version of the Iconix Process for its BPR and Requirements development needs. The process grew out of the need for DMV to control its own destiny in its new software redesign effort. It had to start simply enough for business analysts to use it to drive business requirements. A prime goal was to ensure that it was business-driven; not IT driven. As it grew, however, the process required the power to handle complex issues, particularly the refactoring of multitudes of silo-style business processes into a set of requirements geared to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

We are getting there. It is amazing how the process has evolved over the course of a year. We have documented our processes, and their evolution, using the same tools we use to document the actual DMV requirements. I am now in the process of gathering and publishing that information in a single coherent written manual. As I write this manual, it is more and more amazing what the folks at the Virginia DMV here have been able to accomplish in the last year. There is a lot, and it is good. I pray that the document I am writing will do them justice.

The new poller/poster for FEMA’s Open Platform for Emergency Networks is now on Source Forge. Lee Tincher from Evolution Technologies reworked some of my old code to make in work directly with both Oracle and MySQL databases. I must admit that his solution is much more robust than my original test code. On the other hand, I did write the foundation connection code. :–) Let’s hope we get a lot of interest. This could make emergency alert sharing in a non-proprietary environment actually work. Even better, lets make it work in a multi-proprietary environment using OASIS EDXL Standards for communication through a level playing field Government supplied middleware infrastructure. This was my dream when I worked on Disaster Management. Maybe it can actually happen.