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Location: Blogs
John Weathington's Blog
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| JohnWeathington |
Thursday, July 17, 2008 |
I just wrote an article in the latest issue of my newsletter Flawless Compliance(tm), about the fires that continue to blaze around Big Sur in California. Out here, it’s on everybody’s mind. We’re constantly reminded of the fire departments’ victories and defeats, as the battle to contain the fire continues.
We face similar situations when compliance situations get out of control. In a perfect world, everybody would be proactive in their compliance efforts. There’s plenty of education and assistance out there, so there’s no reason why companies can’t do it. However, they unfortunately don’t do it until it becomes a problem.
Reactive compliance efforts are in a class by themselves. Suppose a recent audit discovered serious compliance violations. Your company will be responsible for immediate remediation, with serious impacts if it’s not done. I know, we’ve all been there late nights trying to hit an unrealistic deadline, but it’s one thing to disappoint Marketing, and a whole different animal to miss a remediation deadline.
As a database professional, you might be dragged into these efforts, so I wanted to share some of my favorite tips for getting through. If you’re not prepared, you are setting yourself up for undue stress, frustration, and long hours.
Tip # 1 : Get Good Tools, And Learn Them Well
By far, Toad is the best tool to have in a firefight. You may have others, but this is your key tool. When firefighters go in to fight a fire, they’re not carrying garden hoses. I see the equivalent of that when I enter companies trying to battle serious issues that involve databases, and the best tool they have is SQL*Plus.
If your company doesn’t have Toad available, pay for the latest version of Toad out of your own pocket, and learn it inside out. I know that’s easy for me to say, because I’m a consultant, but I would strongly urge you to take my advice. The cost is nothing compared to the value it’s going to bring to your life.
I have to do on-the-spot data transformations from time to time. One time, I had a monstrous query that was taking about 3 hours to run (thank God it finished). I had to run this query over and over again, firstly because the transformations needed to be constantly tweaked to get the right results, and secondly because we had to run it over several periods of data. One pass through the Toad’s SQL Optimizer, and my 3 hour query was reduced to a 2 minute query. This saved me huge amounts of time, stress, and most importantly got the result to the client much quicker.
Tip # 2 : Don’t Take Things Personally
People in program and project management are typically not at their best when compliance impacts are involved. Understand it from their point of view. They are being held responsible for preventing the company from feeling a great deal of pain. The longer the threat exists, the more panicked and stressed-out everybody gets.
If you internalize this stress, you will not be able to perform. I’ve been screamed at, threatened, and forced to listen for hours at a time about how bad things are. Although the language may indicate it, they are not reacting to you the person, they are reacting to the situation. Under normal circumstances, they probably wouldn’t act this way.
Database analysis takes focus and intellect. Your emotions can diminish your capacity to perform. Program and project managers typically don’t have this problem, because their job is to attend meetings, and communicate status. This does not require the same amount of intellectual firepower, as building a set of transformations to mine data for discovery. They can afford to stress out if they want to, you cannot.
So, stay cool and don’t take anything personally.
Tip # 3: Keep Grounded in Reality
What tends to happen is that you are pressured to commit to something that’s not reasonable. The stakeholders in your effort will want to believe something that’s not true. That’s the nature of the beast. Nobody wants to be out of compliance, and the sooner you can be in compliance the better. Once again, I know everybody wants everything on unrealistic deadlines – but this is different. There are serious consequences involved here, so the pressure is more intense.
Because you are committed to the solution, and helping your company resolve its issues, you will want their reality to unfold also. You may start convincing yourself that things are possible – when you know they are not probable. This is very dangerous.
I was on a project once, where the program management would not let up on a deadline. They said, “There is no other option, we must have it done by this date.” They actually communicated up to their auditors that it would be done. Unfortunately, all this was a fantasy, and I knew it from the beginning. They wanted to get something done in 6 months that was easily a year project. Of course, they blew the deadline, and things got exponentially worse. That’s what happens when you don’t pay attention to reality.
Stand your ground, and listen to your head instead of your heart. Do not sign up for something you cannot do, and push back hard if necessary. You are doing a great service when you don’t cave in. If you commit and don’t deliver, you harm everybody involved including yourself.
Getting caught in a firefight is no fun, and the compliance varieties are the worse. You can however limit your stress and frustration by taking a few pieces of good advice. Get good tools and learn them well, stay cool under pressure, and stay grounded in reality. If you don’t have the current version of Toad, purchase it today, and learn it inside out. That way you’ll be prepared when you’re called into action. |
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