Tania.co.za

AIG, Discovery, the DMSA and cell-phone spamming: The plot thickens

The so-called National Consumer Database

I was too busy during the past month or two to pay proper attention to a comment which someone posted in response to my note on AIG's cell phone spamming, but a few weeks ago I followed up on what he said, and learned the following: it appears that the so-called National Consumer Database is the database shared by members of the Direct Marketing Association of South Africa (also known as the DMA or DMASA). I used to have quite a positive feeling about this organisation, because I reckoned that at least tthey had a code of ethics -- after all, they run a Do Not Contact register, and I am on that register; which means that if some company is spamming me, it must be a company that isn't affiliated with the DMASA.

AIG and the DMSA

Wrong. I found out that AIG is indeed a member of the DMASA, so either AIG was contravening the DMASA code when they contacted me, or the DMASA doesn't care a hoot about who's on that register, and the members are collectively determined to contact as many people as possible anyway, regardless of their feelings towards spam. I contacted the DMSA's complaints department a month ago to let them know that a number of people have been experiencing the same annoyance from AIG, and to ask them what we should do about it. I still have not had a reply from them.

What are they thinking?

None of this makes sense. Why would people try to sell something via a cell phone to someone who has actively, and proactively, declared herself to be hostile to this form of contact? Perhaps the explanation lies in the simple notion that persistance occasionally eventually pays off. Persistence doesn't explain everything, though. Why go to all the trouble of running a Do Not Contact register if you are going to contact these people anyway? Is inviting people to sign up for the register simply a way of ensuring that you have more accurate information about your prospects, so that when you do contact them, you can break through their hostility because you know a lot about them and can thus plan your strategy to squeeze through their barriers? (There are certainly a number of people who believe this conspiracy theory. I've heard them phone in on the radio.)

Discovery

Today I received a similar SMS message as I got from AIG from Discovery. I have two policies with Discovery. But this message wasn't in connection with that. It was in connection with "value-added SMS services" (whatever that means) to which they have subscribed me without my consent. If I don't want these services, they say, I have to send them a message to unsubscribe, or visit the Web site. I visited the Web site, and from there I sent them a livid message telling them what I thought of their marketing technique. I don't care how good their insurance policies are. If they can't keep their dirty little fingers away from spam, I don't want to have anything to do with them, and will get the services I want somewhere else. Anyway, what sense is there in insuring people against things like high blood pressure if you are going to drive up your customers' blood pressure by spamming them? I think that the next time I go shopping for insurance, I am going to ask to see the company's communications policy before I ask to see any insurance policy. I want to be sure that they have some business sense before I entrust such a large chunk of my salary to them to invest.

Botswana

It is my last night in Gaborone. For years it was my dream to come to work here and the reality was even better than the dream. I had the privilege of presenting a course on Activity-Based Project Costing for the National Governance Programme of the Office of the President of Botswana, along with Dr. John Morrison. Botswana was once one of the poorest countries, and can now boast not only declining HIV infection and AIDS death rates, but also a growing economy and political stability. Working with the extremely bright and hard-working co-ordinator of the Programme and his efficient Personal Assistant, as well as with the highly intelligent co-ordinators and senior administrators in various projects in departments ranging from Foreign Affairs to Tribal Administration and Information Technology has inspired the following beliefs:

Civil servants and politicians are not inherently corrupt, evil and selfish. I never put much faith in governments before, but at last I believe that a government can work for its people. The people we dealt with are tasked with auditing existing policies, systems and procedures, and fixing whatever is not effective. They recently changed the entire judicial procedures in the country resulting in an enormous increase in efficiency in the legal processes. They got us in to teach activity-based costing, because they saw that as the best way of fixing some of the errant projects under their direction. (We will also be making some other recommendations in our report.) The point is not that they do everything well, but that they are constantly working on improvement, with measurable results.

African governments have no excuse for being undemocratic, corrupt, stupid or inefficient. Botswana is an African country, run by Africans. It is a stable democracy, it takes corruption seriously, values knowledge, skill and leadership competence to such a degree that it is developing proper assessment systems for civil servants to ensure that advancement is based on merit, and that people who don't perform and who do not respond to training interventions are removed from office; and it pays attention to the development of efficient processes.

One evening the co-ordinator drove me to the airport to check whether my misplaced luggage containing the course workbooks had arrived yet. As we were discussing two of the leadership development projects under his direction, I mentioned to him that I had recently noticed the cynical irony in that nearly every profession requires that the applicant should submit a CV and be evaluated on his competency before he is appointed, yet the people who form the legislative assembly of a nation -- those who carry the enormous responsibility of deciding how life should work for everyone else in a country -- are selected purely based on popularity rather than on a set of qualifications.
"We have actually proposed a system in which measurable competency and qualifications would be a pre-requisite for candidacy", he told me.
"Wow!" I said, amazed at the boldness of the initiative. "I can't imagine the current delegates took it too well."
"It was rejected at local level," he said with a smile and a subtle you-know-how-politicians-can-be tone, "but at national level it is still being debated. Currently it has gone to the parties for consideration and they haven't come back on that yet."
I was quite incredulous. Whether or not they go for it in the end, the fact that they were actually willing to debate it at all is amazing to me. I would love for our own politicians to be subjected to competency assessments prior to becoming candidates!

My associate, Dr. Morrison, with the Co-ordinator of the National Governance Programme of Botswana at Primi Piatti in Gaborone.

After coming to say goodbye this evening, he left for an important meeting with the ambassador of Zimbabwe. He's part of the negotiating team which is trying to convince Robert Mugabe's men to "do the sensible thing" following the no-longer-so-recent elections in that ailing country. (Botswana has effectively given asylum to Morgan Tsvangirai and recognised him as Zimbabwe's president.)

I do not know whether I will be back in Botswana soon; depending on the requirements, I may need to send in some of my other associates for the follow-up engagements with the project leaders and possibly also with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (I briefly met the Minister today and will probably be asked to submit a proposal shortly).

I do wish I could have spent some time seeing how the Ministry of Science and Technology (home to the nation's "IT department") runs its projects, though. We had two of the Project Managers from their Project Office on the course, and in spite of being well-trained in Project Management already, and well-versed in several methodologies including PRINCE2 and RUP, they gave an extremely favourable appraisal of the course which we presented. One of them had the rare distinction of having three qualities which are seldom to be found in a single person (at best, you can usually find two): intelligence, beauty and humility. (In addition to that, she was also insightful, assertive, and delightfully attached to her homeland, in spite of having had lucrative job-offers in Colarado where she studied for four years after school.) I lent her my Wysocki book overnight, and like me she too found the appendix on Project Management basics to be thoroughly enjoyable because of its clarity.

Tomorrow we fly home, and I am looking forward to taking the train out to Simonstown on Monday along with some of the Geek Dinner crowd. At least that trip won't involve having my shortbread, gift-wrapped chocolates and expensive dancing shoes stolen from my luggage!

Checkmates in Johannesburg

Last week I was in Johannesburg teaching a course on Project Management to some of the staff at the University of the Witwatersrand. (This was my second time teaching at Wits, and the next course there is scheduled for November.) I stayed at a guest house near 7th Avenue this time, and during my sojourn I discovered that on any average evening just after sunset you can come to Wish! in Melville and expect the find a huddle of chess addicts. The ringleaders are Eric and his  cigar-smoking friend Pal. Pal's military career may have contributed to his skill as a chess strategist (or perhaps it was his chessplaying skill that contributed to his military career?). If you tell Pal that you're not very confident, he may just offer to coach you as he plays you. If you aren't up for the challenge of playing a Brigadier-General, try taking on Mpho later in the evening. His attack can usually be undermined if you manage to distract him! Wish! is an excellent venue for a chessplaying chillout. Try the cajun chicken tagliatelle, or the baked pecan cake (when they have it), or simply grab a beer or a pot of tea. The music is mellow and the wi-fi is free.

Love

He didn't talk to me for some time. Nor did he let me stroke the frown from his forehead as I have sometimes done before. I was a little hurt by that, but I let him be, and kept my distance.

At length, and with some difficulty, he said, "I have been thinking, and I realised that people need the care of other people." Only the day before, he had told me that he planned to withdraw from emotional involvement with humans altogether, for the sake of self-preservation; and under the circumstances, I saw no other choice for him, because I know of no community of love to which he could go, and I cannot be all things to all men, because some things I can be can be sacred to only one man, and in my heart I have already set aside those things for someone else. "If I make money," he now said, "I want to start a centre to care for people. Not like the TAC, where you have to be HIV positive in order to get help, but just for ordinary people, who need people to care about them. There isn't a place like that anywhere, where people care about other people. Just care."

I rephrased with sad resentment, according to my own paradigm: "There is no church in the world."

He was quiet for a while. Then he said, "I want to start a place like that."

"How will you recruit people to work there?" I asked wryly. "How do you pay people to love?" I was by no means cynical about the cause, only sceptical about the potential success of the proposed approach. It is not as though I haven't considered the same thing myself.

In my mind I heard myself saying the same words as I had said a few weeks before when a 22-year-old friend accidentally revealed how hurt he was by his father's nonchalance over his graduation, indeed by everything his father had not done to build a relationship with him in the years after his parents' divorce. I remember thinking at the time, or possibly even saying it aloud, because it reminded me of my broken marriage: It is not that he doesn't love you at all, it is just that he does not love you enough.

That was what I was thinking about again this time, as I have thought so often in situations such as these: It is not that there is no love in the world; it is just that the love which there is is not enough, not deep and long and wide and high enough. How is it that so many people around me are so utterly lonely and desperate by the time that I meet them? Why is it that there is so little friendship to be had out there that so many people end up regarding me as their best friend -- in some cases in spite of the fact that the friendship I have given them them is not even as full or complete as friendship can be? Why can't more people just love those around them with greater commitment? After all, love is a choice. Even when I love deeply and completely, why doesn't my love spread and deepen in others instead of just being reciprocated? I don't want a fan club! I want my love to be passed on, even just amongst a few people if God will not speed it throughout the whole world. Why is it that although I love so many people with such intensity and commitment, the world is still not significantly different around me?

I didn't say any of that aloud. I don't know what we said next. Maybe nothing. I started crying.

He came over to me, and we both wept bitterly. At some point I asked why God allows more people to be born, but I immediately felt daft and theatrical for having uttered such a thing, because it sounded like the melodramatic lament of one who tries to force everything God does into a paradigm of goodness alone and finally ends up either as an embittered atheist or in pathetic denial of his pain, having created a greatly convoluted logic just in order to sustain his faith.

Then we ate together, not with a great gusto at first, because tears seem to dissolve your appetite, unless you are an infant. But we finished everything and eventually felt a little better.

Several hours later I remembered to tell him that I thought it was the best and most encouraging thing I had ever heard him say. I have no faith in the successful outcome of such an endeavour, or necessarily in the approach, only a belief that it should be pursued anyway. You see, just standing at the cliff-edge to stop people from going over is not enough for me. The process of destruction must be reversed. People should be saving each other on a far larger scale, and preventing each other from heading for the edge inb the first place. I cannot even man all the cliffs within my own immediate proximity alone whilst waiting for someday, let alone those in the rest of the world.

Project Management training update

I got back from CCSB in Springs on Wednesday night. I stayed in a guest house which changed my perception of guest houses. The Arch Inn's Web site makes it look very corny, but I can assure you, you are not going to care about whether or they had a Bauhaus architect once you have eaten supper there. The lamb shank and fillet steak were amazing. I hope to stay there again.

The picture shows some of my students at Coca-Cola Shanduka engaged in a project scoping exercise as part of their in-house course in Project Management. We also did two Action Learning exercises, the second one being "coached" by one of the students who hadn't even heard of Action Learning before she arrived. The "overnight change" which can brought about by the effective use of Action Learning has to be seen to be believed. It looks like the project management interest group is now going to adopt Action Learning as the format for all their way-forward meetings. I am so pleased!

Dr. Morrison and I got together yesterday to plan the integration of our course material for the training to the Office of the President of Botswana. I am glad to have him as the primary presenter, because of his backround in managing large and complex projects. (You don't have to be a rocket scientist to manage projects, but it helps a bit if you have experience at managing the building and launch of rockets.)

I am becoming more and more convinced of the need to include Lean, Agile, APF and other new Project Management methodologies in our courses, not only in IT, but also in other fields. I believe that most academic institutions in South Africa that teach Project Management have become inflexible and are completely unaware of many of the advances and changes which are taking place in the field, and I am making it my mission to fill that gap through the new courses which we are developing at ProjectManagement.co.za.

With a knick-knack paddywack

When I have a lot of work, like now, and there's a straight path through which just requires dogged perseverance, then I become like a dog who's received a huge bone. He doesn't pause to say thank-you; he just carries it off to a corner of the yard where he can work at it in peace.

Working on a bone is a one-dog task. It requires concentration. This is not a good time to cuddle him or to try to help him out.  He may just snap at you, and then you will feel annoyed, he will feel guilty, and resolving the situation will delay the whole bone-completion process. If you are going to give him a bowl of water, don't hang about trying to engage him in a game. The best you can expect is for him to wag his tail when you put it down, but don't get annoyed if he doesn't pant, look at you adoringly, and lick your feet.

This is also not a good time to raise an issue like, "Why are you starting a new bone when you already have one buried in the other corner?" or "Why don't you join the rest of us over here? You can bring your bone with you," or "I need you to go and bark at someone for me immediately, pleeeease!" or "I've created a brand-new interactive customised bone-chewing treehouse portal zone full of features and benefits, just for you! Come and try it out and tell me what you think!" or "If only you had actually used the last interactive customised bone-chewing treehouse portal zone that I made, you wouldn't feel a need to be in this corner now!" or "Do you realise how long it is since you had a bath?"

When a dog is busy with a bone, he is not unaware of his social environment. He just does not have the capacity to interact with it in the usual way. Occasionally, he wants to see it from the corner of his eye. He needs to know that everyone else is fine, that they are coping with their issues, that they love him and don't question his allegiance, and that they will want to go for a walk with him again when the job is over. He also needs to know that if a splinter of bone were to break off and lacerate his oesophagus, they won't say, "Well, if only you'd accepted my help in the beginning! Now it's a bit late."

As a busy dog, it is hard enough for me to cope with the relationships I have right now. I don't know how I would have managed if I'd had puppies.

This is a silly form of advertising

I go to Amatomu. I click on an ad. The link doesn't seem to work. Then I notice that my pop-up blocker has been invoked. I don't want to allow pop-ups from this site, but that's not a problem, I reckon, I can right click and open the link in another Firefox tab.

Wrong. The ad is a Flash applet. So if I right-click, I can only rewind, zoom in, and so on. I can't even see the target URL, so I can't go to the site at all without inconveniencing myself.

I abandon the process.

Additional Project Management courses

We're getting so many enquiries that we have scheduled several additional courses. There's a Project Management course in Windhoek from 21 to 25 April 2008. This is a full certification course. From 7 to 10 April there's a customised in-house course in Project Management for line managers at Coca-Cola Shanduka in Springs, and the following week I'm training staff at Wits. From 21 to 23 April there's a course (led by Dr. John Morrison) focusing on Activity-Based Costing in Projects, for the Office of the President of Botwana. I'll be accompanying him to present the revision section on Project Management fundamentals. In the meanwhile, there will also be another Programme in Project Management held in Cape Town in April. In May we kick off with a PRINCE2-based course for an IT company in Johannesburg. (I know, I know, you don't have to throw Agile and Scrum at me this time; these guys specialise in the customisation and implementation of a specific software product, and accountability and documentation are important in their process.) I will be presenting a module on Project Management as part of a special introductory course in management for NPOs at the university's business school the following week. There's another Intensive Course in Microsoft Project in Cape Town from 20 to 22 May (we finished the first one yesterday) to accommodate those who couldn't make it this week, including delegates from other parts of Africa who needed to arrange visas. (This course is a bit different from other Microsoft Project courses in that it also includes a special introductory section on Project Management fundamentals.) Oh, and while on the subject of Project Management software, let me know if you want to attend the demonstration of PSNext in Cape Town on 18 April. This is highly recommended to people who have to manage multiple projects and to collaborate with external stakeholders. It is also the ideal choice for Project Management in a matrix organisation, as well as to anyone who just doesn't like Microsoft (the interface is Java-based, and the back-end is whatever you want -- I'm running it with Apache and PostgreSQL on my laptop, but you could use another Web server and database -- say, MySQL, DB2 or even -- gasp -- Microsoft SQL server -- if you must). The annual Programme in Advanced Project Management (suited to the needs of Programme and Portfolio Managers, and also practicing professional Project Managers) will also be held in May. Further courses in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Windhoek and Pretoria are scheduled for later in the year, but, based on the conversion rate of our enquiries and the increase in the number of enquiries we have been getting, I am pretty sure that the courses available for public booking won't be enough to accommodate everyone. I expect to update the schedule with even more additional courses within a month or two. We are also in the early stages of planning two industry-specific Project Management courses.

I almost forgot: there's a Breakfast Briefing in Project Management in Cape Town on 17 May. Just in case you wanted to know what I am actually talking about.