For many years my professional title has included the word “consultant”, and with it the gravitas that comes with being able to use that term. In the cold, hard light of my early-40s, in all honesty I have say that I was not a consultant for most of that time: I was an analyst.

Analyst versus consultant. What’s the difference?

In black and white terms, an analyst is a tactical consultant, with a specific set of skills and knowledge that can be used to solve a particular problem. And a consultant is…?

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Inigo Montoya

Consultant is over-used and mis-used word. All the people I know who call themselves consultants are actually analysts, contractors, or skilled professionals who call themselves consultants for lack of a better term to describe what they do to pay the bills, and because putting Gun For Hire on a business card tends to attract the wrong clientele.

On the other end of the spectrum, consultant is more than a term to describe a person who works in a large consultancy or professional services firm (or as, Andrea Mulligan is working through in public, a professional service practice in a software or SaaS firm). A consultant comes to a customer with a set of skills that cannot be had just anywhere, be it in a programming language, GAAP restructuring, or, in my case, Web performance measurement and load testing.

A true consultant must be more than a skilled analysts who has chosen the freedom of working outside large companies, leaping from challenge to challenge. A consultant brings years of experience and a view of the larger world with them. In fact, many of the best consultants can’t do what their analysts do for them (or maybe the consultant’s skills are just too rusty) on a daily basis.

Analysts solve a specific problem. Consultants ensure that the problem never happens again.

Consultants put the problem that analysts solve into context.

For more than a decade, I have been an analyst, solving whatever thorny riddle is put in front of me using whatever tools and skills I could cobble together. Analysts don’t have a lifetime career ahead of them, as their skill-set falls out of favor or is replaced by younger, more talented analysts.

Consultants take what they have learned during their analyst/apprentice days and convert that into a strategic view. Not simply How do we solve this problem? but Is this the right problem to solve? or How did we get to the point where we needed to solve this problem?

And, most importantly, Is the solution we’re developing flexible enough to adapt to solve and prevent problems we can’t even foresee now?

It’s hard for someone like me who revels in solving the problems no one else can to let go and realize that the problem isn’t everything. To realize that there are people out there who can do what I do as well as or better than I can.

Letting go of one thing means that you have to have something else to grab onto. I do not relish Wily Coyote moments: looking down to see the fall that’s about to come.

So, at 42, I am stepping back to embrace a very new and different career question: What does it really mean to be a strong consultant?

It’s not easy to shift gears, and drop into the career lane that I had avoided for so long, feeling it a trap. I now know that to survive and flourish, I have to understand how the business works, how practice/company goals are set and met, how to effectively sell professional service (something I am awful at a lot of the time), and how to position professional services within the SaaS model.

It is a somewhat disheartening realization that the 10 years I spent fighting becoming a strong consultant now have to be made up in a very short amount of time, but the games everyone remembers are those that are won from behind in overtime.

A quote from Avinash Kaushik (Occam’s Razor and @avinashkaushik) to start this post.

I have a 10/90 rule . If your budget is $100 then spend $10 on tools and professional services to implement them, and spend $90 on hiring people to analyze data you collect on your website.

The web is quite complex, you are going to access multiple sources of data, you are going to have to do a lot of leg work. Blood, sweat and tears. You don’t just need tools for that (remember 85% of the data you get from any tool, free or paid is essentially the same). You need people!

Hire the best people you can find, tools will never be a limitation for them.

from This I Believe [A Manifesto for Web Marketers & Analysts]

Staring at this as I sipped my coffee stopped me dead.

Beside me I have two full pages of notes on what makes up the Web performance culture of company, and here is one of the most succinct points summed up for me in two short paragraphs.

Web performance is not just about tools and methodologies. Effective Web performance requires dedicated and trained human resources. And those people need to be able to work in a culture that values and understands the importance of Web performance to the business. Without a culture of Web performance, any tool, technology, and methodology purchased to make things better is useless.

In a previous post I touched on the question of whether an organization sees Web performance as a technology or business issue. Answering this question is key to understanding a company’s perspective on Web performance issues.

Start by asking Who is responsible for Web performance? at a company. Is there a cross-functional team that meets regularly to discuss current performance, long-term trends, the competitive landscape, effects on customer experience, and how performance concerns are shaping and guiding upcoming development efforts?

Or is Web performance a set of anonymous charts and tables that have no context ,originating from the inscrutable measurement system, bundled up into an executive report by an unnamed staff member for a once a month meeting?

Most companies understand Web performance is crucial. They understand it affects the bottom line and customer experience. They understand all of the ideas and concepts of Web performance. But like the proverbial horse and water, they don’t drink from the stream in front of them. They don’t drink because they are too busy watching for cougars, wolverines, and poachers. They have too much going on to make Web performance a priority.

Part of developing a strong culture of Web performance is creating a business culture that is customer-centric. When a company turns their perspective around and makes delighting the customer a part of everything they do, the customer experience on the Web becomes a critical component of the culture.

The key to making Web performance a part of a customer-centric culture is to shift Web performance discussions from the abstract (full of numbers and charts representing the potential of Web performance to affect customers) to the real (effect of Web performance on towns and cities and people and the bottom line). Attaching a name, a place, or a value to every number on a Web performance chart makes it easier for people in an organization to absorb the effect it has on them as an employee.

Moving the discussion about Web performance from the testing lab and NOC to the breakroom and the hallway takes a greater effort. It starts by making Web performance data available to all, not just those who are tasked with monitoring it.

A culture of Web performance means that the $90 you spent on people is supplemented by a team of avid amateurs who notice changes and trends that may slip through the cracks. These amateurs are encouraged to participate in Web performance discussions, where the experts are encouraged to listen then contribute.

Why listen to avid amateurs? In many cases, they are the people who work directly with customers and use the products on a daily basis. Their feedback comes from real experience, set alongside abstract values. Once a measurement has a story, it makes it easier to understand the problem.

An example of the success of amateurs is Wikipedia. A population of amateur contributors, as well as a core of experts in certain fields, have ensured that this is a useful resource. A Web performance culture full of avid amateurs allows comments and stories to flow from the customer-centric parts of an organization into the technology and business parts of the organization. These stories and inputs make the Web performance more real, and make a chart in a report more important.

A culture of Web performance is one that is adopted by an entire company. It is a way of examining the reality of a site in a way that is customer-centric and customer-driven. A strong Web performance culture absorbs information from many sources, and filters the data through a customer filter, and makes every measurement count.

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A decade of working in the Web performance industry can leave one with the idea that no matter how good a site is, there is always the opportunity to be better, be faster. However, I am beginning to believe, just from my personal experience on the Internet, that speed has reached its peak with the current technologies we have.

This does not bode well for an Internet that is shifting more directly to true read/write, data/interaction heavy Web sites. This needs to have home broadband that is not only fast, but which has equality for inbound and outbound connection speeds.

But will faster home broadband really make that much of a difference? Or will faster networks just show that even with the best connectivity to the Internet money can buy, Web sites are actually hurting themselves with poor design and inefficient data interaction designs?

For companies on the edge of Web performance, who are trying to push their ability to improve the customer experience as hard as possible, who are moving hard and fast to the read/write web, here are some ways you can ensure that you can still deliver the customer experience your vistors expect.

Confirm your customers’ bandwidth

This is pretty easy. Most reasonably powerful Web analytics tools can confirm this for you, breaking it down by dialup, and high broadband type. It’s a great way to ensure that your preconceptions about how your customers interact with your Web site meets the reality of their world.

It is also a way to see just how unbalanced your customers’ inbound and outbound connection speeds. If it is clear that traffic is coming from connection types or broadband providers that are heavily weighted towards download, then optimization exercises cannot ignore the effect of data uploads on the customer experience.

Design for customers’ bandwidth

Now that you’ve confirmed the structure of your customers’ bandwidth, ensure that your site and data interaction design are designed with this in mind. Data that uses a number of inefficient data calls behind the scenes in order to be more AJAXy may hurt itself when it tries to make those calls over a network that’s optimized for download and not upload.

Measure from the customer perspective

Web performance measurement has been around a long time. But understanding how the site performs from the perspective of true (not simulated) customer connectivity, right where they live and work, will highlight how your optimizations may or may not be working as expected.

Measurements from high-throughput, high-quality datacenter connections give you some insight into performance under the best possible circumstances. Measure from the customer’s desktop, and even the most thoughtfully planned optimization efforts may have been like attacking a mammoth with a closed safety pin: ineffective and it annoys the mammoth [to paraphrase Hugh Macleod].

As well as synthetic measurements, measure performance right from within the browser. Understanding how long it takes pages to render, how long it takes to show content above the fold, and to gather discrete times on complex Flash and AJAX events within the page will give you even more control over finding those things you can fix.

Takeaway

In the end, even assuming your customers have the best connectivity, and you have taken all the necessary precautions to get Web performance right, don’t assume that the technology can save you from bad design and slow applications.

Be constantly vigilant. And measure everything.

When I meet with clients, I am always astounded by the strength of the silos that exist inside companies. Business, Marketing, IT, Server ops, Development, Network ops, Finance. In the same house, sniping and plotting to ensure that their team has the most power.

Or so it seems to the outsider.

Organizations are all fighting over the same limited pool of resources. Also, the organization of the modern corporation is devised to create this division, with an emphasis on departments and divisions over teams with shared goals. But even the Utopian world of the cross-functional team is a false dream, as the teams begin to fight amongst themselves for the same meagre resources at a project, rather than a department level.

I have no solution for this rather amusing situation. Why is it amusing? As an outsider (at my clients and in my own company) I look upon these running battles as a sign of an organization that has lost its way. Where the need to be managed and controlled has overcome the need to create and accept responsibility.

Start-ups are the villages of the corporate world. Cooperation is high, justice is swift, and creative local solutions abound. Large companies are the Rio de Janeiro’s of the economy. Communication is so broken that companies have to run private phone exchanges to other offices. Interesting things have to be accomplished in the back-channel.

This has a severe effect on Web performance initiatives. Each group is constant battling to maintain control over its piece of the system, and ensure that their need for resources is fulfilled. That means one group wants to test K while another wants to measure Q and yet a third needs to capture data on E.

This leads to a substantial amount of duplication and waste when it comes to solving problems and moving the Web site forward. There is no easy answer for this. I have discussed the need for business and IT to find some level of understanding in previous posts, and have yet to find a company that is able break down the silos without reducing the control that the organization imposes.

When I re-introduced my five articles on Web Performance Concepts last night, I had forgotten than I had already written two additional articles in the series.

1. Web Performance, Part VI: Benchmarking Your Site
2. Web Performance, Part VII: Reliability and Consistency

Look for Parts VII and IX in the next few days.

At the The China Vortex, Paul Denlinger discusses how there is no unified “China market”, no monolithic, simplistic, single-minded Goliath that the rest of the world is trying to deal with. While I do not have the depth of on the ground experience that Mr. Denlinger has (I have not yet been blessed with the opportunity to visit or do business in China), I can see the truth he brings to the discussion.

One of the great pits that Western culture falls into when dealing with the China problem is just that: It is seen as a problem, not an opportunity to expand and learn from a culture that deals with life, philosophy, and business in a very different manner.

This should come as no surprise to any astute student of History, or even modern geopolitics, as the way that nations deal with perceived threats or challenges is to create a national culture of The Other, the us-v-them foreign policy.

When Japan was the country du jour in the 1980s, the Western World respected it, in a very shallow way, as a fellow industrial nation with a strong warrior culture. However, it was treated in a simple way, with Western media portrayals that strengthened perceived stereotypes, and plastered over the profound differences that exist within Japan, and within the Japanese people.

China is even more of a victim of this Politics of the Other, having spent more than 50 years as one of the adversaries in the Cold War, being vilified and portrayed in the least flattering light possible. Even without the base Human interpretation of simplistic interpretations of the Other, the West is crippled from the start in its attempts to understand a nation as large, diverse, and fractured as China.

China is far more than Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and small cadre of smaller, but no less important industrial / post-industrial metropolitan areas.

Drawing on my experience in trying to interpret Internet performance data from within this nation, it is clear to even the casual observer that the Chinese Internet does not simply exist in the major cities. It extends into the far reaches of the country, fractured by the internal conflicts of the connectivity providers, government officials at a many levels, and the unstoppable drive and creativity of the people who see the Internet as an opportunity to make their way in their world.

Cultural and national stereotypes are the way that humans ineffectively deal with the differences that exist. But just as the terms “All Brits..”, “All the French..”, “All Germans…”, “All Argentinians..”, et al. should be treated with disdain and seen as a sign of ignorance, using the words “All Chinese…” or “All of China…” should be quickly quashed and carted off to the dustbin of simplistic paranoia and xenophobia.

There is no such thing as a threat. As it is often stated in other contexts, a threat is simply an opportunity that is hidden by your own prejudices.

Two years ago I created a series of five blog articles, aimed at both business and technical readers, with the goal of explaining the basic statistical concepts and methods I use when analyzing Web performance data in my role as a Web performance consultant.

Most of these ideas were core to my thinking when I developed GrabPERF in 2005-2006, as I determined that it was vital that people not only receive Web performance measurement data for their site, but they receive it in a way that allows them to inform and shape the business and technical decisions they make on a daily basis.

While I come from a strong technical background, it is critical to be able to present the data that I work with in a manner that can be useful to all components of an organization, from the IT and technology leaders who shape the infrastructure and design of a site, to the marketing and business leaders who set out the goals for the organization and interact with customers, vendors and investors.

Providing data that helps negotiate the almost religious dichotomy that divides most organizations is crucial to providing a comprehensive Web performance solution to any organization.

These articles form the core of an ongoing series of discussion focused on the the pitfalls of Web performance analysis, and how to learn and avoid the errors others have already discovered.

The series went over like a lead balloon and this left me puzzled. While the basic information in the articles was technical and focused on the role that simple statistics play in affecting Web performance technology and business decisions inside an organization, they formed the core of what I saw as an ongoing discussion that organizations need to have to ensure that an organization moves in a single direction, with a single purpose.

I have decided reintroduce this series, dredging it from the forgotten archives of this blog, to remind business and IT teams of the importance of the Web performance data they use every day. It also serves as a guide to interpreting the numbers that arise from all the measurement methodologies that companies use, a map to extract the most critical information in the raging sea of data.

The five articles are:

1. Web Performance, Part I: Fundamentals
2. Web Performance, Part II: What are you calling ‘average’?
3. Web Performance, Part III: Moving Beyond Average
4. Web Performance, Part IV: Finding The Frequency
5. Web Performance, Part V: Baseline Your Data

I look forward to your comments and questions on these topics.

Landed in the US on a one-day business trip today. The family is enjoying Christmas with the grandparents in Victoria, BC, and I need to work remotely to cover the time.

I flew into Seattle for a one-day trip, with my brand-new Advanced Parole documents. Figured it would be speedy.

90 minutes later, they let someone who has gone through a number of security checks and other body scans into the US.

Have to wonder what people from other countries have to go through.

Technorati Tags: Green Card, Advanced Parole, immigration, strip search, body cavity

Part of the problem with making a lot of East to West trips across the US is that the flights back are a nightmare for timing. You either lose most of a day or have to take a red-eye.

Well, taking the red-eye has only one advantage: you get to camp in the airline lounge and get some work done that you have been too tired/jetlagged to deal with.

I am in the United Red Carpet Lounge. It is 18:33 PDT, and my flight boards at 22:00 PDT. I have been here since 15:00 PDT. I have caught up with a client project, completed my (dreaded) weekly timesheet, booked accommodation for my Columbus, OH trip, and tidied up an analysis script that I use to process client measurement data.

Seems odd that this is the most productive time of the week.

This trip is a 48-hour turnaround from Boston to LA to finish up the project for a large client. The first half was handled by some colleagues, and was detailed here.

Then,when I get home, I have to go to NYC (Long Island City actually) for the day on Monday. And, as I mentioned above, Columbus which is set for the middle of the month.

Compared to some jet-setters out there, this is nothing. But I travelled so much between August 15 and November 15 that I went from 2,000 miles on United to well into Premier (24,000+ miles). This trip makes the fourth cross-country trip in 2.5 months. Not bad for a homebody.

I have three more hours. Think I will sit back and watch Trois Couleurs: Blanc.

My colleague Roger went on his first business road trip last week.

It was from hell. He spent some time detailing the whole hellish experience here.

On November 14-15, I am travelling with Roger to Columbus, OH. I have promised to make it a much more…enjoyable experience.

Technorati Tags: travel, business, bad trips, Los Angeles