A minor request

If you are a decider; If you decide how people do their work; If you are in the IT industry; If you manage a team of developers, scripters, sequencers, packagers, administrators or network monitors; for the love of everything you may claim to hold holy or good, please, never ask of your people to develop or do any kind of productive work that takes longer than 10 minutes on a remote desktop connection with just one monitor per workstation.

Spare your potentially cheerful workforce the agony and frustration of being gears in an impractical paradigm that is nothing more than a misunderstood and faulty application of the remote service delivery business model.

Remote service delivery is a great way to manage and administer server farms, deliver first and second level support services to clients and that is basically it. Managers often confuse the potentials of the technology with the potentials of the service. The technology in this case are protocols such as RDP, VNC, AIP, etc that facilitate remote control capabilities for clients and servers. The service is the convenience of managing your client’s infrastructure remotely from the comfort of your own HQ, branch office or minion cellar. This is when some people get confused.

Cut it out, already!

Let me explain what can go wrong with this philosophy by utilizing an analogy: A baker offers you the service of baking a cake. He’s also offering you the remote service of calling you when the cake is done and maybe drive by to drop the cake off at your house. That would be the alpha and omega of this service. He bakes the cake in his kitchen (in-house development) and gives you a ring when it’s done (a remote service). Now imagine a baker that offers you remote baking services. You, as a client may be curious as to what he’s up to, so you play along and see where he’s going with this. The baker comes in your house, installs a room sized arm robot in your kitchen and leaves. He then goes back to his own kitchen and using a laptop and a joystick starts remotely controlling the robot in your kitchen to make you your cake….very slowly…and he dropped some eggs. He will blame that on your pans.

There seems to be a steady growing trend of IT corporations offering application packaging, sequencing, development and general productive services remotely. This initially evolved from the trend of outsourcing IT services to 3rd party suppliers (core business isolation) but has now taken grotesque forms and dimensions. Entire corporations following each other like religious lemmings thinking outsourcing and remote services is the answer to all ails that saves a buck at the end of the fiscal year.

Development is either done in-house or on-site. Doing it remotely will just increase your client’s TCO per workplace, produce late results and in the long run could cost you your clients.

You may choose to do everything remotely….but you shouldn’t. Seriously…..cut it out!