I will be delivering another free, online MicroTraining on SSIS Package Configurations Tuesday, 7 Feb 2012, at 10:00 AM EST.

Join Andy Leonard as he demonstrates uses of SSIS Package Configurations for externalizing SSIS package variable values. 

Register here!

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I am honored to present Building Your First SSIS 2012 Package to the Madison Professional Association for SQL Server (MADPass) Wednesday, 25 Jan 2012! If you read this blog and will be in the Madison, Wisconsin area Wednesday, stop by and introduce yourself! I’m the fat guy with a fu.

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Join me for a microTraining session on SSIS Precedence Constraints!

When? Wednesday, 11 Jan 2012, 10:00 AM EST
Where? Please register here!
What? SQL Server Integration Services Precedence Constraints provide many ways to control work-flow in the Control Flow. The price for flexibility? Complexity. Join me as I present options and patterns for using Precedence Constraints!

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The end of the year is a study in extremes. For many, it is a time of merriment and celebration. For some, it is yet another day to survive.

I believe most people reflect on the past year as it draws to a close. We think about the things that happened over the year: the accomplishments of ourselves and others; goals set and met; goals not met; gain; losses; and the inevitable change that happens to us all every year. It’s likely this year has been a mixed bag for you as it has been for me. There have been high highs and low lows.

Examples? Wow, there are many. Some subtle, some not. In roughly chronological order:

• Watching SQLPeople grow
• Starting Andy Leonard Training, Inc.
• Writing SSIS Design Patterns and the SSIS Stairway series at SQLServerCentral.com
• Speaking at Connections, several SQL Saturdays, the PASS Summit, and SQLBits

Do these things matter? Sure. But do they matter most? Not by a long shot. Here are some examples of things that happened in 2011 that matter most:

• Celebrating another year married to Christy
• The birth of my latest grandchild, Gabriel
• Stevie Ray’s appendectomy
• Riley starting school
• Meeting with fellow believers at the PASS Summit for PASS Prayers
• Meeting regularly with a small group of committed Christians to study the Bible
• Participating in SQL Server  MVP Deep Dives, Volume 2
• Starting Linchpin People with my friend and brother, Brian Moran

Can you spot the difference? What matters most involves people. Most of these events were incredibly positive – awesome, in fact. Some were and are great but are continuing to mature. I still cannot bring myself to think for long about Stevie’s appendectomy; the harsh realities of that situation still chill my soul.

High highs and low lows.

As the year has progressed, I have become more and more aware of how truly blessed I am. I deserve none of it, and yet much is given to me. A bunch of it comes my way as a winner of the Birth-Nation Lottery. We have so much in America. As I read recently on a friend’s blog, many of America’s poor post on Facebook or Twitter about their needs and concerns from their iPhones. Destitution exists in America, but this isn’t it.  This isn’t the poverty others experienced as children. The fact that most of America’s poor are among the richest in the world is a thing of mixed emotions. I hurt to see anyone in poverty – in America or elsewhere – and this pain is motivating.

Motivating For What?

I believe I can do better and more to help. The faith I share with millions compels me to do more. So I am doing and will do more. My watchword for 2012 is “intentional”. Plans are already underway to intentionally work to reduce the poverty of those in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. I don’t know how many of these actions will make it to the annals of this blog. I am certain some of these activities will appear here, though they will likely not be advertised in the category of “reducing poverty”. I will have no such category on this blog. Or any blog.

I have endeavored my entire career to give back. This will continue, though with a bit more focus, planning, and (yes) intent.

I am truly blessed to have a business partner who shares faith, philosophy, and a desire to implement positive change in the workplace. Brian has taught me much technically, but he has taught me much more about endurance and faith. I am honored to work with him. We are endeavoring to create a different kind of business; one that enables what Tom Nelson calls “human flourishing” in Work Matters. That sounds lofty, mostly because it is. The Linchpin People website went live earlier this month even though we’ve been in business since April. We are architecting Linchpin People to be different, and different takes time. We are building a culture by defining a philosophy. Beyond that, we are cognizant of the movements around us. We are leveraging them at a minimum; we may be starting a movement – time will tell. I would love to share an optimistic story with you, but the starkness of our beliefs compel us to face the reality: this may succeed or this may fail. Only time will tell.

That’s not all. But that’s all I want to share here and now.

Be Intentional

I want to encourage anyone so inclined to be intentional in 2012. I lack the words to adequately express how it feels to know something you did made a difference in someone’s life. Suffice it to say it is unlike any other positive feeling  I have experienced.

Help someone less fortunate. Be there for people who need you. This isn’t always as straightforward as it sounds, as sometimes tough love is what they need most.

We are a community of brilliant problem-solvers. Can you imagine what we can accomplish if we simply put our minds and hearts and hands to it? Just think of the things we can do; things for people; things that matter most.

Andy

Register / Join me today at 10:00 AM EST!

Just in time for Christmas, I break out some magic! This session focuses on the benefits and underlying code of an SSIS Framework.

This is part of my Four Weeks of SSIS MicroTraining. I hope to see you there!

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As in the past, I am sharing my PASS Summit 2011 evaluation results. As also in the past, I explain that I do this because I want to improve my serve. If this kind of post makes you uncomfortable for any reason, please stop now and go read Brent’s awesome post on improving your evaluation numbers. It has awesome advice (as usual).

I encourage feedback when I present – especially ways people believe I can improve. I know that this is begging for dings to my score. I’m ok with that; this is not a race. Presenting is about serving the community and I simply want to do the very best job I can.

Presentation Levels Do Not Help

I have a suggestion for any organization organizing events with presentations: Please discard numeric levels. Why? Because they are an engine of loss and I believe they set up the presenters for some magnitude of failure.

A Question For Presenters:

Have you ever delivered a presentation that contained only material from one level? Me neither. Why is this? For me, it’s because the attendees are never merely seeking one level of material. How can I tell? By the questions. I get questions above and below any level of material I deliver. In a multi-track, multi-session format event, this is because some people attend my session because they seek to learn everything about a certain topic while others attend because very little being presented in this particular timeslot interests them and my session abstract sounds slightly more interesting than the others. This is not to say my presentation won’t help these attendees in some way.

When events provide pre-attendance scheduling capabilities, it would be interesting to note those who intended to attend my presentation – in advance – by adding my presentation to a timeslot. I am not suggesting adjusting the score for these attendees. I simply think that would make an interesting metric to use as a filter when analyzing the evaluation scores and comments.

When delivering a Level 500 session, I set the stage with lower-level material. I may ramp up quickly, spending only 5-10 minutes on introductory topics. This generates feedback that the session wasn’t at the correct level.

When delivering a Level 100 session, I poll attendees and quickly realize some already know the main points I am going to deliver. For example, each time I deliver “I See A Control Flow. Now What?” I ask for a show of hands of how many attendees have built an SSIS package that is in Production. The abstract clearly states this is for beginners with SSIS building their very first package. I am convinced, however, that some of the more experienced attendees learn things from this presentation. Why? They tell me personally or provide feedback via evaluations or email.. Apparently, I am including material to which they have not been exposed. Or I am presenting my understanding of a beginner topic in a way they have not considered. I am not sure. I rarely get complaints about the level of the Level 100 presentations I deliver, but I often – nearly always – get complaints about the level of any Level 400 or higher presentation I deliver.

I have a theory: People attending Level 100 sessions are open to learn more. Since they are just beginning, their context is unbiased and they are open to learn as much as possible. They don’t care if I wander into a Level 200 or Level 300 topic for a few minutes. They are learning stuff they don’t know. I believe people who attend Level 400+ sessions expect me to share stuff they don’t already know. If someone attends and my presentation turns out to be a review of things they’ve already learned, they feel it wasn’t a Level 400+ session because they didn’t learn something new. In my opinion, this is a symptom of Engineer’s Disease: We undervalue what we know and overvalue what we don’t know. My response to this is different: I celebrate the fact that many people already know anything I can show them. This means that my peers and I have succeeded in getting the word out. Yay us.

A Question For Attendees:

Think about the absolute best presentations you have ever attended. Was consistency in the level of material presented the best metric for you to describe those sessions? Me neither. I love Dr. DeWitt’s PASS Summit keynote presentations because he takes complicated material and breaks it down so even I can understand it. He breaks presentation rules in his slides, and yet continues to Wow! those in attendance. How does he do that? The best word I can use to describe it: Connecting. Dr. DeWitt connects with us. To connect, you have to understand the context attendees bring to a session. He does. Second, I think you have to know what the attendees want. What do all geeks want? We want to learn. Learn about what? Anything that will help us do our jobs better. For a few, this is probably an ignoble motive. But for the rest of us, we are in it for the brain exercise. We want to be more efficient, we want to learn stuff so we can help our companies, our communities, and ourselves do more with less. We simply want to know.

Dr. DeWitt uses what we already know to teach us something we want to know. That is connecting.

Conclusion

The last reason I think events should abandon levels is: they’re painfully distracting. It’s painful for presenters to decide which levels to assign; painful for the organizers to fiddle with scheduling a balanced smattering of 100s, 200s, 300s, and 400s in each timeslot; painful for attendees who bring their own concepts of which material should be assigned which level. I believe all complaints about level are a mask for some other – more valid – complaint. Remove this metric, and I believe better feedback will result. As a presenter, I can tell you I always get complaints about the level assigned to my presentation. I have delivered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours of material over the past decades of training and education. For me, complaints about level and level alone are evaluation noise. I simply ignore it at this point.

If event organizers insist on including levels, I respectfully submit that the levels themselves be as fuzzy as possible. What do I mean by fuzzy? Non-numeric. Perhaps Beginner and Advanced. With maybe a dash of Intermediate thrown in. If that occurs, you will see a spike in Intermediate sessions submitted due to the effects of the bell curve. That’s normal.

And that is another fantastic argument for eliminating levels altogether.

Andy

I am not sure why, but Google+ Hangouts no longer work for microtraining. <sadface /> I found Meeting Burner a few weeks back and have switched to it. One cool feature? You can register for the meetings and add them to your calendar. Another cool feature? There are more than 10 seats.

Next Tuesday, 20 Dec, I am delivering MicroTraining on SSIS Frameworks. If you would like to learn more about SSIS Frameworks, please register here.

You can get the fully-functional demo code for this presentation by downloading the materials from this post.

 I look forward to seeing you next Tuesday!

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