Last week I presented for the PASS Virtual Chapter on Professional Development about Communication Skills and the whole thing was recorded via LiveMeeting. It's 70 minutes of distilled experience with some stories thrown in.

Check it out at https://www323.livemeeting.com/cc/usergroups/view?id=7KH9ZW.

Enjoy!

PS Many thanks to Mark Caldwell for hosting the meeting!

Days like this don’t come around very often for us here at SQLskills.com – we’re expanding again! It’s been seven months since Jonathan Kehayias came on board and we’ve had a huge amount of fun together. Now business has expanded to the point where we need to grow again so it’s time to hire the next member of our close-knit, expert team.

Specifically, we’ve asked Joseph Sack to join us and we’re extremely pleased that he accepted our offer. He’ll become employee #4 when he starts with us on Monday, October 3rd.

Joe has worked in the SQL Server space since 1997, and we first met him back in 2006 when he was a Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft and he was in one of the early SQL Server 2005 Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) rotations – which he passed! He then went on to get the SQL 2008 MCM certification and finally took over responsibility for the whole SQL Server MCM program within Microsoft from 2009 to 2011.

It was while Joe was running the SQL MCM program that we got to know Joe really well and gain an appreciation for his extensive SQL Server knowledge and enterprise consulting expertise, as well as his passion for developing content and helping people learn – whether as a consultant or as a teacher.

In fact we respect Joe so much that recently we asked if he’d like to get back into the wild and varied consulting life by leaving Microsoft to join us. We feel honored that he agreed. He brings a wealth of performance troubleshooting, development, scalability and architecture expertise to the team and maintains the high bar we have of all team members either having MCM certification or being MCM instructors (or both!).

With our increased full-time consulting team we’re now able to meet the burgeoning demand for our services, including our new Remote DBA Service that we announced earlier this week. Joe will be blogging on SQLskills.com and hanging out on Twitter (@JosephSack) and in the community with the rest of us.

As you can tell, we’re very excited to have Joe join our team!

Thanks as always,

Paul and Kimberly

I bet you'd love the answer to be "SQLskills.com"? Well now it can be.

Over the last few months some of our clients for whom we've performed SQL Server health checks on their critical servers have asked us if we'd consider a regular service where we perform mini-health checks on those same servers and also permanently monitor the servers for anything untoward happening.

Now that we're expanding our team of world-class SQL experts again (more details on Friday!) we have the capacity to do this, so today I'm announcing a new "remote DBA" service.

Once we've completed an initial health check of the SQL Server instances you'd like us to look after, we'll install a monitoring package that will alert you and us by email if anything out-of-the-ordinary happens (in response to which we'll log in and see what's up) and on a regular interval (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly - whatever works for you and your budget) we'll log in and perform a mini health check to ensure that things are ticking along nicely. We can log in with or without you being present - completely up to you - and of course we'll be under complete NDA. And we can do it anywhere in the world.

We're the company that shows people how to be great DBAs and we solve the nasty performance/SAN/design problems that others give up on.

Why not take the pressure off, get some peace of mind, and let us be *your* DBAs?

Exorbitantly expensive? Not at all - you're paying for hours we work, not a massive retainer.

If you're interested in finding out more details, send me an email.

It may just be the best investment you make all year.

I think many people imagine that technical acumen and razor-sharp problem solving skills are the most important skills to be a successful consultant. I would strongly disagree. While these two skills are *absolutely* essential for success, I think they are less important than the ability to effectively communicate with your clients.

Effective communication is a skill that doesn't come naturally to most people - it has to be nurtured, practiced, and perfected. I could break down "communication" into a variety of sub-classes:

• Presenting to a large audience
  • E.g. a conference session, or a large group of IT staff
• Presenting to a small audience
  • E.g. a class, or a targeted set of IT staff
• 1-<5 discussions with technologists (devs, DBAs, IT directors/managers)
• 1-<5 discussions with executives (VPs, CXOs)
• 1-1 discussions with technologists
• 1-1 discussions with executives
• Whitepapers
• Design, analysis, or strategy reports
• Status emails or general email conversation
• Business solicitations

Each of these requires a different approach. Before any kind of client presentation, meeting, or phone call, or when crafting a report or email, I ask myself the following questions:

• Who is my audience?
• What am I trying to convey to them?
• Is my message appropriate for the audience? (e.g. I wouldn't necessarily be discussing business implications of growth choices for the entire company's data tier with a developer, nor would I necessarily be discussing index tuning strategies for specific tables with a CIO.)
• What politics and inter-personal/departmental relationships do I need to be aware of?
• What would the ramifications be if my presentation/call/report/email was described or forwarded to another person/part of the company? (e.g. am I being asked to deliver some metrics/advice that would be unwelcome - but needed - in another department?)
• Is my communication in the overall client's best interests?
• Am I sure I have all the pertinent facts and details to be able to give my opinion credibly and correctly?
• Am I 100% sure of the technical content of my communication?
• Is my tone correct? (e.g. sometimes one needs to take the tone that 'you hired me because of my experience and knowledge, and in this case, respectfully, person X is incorrect' - but it needs to be done professionally.)

And of course everything needs to be concise, bullet-points instead of waffle-y paragraphs where needed, spel chcked, also grammer must be write actually two.

There's no excuse for incorrectness in written communications - many people have the opinion that sloppy communications indicates a predilection for sloppiness in other areas. I also subscribe to this view. Don't get me wrong - it's fine to have mistakes in tweets and the odd email - but consistent errors in emails, blogs and other professional communications doesn't look good. Seeing these things makes me cringe.

But so far I've only mentioned the consultant communicating with the client. The client's communication with the consultant is way more important. You have to be an 'active listener', where you're not just passively listening to the client but you're taking it in, processing it, making sure it makes sense, asking questions for clarification and so on. If you can't work out what you're being asked to do for the client then you're in trouble. It could be that the client isn't very good at explaining, in which case you need to restate what you think you've been asked to do so everyone's on the same page. Every few new clients we find we're following other consultants who didn't do what the client wanted because of communications issues, not necessarily technical deficiencies.

I am overwhelmingly pleased that I grew up into a manager and senior contributor in a fast-moving product group at Microsoft - there was no choice there but to communicate effectively (in all the various forms I listed in the first set of bullets above) - or be left behind - it was that simple. Trial-by-fire is a great way to learn.

If you don't have an opportunity like that, there are plenty of ways to practice - user groups, blogging, and whitepapers - and just making yourself be a better communicator wherever you work. And you might consider having a partner or colleague review certain key communications - Kimberly and I do that for each other all the time (like this blog post, for example).

Effective communication is an indispensable skill that I don't think enough emphasis is placed on in the tech community.

What do you think?

Happy Holidays!

Back in January I ran a special offer on our new (at the time) auditing service, and as the holidays approach I'd like to do it again!

What I'm offering:

I'll perform a remote maintenance/operations audit for US$750 for the first 10 customers to sign up by January 15th, limited to 4 hours of my time, a savings of over 40% on our regular rates.

[Edit: 12/30/10: 6 signed up - 4more available!]

What do you get:

The remote audits take the form of us giving you some non-intrusive scripts to run on each server (capturing things like database configuration, index usage, wait stats), plus a detailed questionnaire to fill in. We analyze the results and send you a list of recommendations, with supporting explanations and links to deeper information. Any time that's left over you can use however you want (questions/discussions, design reviews, etc) over the phone or email. I even had one customer spend the time by recording an interview with me to play back to their wider operations team to convince them of the need for a full-time DBA.

See the auditing page for more detailed information and the past customers page for testimonials from prior clients.

As part of a regular remote consulting engagement, we'd also be engaging with the DBA team through web-meetings, phone calls, email conversations to undertake performance tuning, design work, and so on. However, many people just want to buy a small, limited block of time to run a quick audit and get the OK or a set of changes to implement to improve operations - this is where the standalone audits come in.

The standalone audit services we offer take a much shorter time (depending on environment size) than a regular consulting engagement, as they don't involve web-meetings and in-depth interaction with the DBA team, so they're a lot more cost-effective when on a tight budget. Of course, we also provide remote performance tuning, available in small blocks of time rather than an open-ended engagement, and the traditional 'figure out all sorts of problems' consulting engagements.

How do you get it:

Shoot me an email (click here) if you're interested in any of these services and/or want to be one of the lucky few to take part in the promotion. This offer is valid anywhere in the world.

We look forward to working with you!

PS As I've been asked this twice since posting this, if you want to move ahead with this quickly but are concerned about delays due to the holiday season at your company, we can accept all major credit cards.

Okay, this post is describing some new services we provide (we are a consulting firm after all :-), but there's a promotion at the bottom where you can save $$$ on one of the new services.

We're starting to offer a set of standalone auditing services that we can perform remotely, greatly reducing the cost of having someone come on-site to evaluate your SQL Server environment. The new standalone audit services we are providing are:

• Database maintenance and operations audit of your SQL Server environment
• Disaster recovery and high-availability audit of your SQL Server environment

The remote audits take the form of us giving you some non-intrusive scripts to run on each server, plus a detailed questionnaire to fill in. We analyze the results and send you a list of recommendations, with supporting explanations and links to deeper information.

As part of a regular remote consulting engagement, we'd also be engaging with the DBA team through web-meetings, phone calls, email conversations to undertake performance tuning, design work, and so on. However, many people just want to buy a small, limited block of time to run a quick audit and get the OK or a set of changes to implement to improve operations - this is where the standalone audits come in.

The standalone audit services we offer take a much shorter time (depending on environment size) than a regular consulting engagement, as they don't involve web-meetings and in-depth interaction with the DBA team, so they're a lot more cost-effective when on a tight budget. Of course, we also provide remote performance tuning, available in small blocks of time rather than an open-ended engagement, and the traditional 'figure out all sorts of problems' consulting engagements.

These audits are usually billed at our regular offsite consulting rate, but as an initial promotion I'll perform a database maintenance audit for $500 to the first 10 new customers who sign up before the end of January, limited to 4 hours of my time (a 50% saving over our regular rates).

Shoot me an email (through the contact button at the top of the page) if you're interested in any of these services and/or want to be one of the lucky few to take part in the promotion.

We look forward to working with you!