A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts

“…but you can hear it on the coconut telegraph…”

Well, it happened. Again. I got tagged by Tim Ford (@SQLAgentman), who talks about surviving for six months on a tropical island with your only sustenance being coconuts and you spend the time dreaming about all the things you would like to be spending time doing if you were back in your shop. Which makes complete sense if your shop was, say, a place that built canoes. Or signal flares. Or a butcher shop. But since my work involves managing a piece of software that manages data that is stored in files on a server, it really seems silly for me to spend any time thinking about such things and instead I would be focusing on seeing if I could get Red Lobster to open a franchise nearby because chances are the fish would be abundant anyway.

But I do not want to upset the man, so I will play along. Here are the things I would be happily thinking about rather than my family, friends, basketball, or the wings at Hooters.

Wow Tim, what a great question. And I am not just saying that because I don’t want you to get control of my laptop again when I am not looking. No, this question is good because it applies outside of work as well. I mean, there are lots of things I would want to do if I had the time, little distractions, and no need to work for food. Things like more golf. Or to properly train for a marathon. Or to train for a few UFC contests. Or just to work on my tan, which I guess I can do on the island anyway. But since you want to focus on work related items, we can do that for now.

Reporting

I would love to get all of my reporting in order. Right now we have a jumbled mess of data that we can query ad-hoc, but it would be nice if we had a set of dashboard reports that we could rely on daily. At least we have the data…somewhere…which is quite an accomplishment to start with. We never really got around to the reporting aspect, which brings me to the next item.

The BI Stack

I have a cursory amount of knowledge on the BI stack. Just enough to serve as an administrator, but not enough to be considered a power user. At least, not yet. I hope to change that in time, but if I could speed that up by getting it done in six months by being allowed to focus on that, it would be great. I understand the value in information, and I would much rather help my business by teaching them how to get the information they need to make the right decisions at the right time instead of spending my time doing backups, restores, and password resets.

Microsoft Certified Master

Give me the time, and the money, and let me earn my MCM, please. ’nuff said there.

Of course everyone knows you are most productive when you are allowed to focus on exactly two distinct tasks, right? You didn’t know that? Well, you do now. That’s right. If you only have one thing to do, then you are underutilized. If you have three or more then you cannot focus enough attention to details and your work suffers. Two items is the sweet spot for success, and you will notice how the three items above are really two because I am that serious. Give me six months and $30k and let me earn my MCM and play around with the BI stack. That is all I ask.

Then I will come back and I promise to bring enough shrimp for everyone. But you’ll need to supply the cocktail sauce.

Deal?

Oh, and since I dare not break the chain, I am tagging Kimberly L. Tripp and Paul Randal, simply because I can.