Haven't Got A Scooby Who...

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed how the latest series of Dr. Who is wearing a bit thin? I settled down on Saturday evening to watch the first part of the two-part current series finale, anticipating something perhaps a least a rewarding to watch, but OMG - was I disappointed. What a pile of crap.

Ok, ok so I know that Dr. Who is supposed to be for kids (and I guess tank-top wearing middle-aged trainspotters) and has built a reputation on scaring the pants off generations of them with aliens constructed out of nothing but surplus Noel's Houseparty Gunge and used bog rolls - but come on, last nights' episode was really scraping the bottom of the barrel. There were a number of things that I thought were particularly bad about it, here's a bit of rant on a couple of them...

Daleks. God I hate Daleks. You'd really think that the Dr Who team could come up with something at least mildly original for a series finale. Instead, what do they do? They do what they've already done countless times in the new bunch of Dr. Who episodes and "bring back the Daleks". Again. Why? Daleks really are the most ludicrous, least menacing arch-nemesis ever dreamt up in the history of B-rate science fiction. Worse than the Triffids and that's saying something. Do the Dr. Who writing team have any fresh ideas?

Daleks - apparently the most nefarious, evil, human-hating scum in the Universe. A nasty paper-cut would probably be worse than a run-in with one of these mechanical dog-crap receptacles.

To start with, you have the usual objections to the Daleks. They couldn't historically get up stairs without the aid of a Stanna stairlift for starters. For seconds, they move at the pace of a disabled turtle on the ground - you could outrun them in a Lada. Of course, the script writers have "cunningly" got around these things in the more recent series by using CG to provide them with rather naff-looking anti-gravitation devices or something similar, so that they can fly and whizz about looking like rampant arial wheelybins of destruction.

In addition, they're thick and just plain improbable. Thick, because they have an extremely limited vocabulary, ("EXTERMINATE!", "THE DOCTOR" etc...) which to my mind is a sure sign of some form of retardation as opposed to vastly superior technological knowledge as the script writers would have us believe.

Improbable, because they apparently build all this fabulous technology to enslave whole planets with, but just what do they build this stuff with then? Their little sink-plunger attachments? Detailed electronics work with a sink-plunger? That's like getting a horse to cook an omelet. C'mon chaps. Give the viewer some credit.

Early Dr. Who scripts cast the Dalek as an inter-galactic gigolo love-droid, until the writers realised that these metal miscreants actually have no todger, and less sex appeal than a wobbly shopping trolley.

A good portion of the Saturday episode was spent getting "reaction shots" from the various members of the Dr Who harem when they found out that it was actually the Daleks that had shadied the Earth off to some remote corner of time and space. Why? Because it's the only plot device that the writing team could think of to instill at least some modicum of threat and dread into an otherwise flaccid, lame villian character.

I mean, if everyone's telling us they're evil and nasty then they must be, right? A really good, well written and really imaginative baddie would actually convey this to the viewer just through their presence and the plot logic behind their existence. Instead, with the Daleks, all the characters have to tell you how nasty they are, because if you (the viewer) were left to decide this for yourself you would probably be wondering what the big deal with them was. You might actually just find them a bit funny or a bit stupid really.

Dr. "All Your Eggs In One Basket" Who. He's a single point of failure, and an unreliable one at that. He'd have been better off staying behind the counter in the menswear department.

Also, all throughout the Saturday episode it was stressed how omnipotent the Daleks are - and yet, on two separate occasions both Rose and Captain Jack managed to blow the crap out a Dalek using a their spacy-looking guns. The obvious question is: if Rose and Captain Jack can waste a Dalek, then how come no-one else can?

Were all the soldiers in Torchwood with Martha Jones equipped with the hi-tech weaponary capable of taking the top off a Dalek? 'Course not - they had good, old fashioned machine guns and service pistols. How inconsistent is that? If the script writers of Dr. Who and associated spin-offs want us to have any kind of belief in their mythology, then they could at least try and make it a bit more logical and consistent.

I suppose they couldn't do this, because the only real bit of plot in the entire episode centered around the tension formed as a result of the doctors groupies not being able to find him (using a mobile phone of all things - groan) when the "Earth really needed him".

That whole aspect of the show was just laughable, and it's interesting to note how the Doctor has changed with the times as a character - from a bumbling slightly absent minded old man in the 60's, to some kind of Radio 1 super hero who can save the entire Universe from everything in the 00's. Everything that is, except from his haircut and possibly the Daleks.

The latest heinous scheme by the Dalek overlord - Stavros, involves stealing planets in order to recreate the Crucible and from there, the 1978 Embassy World Snooker Championship, won by Ray "I Vant To Bite Your Finger" Reardon, pictured above lining his balls up over the top pocket.

To sum up, here's some of my own tips for the Dr. Who writing team:

1. Read some proper science fiction, so that you at least have some idea of how it's supposed to be done properly.
2. Retire the @#$%ing Daleks, they were probably scary for about thirteen seconds at some point in 1969, but they're just dated nowadays and don't really make any sense whatsoever.
   
3. Try and come up with a consistent mythology upon which to base your scripts.
4. Just because the show's about a time lord - don't overuse the whole messing with time thing as an excuse for flaky, tenuous plot lines that border on the pantomime.
   
5. Put more Bernard Cribbins in the show. He's the only one worth watching. Perhaps you could re-create him as ruler of the Daleks or something.

Project Managers and Paper Bags

I work within the IT industry for a software house, doing a highly technical job that takes me all over the place and gives me the opportunity to meet a broad mix of different customers, and work on a good selection of reasonably large-scale software implementation projects.

Over the past couple of years, or perhaps a little longer - myself and many of my colleagues have started to notice a fairly worrying pattern beginning to emerge within the IT sector; more specifically within the approach and organisation of medium-large software implementation projects.

It's simply this: the number of project managers within IT appears to be growing at an exponential rate, and the number of skilled staff that are actually capable of delivering anything tangible on a given project is in a reciprocal decline.

Whereas perhaps five years ago, when working through a deployment lifecycle on a medium duration/medium complexity project there might have been maybe one, possibly two project managers involved, my recent experience has been that for an equivalent project (even on the much smaller, tactical projects) I regularly have to liase with and bump up against anywhere up to about ten PM's in order to make any kind of forward progress at all.

To avoid any misunderstanding, let me clarify what (in this context) I mean by a project manager:

• Anyone that can't be seen to directly contribute to the project through the production of anything directly related to the delivery of the end product. (And that could be anything tangible such as documents, code, training etc...)
• Anyone that insists on only having a "high level" view of the various project elements.
• Anyone that appears to spend a great deal of their time dealing with "issues" and allegedly "managing risks".
• Anyone that has no apparent grasp of technical aspects of the project, and isn't a key business stakeholder affiliated with the project.
• Anyone from a non-technical background who attends a large number of meetings within the working week.
  

So it's not just the traditional notion of a PM, I'm probably abusing the term a bit here so that it encompasses all non-productive members of the project team.

Ideally, a strong PM should have the correct background for an IT project - not like Ralph here, who didn't realise until it was too late that in actual fact, a SAP workflow solution was required and not an extension to the local public toilets.

I guess what I'm really saying is that there's generally a lot more useless cruft wrapped around even the most simple projects these days, and what's more it appears to be consistently impacting the delivery capability inherent within the technical teams on these projects.

That's not all:

• IT project implementation costs are steadily on the increase, as the amount of money required to support superfluous project staff also increases.
• IT project implementation timescales are stretching, as more and more time is taken over pointless meetings and debates within entire clusters of non-technical project affiliates, for the sake of some weird form of self-fulfillment or self-aggrandisement. Often, key technical people are diverted away from productive work in order to attend such meetings, or to participate in such debates just in order to introduce some level of credibility to the whole charade.
• The number of key risks - which should be managed by this crew of project managers - is actually increasing in most projects due to poor communication and "chinese whispers" developing between and amongst them. (I could cite several examples where pretty innocuous events have been turned into deal-breakers as a result of this).
• Software-based solutions are consistently failing to meet requirements as a result of the previous three points, largely because of the fact that over-spend and poor project time-management ultimately result in feature reduction and requirements sidelining. It's a regular thing.

So, is this just bureaucracy gone mad or is there something fundamentally broken (or breaking) within the IT sector? Am I just working on entirely the wrong projects?

I personally think that there are a number of things going on:

• There is (and it's well documented) a genuine skills shortage within the IT sector, and the number of experienced, well-qualified technical staff to work on individual projects has dropped significantly over the past five or so years.
• There is an increase in the number of workers within the IT sector, but many of them lack the basic understanding of the fundamental principles behind computing and at a higher level, IT.
  
• Those people with little or no technical grasp of the subject matter are beginning to display aspirations to move into project management as a distinct, worthwhile career path. Without any formal technical grounding in the projects that they'd hope to manage. (It's like the old adage - "If you can't do, teach".)
  
• There is an decreasing lack of understanding at a business level as to what's involved in delivering any form of engineering project, of which IT projects are just a subset. For some reason, with the rise of the throway consumerist society it appears to be the normal expectation now that IT systems can be deployed simply with little real technical skill and knowledge.
• To supplement the lack of skilled resource (which has the net effect of driving up project cost and therefore commercial risk) companies have locked into this vicious cycle of employing more and more people in lower-middle management roles, to somehow manage this risk, without understanding that increased beurocracy leads to increased cost.
• Outsourcing of IT has exacerbated this whole thing, given that nowadays in large companies that have outsourced vast tracts of their IT delivery capability a larger part of project implementation time is spent fencing around the SLA (service level agreement) as opposed to actually getting anything done.
• Outsourcing has also (quite successfully unfortunately) managed to reinforce this belief that lots of lower-cost resource is better than smaller numbers of higher-cost expert resource. This is a complete piece of kiddology. Use of lower cost, high volume resource increases the management overhead on a project, decreases overall quality on a project and fundamentally stifles the innovation that needs to be present as part of the makeup of any successful solution delivery.
• The internal organisation and IT delivery capability within more and more private organisations is beginning to - through regulatory policy making and massively complex third-party supplier relationships - beginning to parallel the business model of the most inefficient organisational structures we know of: the public sector organisations such as those run by the government. (I'd love to hear from anyone that can credibly put up a strong counter-argument that these organisations operate at peak efficiency).
  

A pragmatic approach to project management can bring about a healthy orange glow that invigorates and revitalises the entire project team.

I don't have anything specific against project managers - so please all you PM's out there please don't take this personally. What I'm actually quite concerned about is what appears to be a general malaise within the IT sector at the moment, which (if it spins out to its natural conclusion) the economic downturn we're currently seeing could well make a whole lot worse.

There is, of course a definite need for good, strong project managers on all but the most trivial of projects, and I'm actually honoured to work with a couple of people that succeed in turning project management into a real asset on a number of gigs. What I really find frustrating is this apparent wish to over-egg the whole management side of IT projects at present.

Is this just me, or does anyone else have a similar (or counter) viewpoint on the whole thing?

Caravan Tax

Caravans, caravans, caravans.

If, like me you're fortunate enough to live in a scenic part of the UK then you're probably used to the periodic influx of caravans (and associated caravanners) that happens each and every bank holiday, school holiday break or sunny weekend.

They appear in their thousands like some weird invading army tugging their mobile lounges behind their oversized saloons or 4x4's, generally moving at no more than 50 miles per hour, clogging up not only the main arterial routes into a region, but also all the less-travelled A-roads and B-roads, back lanes and population centers. They get everywhere.

Local roads that you would normally traverse in a matter of minutes to get to your local amenities become clogged, glutinous affairs where forward progress becomes a source of intense frustration and stress.

With ironic names like the "Rapier", "Swift", "Valiant" or "Swallow" other road users are forced to sit behind these cumbersome, ugly contraptions as they make their ponderous way to the nearest herding point, so that their occupants can plug in their mains electricity, set up their satellite TV, crack open their chemical bog and get down to enjoying the thrills and exuberance of a truly nomadic lifestyle.

The Avondale Land Ranger - a prince amongst caravans to some, just another white, wheeled coffin to others.

I'm not a fan, as you can probably tell. To me, caravans can be basically summed up as the "suburbs on the move". Each weekend, thousands upon thousands of people pack up their stuff, cram it all into a lounge on wheels with all the creature comforts that they would have in their own homes and hunt out specifically clinical, managed, safe resting places where they can set up camp and get down to enjoying what they would probably do if they were still in their lounge back home in good old Suburbia.

The popularity of caravanning in the UK is huge. Some statistics taken from the Caravan Club indicate that:

• There are currently approximately 1 million registered caravanners within the UK.
• The CC annual turnover is £95 million pounds, indicating a sizable market for "value add" caravanning services.
• The number of registered caravanners more than doubled (from 100,000 to 250,000) between the years of 1971 and 1982.
• That caravanners inject somewhere in the region of £370 million pounds a year into various regional ecomonies.
• There is on average, one CC badged caravan site for every 30 square miles of country within the UK.

That means that taken as an aggregate, the registered caravan owners within the UK equate to a small city, mobilising and spreading out throughout the furthest reaches of the UK each public holiday. A small city moving along the highways and byways.

As I was sitting in my car on the A55 the other day (incidentally stuck in a jam caused by an overturned caravan) it occurred to me that I've never seen (and admittedly not really actively gone looking for) any kind of lobbying asking for a degree of taxation to be applied to the use of caravans. It hit me in a flash what a genius idea this would be. My rationale is simple:

1. Caravans have the aerodynamic profile of a melted blancmange, and so vastly increase the fuel consumption (and therefore emissions) of the vehicle towing them to their final destination.
2. To tow a caravan, you need a fair degree of torque, which generally you only get with larger, thirstier and dirtier engines, such as those found in the 4 x 4 models - often diesels.
3. Towing a caravan dramatically reduces the fuel efficiency of the towing vehicle, and so lead to an increased consumption of diesel, petrol - driving up demand and so the forecourt fuel prices.
   
4. Caravans are slow and directly cause congestion on many of the UK roads, resulting in jams and therefore driving up the emissions from vehicles of other road users; given that they end up having to sit around for longer periods with their engines running, in lower gears. Given the current governmental policy around road tax and linking it to emissions, this also has the indirect effect of driving up the cost of road tax for other road users.
   
5. Caravans add either 50% or 100% the number of axles bearing down on the road (taken with those connected to the towing vehicle) and so must increase and/or exacerbate the wear and tear of the highways, thereby indirectly driving up the road tax for other road users.

Taking all these (alright, alright - somewhat biased) points into account, it struck me that on many levels, caravans can be thought of as just another HGV vehicle; you could replace the word caravan in many of the above points with "articulated lorry" and they'd still make sense.

Use of HGV vehicles is of course, heavily regulated and heavily taxed (directly or indirectly) and given that they share so many fundamental characteristics with the caravan, I don't really understand why the two things should be treated so differently.

A more egalitarian approach could be achieved in a number of ways:

1. Introduce an uplift on the standard road tax for any car owners that intend to tow a caravan.
2. Introduce a separate caravan road tax - i.e. have a caravan registered as a separate, legal vehicle that is subject to same road tax banding as standard non-HGV vehicles.
3. Introduce a tachometer-based taxation which introduces a price per mile travelled levy that would need to be paid dependent on usage.
4. Introduce a devolutionary toll-based system which would be collected using the existing caravan-site infrastructure, thereby eliminated the need for any additional infrastructure (i.e. toll boothes).
   

Looking around on the web, it appears that some degree of caravan taxation has in fact been proposed previously - check out this page for Margaret Becketts anti-caravan taxation stance and a link to a petition against it.


Margaret Beckett getting sloshed in her caravan. This picture was actually taken moving at high speed down the M4 between Swindon and Bristol.

Margaret Beckett, unusually, not in her caravan and attending to matters of state.

It looks to me as the basic arguments against some form of caravan taxation fall could be summarised as follows:

1. People have a "right to roam" freely, taken way too literally this is translated into the right that caravanners have to "hitch up" and then subsequently invade any part of the UK, without having to pay for the privilege.
2. Caravanners typically only use their caravans occasionally, and so some form of taxation that assumes constant or background usage would be unfair.
3. Stars and upstanding role models such as Madonna and Jamie Oliver, have claimed at some point to have either caravanned, or more likely purchased some massively expensive all in one "roam-a-home" as part of some publicity stunt or strategy, so it must be alright, good and decent.
4. Caravanners contribute massively to the local econonmy, through the purchase of foodstuffs, refills for their chemical toilets etc...

All of the above, with the exception of number four seem pretty unsubstantial from where I'm sitting. To take each in turn:

1. Everyone has a right to roam in their caravan, except of course for travellers and those with a genuinely peripatetic or itinerant lifestyle, where land ownership and invasion of privacy laws appear to come into force. I suspect that most caravan-fans would probably support the taxation of genuinely migratory people, and I also suspect that most caravan owners wouldn't like to have a transient settlement on their back door step.
   
2. Occasional use of a caravan is moot. The point is that most caravanners tend to occasionally use their caravans at the same occasional point in time, thereby creating the problems cited earlier in this posting. If there was some kind of uniform distribution governing the occasional use of the caravanning fraternity, then many of the problems wouldn't be as bad as I'd perceive them to be. The fact is that the major downsides to caravan use are symptomatic of a clustered pattern to their usage and distribution across the UK roads at peak periods throughout the year.
3. I'm not going into this one, it's a lifestyle choice I suppose - sincere or otherwise.
4. OK - so the contribution to local economy is great. Not as great as it would be if a small proprtion of the caravanners elected to use a local hotel, guest house or other means of local accommodation as an alternative once in a while. Those non-caravanners that don't have the ability to be "self-sufficient" surely contribute a larger proportion of revenue to local business, than those that basically sit in their mobile lounges, eating food probably bought in Tesco before they set off.

There. That's about all I wanted to say on the subject of caravans for the time being - and I'm pressed for time so need to crack on with some other stuff. If you read this post, and have a strong view one way or the other then I'd love to hear from you - just pop in a comment using the links provided.