Tufte paying off
I recently published a report at my job where I used Tuftian principles in presenting the data. I presented this report for the first time about 3 weeks ago to a director who ended the conversation by saying “Jake, you are my favorite person of the week”. Anytime a director says anything positive about you…well, it made my week (heck, my year so far). Now today I’m learning that the report has made it’s rounds through the director sphere and I’m starting to receive kudos from other directors as well. There are even whispers that the type of analysis that I did should be a “minimum deliverable of each infrastructure upgrade project”. So what did I publish? I took a look at Unix Server Support Costs and how they relate to my Enterprise DB Upgrade Project (3 year project). As we upgrade databases, we move them from old unix server to new unix server. Now that the project is in it’s final year…the old unix servers are under-utilized. Meaning we pay full price for support…on hardware that only houses about 30% of what it could house. What I wanted to do was paint a picture of Counts of Databases per Server and show the “evaporation” of the old over time…but the kicker came in with also showing db ownership by team. The end result was what I called the DNA sequencing charts….inspired by some charts I found in National Geographic….For each Server (10 in total), there was a horizontal line representing time (by month) from Dec. 08 (top) to Sep. 09 (bottom), then using a stacked chart I would populate an area that would represent the number of databases that would exist at that point in time. So as your eyes traveled down in time, the population of databases would get smaller and eventually “evaporate”. What this enabled our leadership to do was to make strategic decisions on: When to start some technical solution to retire the very expensive hardware early Which directors of the db owner teams that would need to be pulled into the decision and be on board Summarize the cost savings by taking such an approach. This all occurred in one 30 minute seating…where typically if the data is not available, these decisions take weeks and weeks and meetings after meetings. So…this is all really good. To have my stock rise…especially when I hear that further cut backs may take place in March to us contractors. So thank you Prof. Tufte…you may have saved my arse!
