Heilmeier’s Catechism – a checklist for software projects
Until recently, I am ashamed to say that I had never heard of George Harry Heilmeier. A recent retweet by Roy Osherove on Twitter soon had me digging for more information.
It turns out that not only was Mr. Heilmeier a pioneering contributor to liquid crystal displays, he was a Vice President (and later CTO) of Texas Instruments during the time they produced the mighty Speak and Spell.
Mr Heilmeier’s Wikipedia page lists an amazing amount of awards, including the National Medal of Science and the IEEE Medal of Honor, but that’s not what sparked my curiousity.
What was interesting to me about Mr. Heilmeier was a series of questions anyone should be able to answer when proposing a research project or product development effort. These questions are known as Heilmeier’s Catechism.
Here is Heilmeier’s original list of questions:
Heilmeier’s Catechism
- What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon.
- How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice?
- What’s new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful?
- Who cares?
- If you’re successful, what difference will it make?
- What are the risks and the payoffs?
- How much will it cost?
- How long will it take?
- What are the midterm and final “exams” to check for success?
When I read this list, it struck me that these questions could easily be adapted as a software project checklist.
With some small tweaks in language, this list becomes a standard project checklist that any consulting organization should work on with their customers to answer when deciding whether or not to go ahead with a project:
Project Checklist
- What is the underlying business problem we are trying to solve with this project?
- What happens today? Is this problem worked around with manual processes?
- What’s new in this approach and why do we think it will be successful?
- Who are the project stakeholders?
- If we’re successful, what difference will it make?
- What are the risks and the payoffs? How can the risks be mitigated?
- How much will it cost?
- How long will it take?
- How will we measure progress on the project? How do we know we’ve been successful?
What about your organization’s project approval process? Does your company use Heilmeier’s Catechism to decide whether to give a project a green light? What other questions should be asked before starting a project?
Matching Salesforce Data to Back Office Systems
Overview
Often when working with Salesforce Account and Contact records, you want to see if there’s a match with existing SQL Server data in back office systems. While there are several commercial solutions that perform data matching on the Force.com platform (just search the App Exchange for deduplication or lead management to see what’s out there), as well as SSIS fuzzy lookups on the Microsoft SQL Server platform, often you want a quick and free solution that compares data between Salesforce.com and SQL Server data.
To do this, you simply need to add a custom formula field in Salesforce.com and a similar query in your SQL Server data. You can tweak this formula to match different fields depending upon the demographic information contained in the back office system. I will demonstrate this with the Account object in Salesforce.com. In this example, I am assuming that the company name, street, city and postcode will be stored in the back office system.
Duplicate Check field
The field simply concatenates parts of the customer’s name and address together, converts it to upper case, and pads any empty spaces with a character not likely to appear in the name or address fields. I chose the asterisk “*” for this example.
| Name |
Street | City | Post Code | Duplicate Check Code |
| *************************** | ||||
| FELLS WARGO HOME EQUITY | FELLS W******************** | |||
| CATAMARAN EXPRESS COMPANY | SAN BERNADINO | 91911 | CATAMA E**********SAN B91911 | |
| GUMFORT CARE DENTURE CENTER | 900 HOCKSVILLE RD | MASSAPEQUA | 91758 | GUMFOR C900 HOCKSVMASSA91758 |
| ORLANDO/GREEN COUNTY CAB | 1234 LAKE ROAD | ORLANDO | 12319-5273 | ORLAND C1234 LAKE ORLAN12319 |
You’ll notice that this works best when the fields you choose to populate the check code are required, or at least generally populated in both systems. If you choose fields that are often left blank, you can turn up more false positives for matches, which defeats the purpose of the duplicate check.
Salesforce.com Custom Formula Field
To implement this in Salesforce, you need to add a custom formula field to the Account object in Salesforce.com:
- Login to Salesforce.com as an account with administrator privileges.
- Click the ‘Setup’ link at the top of the screen:
- On the left hand App Setup menu, click Customize, Accounts, Fields:
- In the Account Custom Fields and Relationships section, click New.
- Choose Formula as the field type:
- Enter a label and a name for the field. Choose Text as the output type of the formula field:
- Enter the matchcode formula into the Advanced Formula text area:
- Setup the field level security and add the field to the appropriate page layouts, and Save the field.
- That’s it! The field will now be available via the API, Apex code and can be exposed through data exports with the Apex Data Loader.
I’ve reproduced the code from the screenshot in a copyable format below to save you from RSI
UPPER (
MID(TRIM( NULLVALUE(Name, '') )& '******' , 1, 6)
& MID(TRIM(NULLVALUE(Name, '')) & '*' , FIND(' ', TRIM(NULLVALUE(Name, ''))
& '*'),1)
& MID(TRIM(NULLVALUE(Name, '')) & '***' , FIND(' ', MID(TRIM(NULLVALUE(Name,
'')) & ' ',
FIND(' ',TRIM(NULLVALUE(Name,'')) & ' ') + 1,59)) +
FIND(' ', TRIM(NULLVALUE(Name,'')) & ' ') + 1,1)
& MID(TRIM( NULLVALUE(BillingStreet, '')) &'**********' , 1, 10)
& MID(TRIM( NULLVALUE(BillingCity, '')) & '*****' , 1, 5)
& MID(TRIM( NULLVALUE(BillingPostalCode, '')) & '*****' , 1, 5)
)
SQL Custom Query
Although adding the custom field to Salesforce alone has some value (for example, you could use it in custom code to detect duplicates), the real value is when you can match up the values to your back office system. I’m assuming your back office server is running SQL Server 2005 or higher for this T-SQL example, but most forms of SQL have equivalent functions that can manipulate strings, so check your documentation if you are using a different flavour of SQL, and please post your custom formula in the comments section to help out others.
This query could be added to a view, stored procedure or custom field in SQL.
For this example I’m assuming that the fields are called ‘Name’, ‘StreetName’, ‘City’, and ‘ZipCode’, and are stored in a table called CompanyInfo.
SELECT UPPER (
SUBSTRING(LTRIM(RTRIM(ISNULL(Name, '')))+ '******' , 1, 6) +
SUBSTRING(LTRIM(RTRIM(ISNULL(Name, '')))+ '*' , CHARINDEX(' ', LTRIM(RTRIM(ISNULL
(Name, ''))) + '*'),1)
+ SUBSTRING(LTRIM(RTRIM(ISNULL(Name, ''))) + '***' , CHARINDEX(' ', CHARINDEX(LTRIM
(RTRIM(ISNULL(Name,''))) + ' ',
CHARINDEX(' ', LTRIM(RTRIM(ISNULL(Name,''))) + ' ') + 1,59)) +
CHARINDEX(' ', LTRIM(RTRIM(ISNULL(Name,''))) + ' ') + 1,1)
+ SUBSTRING(LTRIM(RTRIM(ISNULL(StreetName, ''))) + '**********' , 1, 10)
+ SUBSTRING(LTRIM(RTRIM(ISNULL(City, ''))) + '*****' , 1, 5)
+ SUBSTRING(LTRIM(RTRIM(ISNULL(ZipCode, ''))) + '*****' , 1, 5)
) AS 'DuplicateCheck'
FROM CompanyInfo
Using your duplicate check code
Once the check is in place in both systems, you can use it in several ways. You can match the fields directly, you could create a matching “confidence” score by using character by character comparisons or you could use more complex fuzzy lookup functions to further match the data.
Summary
Now that you have a single field to compare Salesforce and SQL data, you can tweak the values to find better matching algorithms, and use these fields as part of any duplicate checking process for data integration.
It hurts when I do this – an open letter to Software Consultants
There’s an old joke that goes something like this:
A young woman went to her doctor complaining of pain.”Where are you hurting?” asked the doctor.
“You have to help me, I hurt all over”, said the woman.
“What do you mean, all over?” asked the doctor, “be a little more specific.”
“The woman touched her right knee with her index finger and yelled, “Ow, that hurts.” Then she touched her left cheek and again yelled, “Ouch! That hurts, too.” Then she touched her right earlobe, “Ow, even THAT hurts”, she cried.
The doctor checked her thoughtfully for a moment and told her his diagnosis; “You have a broken finger.”
So what does this have to do with software development?
Too many times consulting companies get customers to tell them what they want and then they build it. What’s wrong with that? Isn’t there an old saying that says the customer is always right?
If you build what the customer asks for without digging deeper into the underlying business problem, then I guarantee that you will not build what they need. If you are just delivering a technical solution to a customer without figuring out whether you are solving the right problem in the best way, you aren’t giving your customer value for money. In fact, no matter how low you put your rates, you are short changing your customers, because you are charging them money to not fix their problems.
Just like a doctor’s patient can describe their symptoms, but doesn’t necessarily know the correct prescription to cure their ills, a customer is typically able to describe the business problem they are facing – but that doesn’t always make them the best person to come up with the solution. You need to collaborate with the customer and dig deeper to understand what the underlying issues are.
Of course, the customer is typically the expert in their domain and you should be the expert in yours, but you have to be more than just a technical expert to deliver business value. You need to be creative and passionate, you need to establish trust with the customer and build a collective sense of ownership of the problem so that you and the customer can both contribute to the solution.
You can use techniques like the Five Whys to perform root cause analysis, but ultimately you need to be interested and involved with your customers and care about their business. Only after defining the root cause of the problem can you then relate the problem to a solution you can provide with your domain expertise.
Ultimately, it’s not about delivering a project on time and under budget if that project isn’t effective; only by helping your customers succeed have you given value for money.
Are you tired of working with consulting companies who give you what you ask for, but not what you need? If you want to partner with us to extend your IT capabilities and produce real results, contact us