Donald Burelson on DBA Personality Types

I came across this article "What Type of DBA Are You?" by Donald Burelson. Found it interesting and a little hilarious, especially the last part about having more than 1 DBAs working together.
He categorizes DBAs into 3 types. Try to find what DBA Catagory you belong to.

Project Implementation Experiences

Just thought of sharing an Exerpt from a PM Article "Project Memoirs: Real Projects, Real Lessons" written by Micheal Wood on http://www.gantthead.com/, which might be of interest to Developers and DBAs too. Eventually, we would all be climbing up the ladder and may face similar decision making situations. Here it goes...

Lesson 4: Focusing on FTE efficiency can derail real progress.
One of the lessons that has paid recurring dividends over the years has been learning the difference between working lots of hours versus achieving project outcomes. Yes, I am talking about the dreaded Full Time Equivalent (FTE) utilization metric.
One project comes to mind that might illustrate why, as a project manager, I tend to focus more on project progress than labor utilization rates. It was the mid-1990s, then I lead a project to help reinvent the way Showboat did direct marketing. The goal was to develop a direct marketing patron repository that could be used to create targeted campaigns that would have predictable response rates well above industry averages, and drive revenues to new levels while reducing direct coin offers by $5 million a year.

The project needed to be completed in about six months and was being viewed as just one more of the projects in an already overburdened project portfolio. Maybe it was instinct (or maybe experience) that told me that a project this ambitious and with so much potential payback should not be treated in a traditional manner. So I fielded a dedicated team of 12 to do the project knowing that there would be times when only six or so of the team would be fully utilized. Traditionally, down time on a project is backfilled with other assignments, but not this time, not this project.
Despite extreme criticism from management, I stuck to my guns. When people had gaps in their work schedule I gave them time off, sent them to training (or anything else that didn’t put them in the critical path of another project) or stuck them into a production support role. The project cost about $400,000 to complete with a monthly processing cost of about $26,000, as the repository was housed off-site. The average productive hours worked per day were about five. From a staff utilization point of view, that project was a failure.

However, from a return on investment point of view, the project was an overwhelming success. Had the project been resourced to take six months, the lost value would have been over $400,000 a month in wasted coin costs alone (you do the math). By focusing on project outcomes and not contracting a FTE utilization rate, about $1.2 million dollars was driven to the bottom line. (Now that was a lesson worth learning!)

Most seasoned project managers have a treasure trove of lessons they have learned over the years. Some lessons came at the cost of failure, others with success. What is important is that each of us continues to learn and improve our project management talents.