I know it's lean times in IT, and product / services vendors are all beating the bushes. Some interesting patterns have emerged over the last few months ... My Boss Is In Town: This is far and away the #1 meme / structure of incoming cold calls; I get a (very) brief synopsis of services/value add, the caller and pushes for some face time with "their manager". Did some newsletter or web site suggest this novel approach last summer? I…
I noticed an interesting phenomenon this afternoon; we are experimenting with SharePoint as our internal project management / collaboration portal. A nice platform to choose, because it's popularity is growing, and there are a wide selection of add-on products and development partners ready, willing, and able to help us spend our money to make it even better. The interesting part is that we are running into other companies who are also working with SharePoint. Specifically, third-party consulting firms that want…
Spent time at an industry conference last week (ain't Boston great!), and heard the term SAPanese - that special language SAP users learn when immersed in worlds of Walldorf and their ubiquitous software. It's not unique to SAP - lots of software companies develop their own vocabulary. Heck, IT "geeks" are famous for it - even the various functional units within the business develop their own shorthand, terms to help speed communication with "those in the know". Here are some…
It's impossible to over-communicate Sounds a bit strong, but if you think through your real-world experiences, this shouldn't surprise anyone. No matter how hard you try, your message will be missed by someone ... Problem: It's all their fault! Rely on Web 2.0, and ... ... they won't subscribe to the RSS feed; they don't understand the concept, and have no other information sources that supply feeds ... they won't sign up for the email notifications; that feature is hidden,…
99.9% of the project managers I know have at least heard of Microsoft Project (MSP), and all understand it to be a very capable, yet very complex environment for estimating and managing projects. But it's Saturday evening and I'm a bit cynical tonight, so I'll say that 50% of those people don't really understand how it works - and have many reasons why they should not use MSP for this project or that ... ... this is an iterative development…
Confucius was wrong - it is good to live in interesting times ... I'm deep-diving into a number of projects at work, while juggling a sudden surge in business travel (the majority of my tweets of late). All of the work involves significant change - different tools & process, or reworking process "traditions" that have ossified over multiple years and a succession of owners. I have developed a stack of notes on a range of topics - excellent blog fodder…
I don't travel a significant amount in my current position, but when I do, it seems to come in chunks. I'm about half way through a round of travel this fall - mostly business, but with some personal travel mixed in. Six cities, three countries in less than four months. Some observations at the halfway point ... @ the Data Center: The Surreal Life I'm finishing this entry around 4am - just off my second night in a row on…
I am getting seriously aggravated with the flighty behavior of Excel 2007. Yes, I acknowledge that the spreadsheets in question is quite complicated ... shared VBA modules in an XLA file database read/write using ADO array-manipulation for ranges of cells (see this post) lots of macro (VBA) logic to control look/feel of the tabs code to automatically insert formulae into cells ... and so on. However, some of the observed flightiness is specific to the UberSheet, while other weirdness happens…
Starting up a new project, and I'm definitely having fun with it. At first glance, it looks like a fairly small, departmental application, but it is actually part of a web of disconnected processes and local databases (ie. "a mess") that support some fairly important master data. Also, the folks I'm working with are much more comfortable in a "waterfall world", with formal requirements followed by code, test, and deploy. Lots of opportunity for process coaching and new methods -…
I've been writing about iterative documentation and checklists, and it's easy to see how these are applicable to a number of common IT processes ... Build a server Apply OS patches Move new code into production Initiate a project / programming request Unfortunately, there are plenty of other areas in IT that you think should / could have a definable process ... yet there is always some magic to them, a variable recipe that's difficult to capture in a cookbook…