Saw this great post from Hyatt (referred from this blog, definitely worth syndicating) re: how to get decisions / results out of your manager / boss. Great stuff, pay attention to the details here, all of it is right on. A few additions I'd make to the list ... Keep it short - just like you, your boss is juggling multiple priorities, especially when you're reporting to a C-level person. If you can't develop and present an elevator pitch version…
Interesting project that I have to take a deep-dive on this week - has to do with automating a piece of barcode printing software, and integrating it with a newly developed labeling process out in the shop. Project was hitting some significant snags, and I was asked to step in. Here's where hands-on software development skills are a boon and a curse ... The perception is that we're trying to get the forms software to work in a certain way…
Interesting conversation today with one of my application managers. As we move into the new year, we're doing some "spring cleaning" of the older projects in our PMO. Two from last summer had languished - efforts to develop simple web front ends for order inquiry and dealer information - and I asked my lead web developer to audit them (make sure we've got source code under version control, check out the tech architecture for the supporting database, etc.) before "closing"…
Had two interesting design sessions yesterday, both of which got me thinking / observing ... Push to Prod A team of techs, working in a Unix / Progress environment (QAD MFG/PRO eB2), reviewing our plans for improving our Dev/Test/Prod cycle for controlling / auditing the movement of source between environments. A little history - we didn't get off to a good start because of two key mistakes: Mistake #1: We started with the concept(s) of Development, Test, and Production environments,…
This week the marketing group is getting a bit frustrated, because we're having a difference of opinion about service levels, resource availability, access to databases and servers - all exacerbated by the new owners handing down edicts for reporting requirements that are absolutely taking priority over all other work, no matter what expectations may have been set in the past. Observation #1: Is the term "Customer Service" applicable to IT? Some of the pushback I get comes in the form…
Well, Raymond Chen has blown me away with his detail, but I have another take on the whole History of Spam thing - the impact of spammers changing message formats to get past the spam filters. My curious habit is to count my email into two categories; read vs. unread. This was originally meant to be a measure of the pointless cc: / newsletter / internal announcement stuff I receive everyday; I have Outlook set to mark an eMail as…
The outgoing intranet was nice, in that it gave content owners the ability to control what was visible / available. Unfortunately, we've come to discover that a number of corporate services areas (Safety, HR, Transportation, etc.) in our organization used the intranet but never took part of the content management (CM) - it all came "from above". Basically, these folks are about to get a "crash course" in CM and Knowledge Management (KM), albeit in small bites. When you read…
This week, we're kicking off a new project, implementing an intranet / portal for our newly independent company. I'm fascinated at how the "state of the art " has moved forward so much since the "old days" of the 90's. This is actually my third or fourth cut at an application like this (depending on how you define "portal"), and I'm sure it's going a bit faster simply because we're skipping over some portal design and admin process "dead ends"…
On this site, I've implemented multiple blogs (thoughts, essays, updates) - and it's not because I see many nails for my shiny new hammer. I'm trying out blogging for a couple of different applications / uses ... for example, I'm playing with the updates blog as a test for project status blogging at work. It's a fairly common request - "please keep us up to date with changes, additions, etc." - but that can be labor intensive, and I'm looking…
I'm Jim MacLennan, and I'm glad you had the chance to visit the site.
I'm working on a lot of interesting projects for Maker Turtle,
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