Thoughts on Why Tech Folks Need to Sweat the Administrivia Details

As I've noted in the past, it really helps to understand the techies' way of thinking, especially when trying to get work done on tasks that are decidedly non-technical. Here's two more recent stories from work, both hinging on the common desire to just "git'er done". Why do we waste time removing obsolete code? Just hide the menu option ... A few months ago, we had a task to decommission a chunk of code that was calculating some elapsed time information…

Five Key Skills for Successful Project Managers

Just a quick post this evening, capturing some thoughts that have been forming over the past week or so. When evaluating people for a role as project lead or project manager (PM), what exactly does one look for? I suppose many will point to PMI certifications, adherence to principles in the PMBOK, "excellent communication skills", and multiple, complex, high-profile, high-quality projects under their belt. But what about the intangibles - the stuff you can't really learn from a book? I…

Marketing a Startup Business (2 of 3)

author's note: 2nd of 3 parts of an essay first published in 2000. Check out part 1 here ... jpm Starting in the Middle To get moving on step 1 – capturing the “vision” – we’ll start in the middle with the executive summary. This presentation will help gather the relevant “what”, “why”, and “how”, without going into too much detail or oversimplifying. A little structure now will allow you to quickly summarize the salient points into your elevator speech…

Marketing a Startup Business (1 of 3)

author's note: I was recently asked about this essay, first published in 2000, so I thought I'd trot it back out as a series of posts. Written near the end of the dot-com boom, it still has some resonance, even with internal IT projects ... jpm Congratulations! Getting that terrific startup idea that has real business potential can be the easiest and the hardest part of going entrepreneurial. It’s fun to bat about ideas, look into new and exciting technologies,…

Hidden Gold in Automating Recurring Processes

Here's a typical IT scenario: each quarter, you need to check audit user access to a critical application. Your internal security standards require that you revoke access for those who haven't been on the system for over 90 days. I've seen this before, and the process (at the time) had many challenges: It's manual; we did a quick-and-dirty set of steps years ago to cover the minimum requirements, that involves extracts from application logs, file transfers MS Access and MS…

Five Under-Emphasized PowerPoint Best Practices

Catching up on old links that I wanted to comment on - here is a selection regarding some PowerPoint best practices, including five of my personal favorites that I don't often see in those ubiquitous articles / postings detailing the Secrets of Presentation Success ... Under-Emphasized PowerPoint Best Practices Never Embed Objects: I grew to dislike embedded objects years ago, when computers could barely handle the launch of an Excel instance from within Word, or Visio from within PowerPoint. This…

Excel vs. RDBMS: Choosing the Technology, Winning the Arguments

Businesses large and small, private and public, for-profit and not, commonly control critical business processes using the EIE platform (which means Everything in Excel - always good for a laugh in your next PowerPoint - jpmacl). Folks in the business get used to the power and control they have with spreadsheets, and who can blame them? Excel is … … fast and flexible … easy to learn Everybody has a copy I don't have to go through IT Remember, most…

Continuing Education Pareto Principle (50/30/20)

14 February, 2007
Out of the Box
0 Comments

(okay, I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, just wanted to expound on the idea ...) Everyone's heard of Pareto's wonderful 80/20 rule. I've identified a variant of that rule that applies to all sorts of "continuing education" - like presentations at a trade conference, or skills training for new software packages. It really struck me when I was in grad school, slogging through Accounting and Business Law and marvelling at the range of difficulty in the two subjects…

Defining an Effective IT Metrics Framework

21 January, 2007
IT Management, Metrics
0 Comments

Had a really good conversation about metrics the other day. We've been discussing ways to express how our systems are performing, delivering value, and staying available - and I'd like to use the same general structure for all systems, regardless of function (transactions, integrations, analytics) or platform (Wintel, AS/400, Open Systems). For each type of metric, we need to understand two dimensions: Performance against some Target. This can either be a baseline (a minimum or average expected score), or a…

War Stories from the Change Management front

Stories make our ideas real and relevant, and are helpful tools when introducing change. This article has a few examples of stories - all around the topic of introducing change.