Phil Wolff: project management

The Well-Heeled Dean CIO Quiz

Mon, 16 Feb 2004 21:14:03 GMT

I've heard it said by Dave Winer and many many others: if only Dean had reinvested half the money raised into the Internet, then ...

OK, so you're the Dean Campaign Chief Information Officer in August 2003. The money starts to roll in. $20 million over six months, $2-4 million per month.

What would you spend the money on?

What does your monthly budget look like?
What is your application and infrastructure portfolio?
How much will you allocate to maintenance?
You're building from scratch, so what problems do you hope to avoid through wise architecture?
What are your big milestones?
Who are your key vendors?

How do you spend in consonance with the campaign strategy?

How will you use the Internet to bring offline voters into the campaign at the same numbers as radio or television broadcasts?
What is your online strategy for responding to attack ads and opposition pundits in radio, television and print?
Online community takes time to build and is very hard to organize geographically. What will you do to match the state-by-state primary schedule?
What can you do with online services to serve the campaign in caucus states?
You are preparing for Bush to launch in Spring 2004. What are your countermeasures to reach out to moderate Republicans online while the GOP uses its advanced voter email systems to barrage 200 million validated email addresses?
How will you lower the cost-per-vote vs. the GOP?

Hospital intranet blogging.

Mon, 05 Jan 2004 22:13:18 GMT

Working notes from D. Keith Robinson's project of moving most of the hospital's intranet into Moveable Type. Useful observations on deployment, template design, new uses (project coordination). "Don’t let anyone tell you that you need to spend thousands of dollars to do distributed authorship or content management the right way. It’s simply not true." (Staff time excluded, of course.)

Director Ron Howard shares project management insights

Thu, 27 Nov 2003 23:23:45 GMT

Director Ron Howard spoke about project management with Charlie Rose this week.

On executive sponsorship of projects...

If they're going to make a movie, it's a big deal. Every movie is an investment, a commitment. You want a studio that believes.

Finding a project's spirit. Project scope as narrative...

It's my hook on the movie. It's making some sort of connection or defining a thematic value that I think I understand and that I think I can express to an audience. Then I have something to bring it. Otherwise I'm a technician setting up camera angles. I can do that, but I'm not really offering anybody much. But if I can come to understand the story, then I have conversations with the actors that can add up to something that can be meaningful. And I have a way of evaluating each and every moment. Because at the end of the day it's not so much about setting up camera angles, it's really about making a thousand little choices during the course of any one day.

The payback from effective communication of your vision...

Once you discover what the film can be, you can then begin to sort of rally everyone. And it becomes a kind of an organism. And it's moving together. And it's exciting to be at the center of that. Because this consciousness is now making a lot of creative decisions and suddenly it's very exciting because everyone's ideas are working in concert in synch. As a director you wind up saying 'yes' a lot more than you say 'no' because you've been able to create a sort of a sensibility, you know how to fulfill it and everyone starts seeing roughly the same movie. That's what I love, that's what excites me.

Can you say emergent project management? "akasig"

Mower musings: 5 blognet justifications.

Mon, 22 Sep 2003 19:47:00 GMT

Matt Mower skyped me in my early morning hours. Blame errors or recollection on being awake all night.

Speaking from theory, what might be some core business cases for intranet blognets?

Project communication.

Team blogs. Project aggregators and RSS feeds. Individual blogs. Blog your thinking as you scope the project. Blog flash reports. Meeting minutes. Task notes. Use a blog-to-email gateway for stakeholder communications. Socialize new project members faster and more completely. Create better after action reports.

Projects often fail due to poor communication. Blogs aren't a magic pill, but they are a fast and cheap way to produce more and better communication. More, because blogs lower some of the barriers to communication and create personal and peer reinforcement for sharing. Better, because blognets' social nature also improves the quality and context of those communications. The PMBOK describes a basic project communication; you can live it with blognets.

Scale social network from small to medium, medium to large

When your workforce can fit in your neighborhood Starbucks, everyone knows each other. Blognets help you scale that experience. Do you plan for growth? Foster blognets to smooth the way, to preserve values and culture, to reinforce the informal organization that gets things done.

Cross stovepipes

Marketing doesn't talk to engineering? Raise two blognets. Expose them to each other with discovery tools. Not only are you getting blogging's baseline benefits, hidden processes and thinking see daylight, and you can improve the quality of dialog.

Due diligence

Merging with another department or company? Buying one in the next few years? Selling your company? Start your blognets now. Help appraisers value your org's social capital. Reveal the power of your informal networks, your workforce's individual and collective knowledge and capacity.

You're buying one of two apparently identical firms, but one has a healthy blognet. Which has lower risk? Which gives you an added factor to consider, reinforcing management's claims?

Transition and Continuity Management

Your chiefs adopt a new strategy. The new direction calls for changing the workforce over 2-3 years. Layoffs. Mergers. Retraining. Recruiting. Retirement. For the chiefs, blognets shorten new hire learning curves. Help two organizations merge their informal social networks faster and with less struggle. For individuals, blognets strengthen your personal brand (good or bad, but stronger) and improve your marketability within the enterprise.

And I haven't even evoked tying blogs to your enterprise systems and processes. "akasig"

Klogging case study: Blogging in Corporate America.

Sun, 21 Sep 2003 21:40:19 GMT

via Roland Tanglao: Michael Angeles presentation on Lucent Technologies' intranet blogging at a Usability Professionals Association meeting. Download presentation slides with notes, PDF. (5 MB) While he doesn't reveal number of intranet bloggers (my obsession) he describes the range of tools, categories of users, and the nature of blogging.

Michael, an experienced blogger in his own right (see IAslash, urlgreyhot) also shows deep understanding of how blogs fit into his enterprise's IT architecture. Creating blogfodder via RSS from corporate databases. Providing tools for search and discovery. Supporting knowledge workers and communities of practice.

If you're coming to my BloggerCon Sunday session on workplace blogging, this should be on your reading list.

PowerPoint isn't evil. People who misuse PowerPoint are evil.

Sat, 23 Aug 2003 23:35:24 GMT

Michael Gartenberg and Chris Sells blame the user, not the tool. Room enough for both, I think. There is always the question of doing the wrong thing more efficiently. Or using a tool as a crutch or substitute for presentation prep and delivery skills.

I'm quite fond of some common tips:

One idea per slide
Replace words with pictures
Fewer words are better. One word or phrase is best.
Talk over slide transitions

That said, nothing replaces rehearsal to perfection, clear organization, ruthless editing, and people skills.

Machine Blogging: Microsoft SharePoint to intranet RSS.

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 06:57:12 GMT

"ManMachineLogo"The folks at NewsGator share a case study.

Triple Point Technology has transformed the way they share information within the enterprise. From critical build and release notifications, to internal publishing and collaboration, publishing via RSS has dramatically changed their information landscape.

Michael Sippey summarizes:

It's not really about weblogs at all, rather it's about how RSS (or whatever you want to call it) can be used to augment typical email- and web-based collaboration systems. Key points:

Feeds are generated not only by individuals, but also by teams, and by software. They publish the output of their release management system in RSS. They've retrofitted Sharepoint to output RSS streams for watched folders.
They're driving the posts right into their mail client (Outlook), which is where info workers seem to spend an inordinate amount of time. No need for training on a new piece of software, and power users can customize views to their heart's content.
The subscription model is much more efficient and user-driven than internal mail archives. A couple of years ago I wrote a piece for theobvious on how I wanted Yahoo Groups for my intranet. The key thing there was (a) discovery and (b) user control over subscription. An "OPML" directory and user-controlled aggregator solves that problem. No more sysadmin time dealing with "hey, can you put me on this list for the next few weeks while I monitor what's going on with this project?"

If the blog/feed/echo/rss whatever thing takes off inside large organizations, and thousands of people, teams and systems inside companies like IBM or HP or Sun start blogging, there's gotta be a market for the intranet equivalent of blo.gs where users could learn of recently updated feeds they don't subscribe to, find new ones based on existing subscription lists, etc. (Question: is anyone selling software like this today? To slurp up user's OPML files and discover relationships and create an interlinked directory?)

Sippey gets it. So does Triple Point.

Klognets give faster payback than tradtional Intranet portals

Wed, 30 Jul 2003 00:55:06 GMT

John Robb asks:

Can blogs can replace portals?
If so, what are the relative costs, benefits, ROI?

His answers (and I concur):

Yes for everything except "adding a web front end to business apps"
Blogs look better:

Costs: $142 vs. $807 per desktop (Costs 82% less)
Benefits: $1,658 vs. $1,886 per desktop (Delivers 88% of the value)
ROI: 1,170% vs. 240% (or 4.9 times the ROI)

Considering that so many projects:

Aren't funded at all in this economy
Fail completely (around 25% are cancelled or aborted)
Fail partially (blowing scope, schedule, or budget)

Setting up a klognet seems like a low risk, high payoff proposition.

Quovix is hiring a project manager.

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 12:27:13 GMT

President Marty Morrow posted this project manager gig to his blog a few weeks' ago. As outsourcing and offshoring grow, so will Quovix, a project/product management collaborative software company.

Machine Blogging: Programmers sought for project: CVS to weblog/RSS, and back.

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 07:02:33 GMT

CVS as Blogger. Bill Lazar seeks programmers interested in bootstrapping a new system. Improve project communication by having your codebase blog.

Yes, blog.

You're all busy doing your own thing, coding here, checking stuff in there, testing this, trying that. Common point of reality? The code. Keeper of the reality? Your configuration management system.

Bill's solution: Wrap common events in plain english and post them to a weblog. Syndicate the results if you like. Add your project CVS to your blogroll. Comment on your CVS's posts in your own blog.

Wanted: Programmers and QA folks interested in making a tool that will extend the five most popular code management systems with a blogging interface. Contact Product Manager Bill. Bill is an alum of both Sun and Pyra, has a Rutgers MBA, and is polishing his C# in his spare time.

p.s. Bill pays attention to movies in the works. Very cool. He's interested in syndicating this content while preserving its structure. Any suggestions?

Is your email program the ultimate microcontent manager?

Mon, 07 Jul 2003 11:51:24 GMT

Lilia wrote:

One of the questions from the audience was about number of technologies that one can cope. I share this concern given the number of communication/discussion tools I use.

Everything becomes email, according to some theories. Usenet, for example, was blended into mail clients, treating the usenet post like an email message. Completely hiding the plumbing from users, the differences ceased to matter. The usenet post became just another email message.

Perhaps blogging tools will also blend into mail clients.

Posting from your mail client (your blogs are just special email addresses) and IM/irc/SMS.
Read your RSS feeds with Outlook or Eudora or whatever Macheads use these days.
Configure your weblog with a properties dialog your mail client.

If so, there are some bonuses.

Safety and Comfort

Exploit mail's ability to block spam and advertising (you're expecting RSS advertising in your feeds, aren't you?)
Scan RSS posts for active or hostile organisms (viruses, worms, etc.)

Filtering, Search and Notification

Organize incoming posts by content (not just point of origin or date) into folders.
Search your archive across email and RSS archives, one big database.
Alert the user to very interesting posts, using filters.
Apply family filters.

Workflow and Collaboration.

Perhaps everything on a project gets cc'd to a project weblog
Trigger user action from enterprise systems

you have an invoice to approve
you have a meeting to summarize

RSS as transport for distributed calendaring and scheduling.

Subscribe to my public calendar via RSS.
Request meetings via email.

Manage my groups of people. One tool (my Address Book) to manage:

blogrolls
friend of a friend
LDAP directories
personal distribution lists lists
blogosphere neighborhoods, and
externally managed memberships (egroups, social networks).

Servers conflate also:

Mail servers cache and aggregate RSS feeds, just like usenet.
Servers following the IMAP model can hold backups of your email/blogging databases and address books.
Server managed access control to private feeds.

Microsoft, for one, believes users want all variations in microcontent to be manageable from one place, with one interface. Their standalone task-reporting tools for project members went nowhere until they blended them into the email clients. Now your Things To Do Lists work with the MS Project servers, communicating by specially formatted emails.

The upside?

Blogging as we know it becomes a feature. And everyone has it.
One user experience means lower learning curve.
As email clients become smarter, blogging benefits too.

The downside?

Blogging becomes boring, routine, work-like.
The browser interface becomes less important.
Newsreading must compete for time with your inbox.
It starts to feel employer-managed vs. personally controlled, just like your at work email.

A prediction:

The vendors who dominate messaging will shape blogging. AOL and Microsoft have fat clients, web clients, and chat clients. Watch them:

Bring blogging into their messaging family.

Absorb blogging user and group digital IDs into their identity mechanisms.

Offer faceted blogs (everyone sees just what they're intended to see and not what they don't want to see) using digital ID. You're not part of their ID world? No facets.

Push blogging into all their customer touch points (voice, SMS/iMode, handhelds, desktop software, etc.)

Fold blogging community servers (the Technoratis and Popdexes) into email and search servers.

Offer tools for good citizenship (i.e. censorship, filtering) via community servers.

I'm not recommending this, mind you. I just have a hard time imagining a sustainable alternative scenario.

[a klog apart klogs]

AO: software development goes abroad for good.

Fri, 20 Jun 2003 07:52:14 GMT

An Always On discussion thread. Hold on to your IDEs, American programers: the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming. And the Chinese. And the Indians. And the Irish. I wrote:

If you can move work to the next building because of IM, email, file sharing, SCM, etc., you can move it a thousand miles.

The questions should be:

What work is very hard to move?
What advantages can we create that will be hard to follow?
What limitations of remote work can we exploit?

My gut reaction is to force jobs to stay here. My head knows that doesn't work well. So the challenge is how to move up, do better, and justify a ten-fold premium over market rates.

You don't export the requirements process, the warmth of high touch service, the intimate understanding of local and industry culture and behavior. That work remains bound to the constantly evolving local domain.

But instead of the handoff going to construction engineers across the room, the customer-aligned tasks go to Irkutsk or wherever the market dictates.

This means, of course, that those who collect requirements must do a much better job, produce clearer and more specific functional specs, test requirements documents for usability and the prevailing criteria for quality, manage shorter iterations, and conduct more rigorous acceptance testing.

The new integration costs and risks are real and substantial, especially across language, culture, legal, financial and political boundaries. If two Houstonians can make communication mistakes, you know it is more difficult when working through translators (surprise surprise but most people don't speak, read, or write English at all, let alone fluently). And culture-centric ideas like courtesy and privacy vary across industries and generations, let alone regions. All parties have currency risk and in some places material poltical and safety risks (work interruptions or delays because of violence, war, government corruption, or other things that happen in the U.S.).

But the separation of user/customer relationship from engineering/construction creates value. It gives freedom to shop for the best partners you can trust. To bid for world class performers in niche specialties for the strategic parts of your project. To make your customers' biases and assumptions explicit, perhaps for the first time. To get more satisfying tradeoffs between scope, schedule, budget, quality and risk.

This looks good for those who buy software development services. Prices "rationalized", quality varied but improving with experience.

How will this affect those who market packaged software to consumers? To businesses?

What career advice would you give a US programmer with ten years' experience? A compsci student in Mexico City?

What knowledge, skills, and abilities will the new offshore software brokers need?

What would an insurer want to know before selling you a completion bond for offshore work?

What process might buy you a sustained competitive advantage as a London game development firm?

p.s. The author of the initial post has financial ties with the AO operators. This isn't disclosed in the post. Be up front, please.

p.p.s. More gripes about AO's design (courtesy of prock+jaffe creative):

Comments don't have permalinks.Add permalinks, dudes!
Comments aren't listed in chronological order. Topics in reverse chron, Comments in chron order. Have you ever tried to follow a thread from the wrong direction? Argh!
No RSS feed for comment threads. Feed me!
Site not accessible to the visually impaired. Pass the Bobby test!
Rewrites html, destroying lists, html entities, and link attributes. Let me express myself!
Member profile pages don't show all of a person's posts and comments. They should.
Don't call posts "blogs" when they are posts.
Enable trackback.
Human readable urls, please.

p.p.p.s. What roles should blogs and wikis play in coordinating work across national boundaries?

Can you apply Theory Of Constraints to Human Capital?

Tue, 17 Jun 2003 07:08:33 GMT

Frank Patrick (one of the deepest thinkers on project management in our time) catches the new chapter on Critical Chain Scheduling in Ed Yourdan's new second edition of Death March. The book is mandatory reading for every project worker.

I like one of Yourdan's anecdotes:

My colleague Tom DeMarco likes to tell the story of consulting clients he visits, who ask him, "If we could do just one thing to improve our project-management situation, what would it be?" Tom's answer is often simple: "Stop assigning people to work on five or six unrelated projects simultaneously; give everyone one project to work on, and leave them alone until they finish that one project." Invariably, says Tom, the response is, "Well, yeah, that sounds very rational. But you don't understand, that just wouldn't work in our organization -- because in our organization we have constraints A, B, and C, and we have to deal with political problems X, Y, and Z, so give us another one thing that could make all of our project management problems go away." Any suggestion that attacks the dysfunctional behaviors in the organization is almost certain to be rejected with the phrase, "Well, maybe that would work in a perfect world -- but in the 'real world' where we operate, it could never happen because of X, Y, and Z" And the organization eventually finds a "pill" -- a new development tool, a new systems analysis methodology, a new buzzword -- that may bring short-term relief, but rarely attacks the underlying problems.

Changes, deep ones, important and worthwhile, shake us.

The chapter is about more than change. It is about applying Goldratt's Theory Of Constraints (TOC) to project scheduling. It requires a different set of values, behaviors, incentives, measures, and project controls. So this calls for extensive change.

Human Capital Constraints

How can we apply the Theory Of Constraints to workforce planning and recruiting?

Where are the bottlenecks to be overcome?

Can the system design be reconsidered in light of the TOC?

What assumptions and dogma are worth challenging?

What new values, behaviors, incentives, measures, and controls will lead to more of what we want?

How can we get more of the right people on our radar? Spend more time spent in meaningful conversation and less on paperwork? Shorten our cycle times while increasing our quality?

Along the way, can we take some of the strain out of the process?

Now on my reading list:

P.S. When I was a kid I wanted to grow up to be a systems engineer. In high school I wanted to be an operations research analyst, reading Naval Operations Analysis. By nineteen I was working for the Naval Supply Systems Command as a civilian operations research analyst. My favorite book in the whole world was Quick and Dirty OR. Just to explain the utter and complete geekiness of this post.

Exporting software development is good for American software engineers.

Thu, 12 Jun 2003 17:25:56 GMT

Roland Tanglao takes exception to an AO post. The post...

How efficient is it to pay a software engineer in the Valley a loaded salary of $170,000, the average salary reported in the fourth quarter of 2001, when Asian engineers provide a much better value? We've all read the cost differentials between US and Indian, Vietnamese and Chinese workers. And one of the main reasons this work went overseas is because clients knew they were being gouged by US engineers and consultants. After all, programming is, essentially, production work. And is labor not the most expensive variable component of a software product?

Roland...

Good software is not production work. If this guy had ever actually developed good software, he'd know.

There's a huge fork in software development. If you can define scope clearly and it seems like a straightforward thing to build, then you shop it to a code farm.

On the other hand, if the scope is fuzzy, elastic and frequently changing, and there are elements of novelty (never done that before), sub-cultural awareness (how do our surgical nurses model their work process), you may need local auteurs.

When the business schools started to teach MIS 30 years' ago, you could tell that whole categories of software work would become routine. Both the problem set and the tool set had no barriers to entry. We have a million programmers in North America because of lighter weight problems and easier to use tools. That same lack of barriers makes it easy for India, China, and the rest of the world to enter our labor market.

The things that don't fit?

Thorny problems. Intractable ones that take deep scientific education and grad school maths. Edison problems that require years of tinkering to get the chemistry just right. Collaborative ones that involve close knit teams of world class experts.

Proximity. Where the development team must work intimately with the customer, eating and breathing with them.

And those barriers won't last. When you throw mass quantities of smart people at an education system, like they are doing in India and China, the bell curve says some will become world class computer scientists. People who invent things, who break through conventional thinking, who upset the apple cart. And they will compete with the industrial world's best and brightest.

So you have a few choices.

Get your PhD in computer science.
Become a product manager or product requirements manager, because outsourcing demands coordination.
Become a world class specialist in a technology or an application, one of the top 5 in a very narrow field.
Or get out.

WBS: Jupiter By Wire

Mon, 09 Jun 2003 15:41:18 GMT

There's a channel of pushed posts from the Jupiter Weblog Business Strategies conference. Just hit refresh.

The schedule...

Thu, 05 Jun 2003 06:10:21 GMT

... is not the project.

From Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Business Blog.

Local talent, sourcing help Matsushita Electric survive in China

Wed, 12 Mar 2003 04:50:50 GMT

Asahi Shimbun reports Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., after 15 years in China, stopped importing parts from Japan in favor of making parts with local, cheaper labor. Keeping up with the competition, especially when labor is a key factor of production costs.

Not too novel.

Now they're moving R&D to China.

Matsushita stopped making microwaves in Kentucky in November 2000, and shifted production to Shanghai.

Matsushita is shifting not only production but also research and development to China. It established two R&D centers-one in Beijing in January 2001 and the other in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, in April 2002.

At the Suzhou center, about 40 Chinese engineers are set to start developing air conditioners, which will be produced at a plant in Guangzhou. The company is also considering developing Internet-connected household appliances in Suzhou.

If Matsushita is to successfully shift its R&D to China, a crucial factor will be finding local talent willing to work for the firm.

At its Beijing center, Matsushita has about 100 engineers working on mobile phones and digital television. The company has tied up with Tsinghua University and other local schools, and has started developing third-generation mobile phones.

"The key is how much excellent Chinese talent we can recruit and how long we can keep those people with us," Ozawa said.

You're not safe just because you're smart, educated, and wear a pocket protector. White collar work is nearly as mobile as factory work. So contemplate your future.

4.9 - South Of Fiji Islands

Mon, 10 Mar 2003 08:36:14 GMT

Get U.S.G.S. earthquake alerts piped to your desktop from around the world via "RSS".

4.9 - South Of Fiji Islands TIMESTAMP (UTC) LAT LONG DEPTH MAG COMMENT 2003-03-06 18:47:03 -24.72 179.8 500.4 4.9 SOUTH OF FIJI ISLANDS

Good use of technology.

Next steps...

News readers to filter incoming items. While you could do full text, like most email clients, it's more useful to compare against structured data. This assumes the RSS feed is an envelope for a more structured description. In this case, an earthquake with lattitude and longitude marked up.

Selectively alert me. For example, earthquakes near a city or state where my family lives. And if you can do it for quakes, why not for your supply chain? You daily calendar? For whatever?

Tue, 18 Feb 2003 06:51:35 GMT

Google Pyramaniacs Pry Open Enterprise Sales.

Sun, 16 Feb 2003 23:21:30 GMT

Why did Google buy Pyra Labs?

"Klogging". Watch for their Google Search Appliance to come bundled with a version of the Blogger Pro server.

Search, or the lack of it, holds back intranet blogging. When everyone uses Google to search the universe, you expect blogs inside the firewall to show up too. But they don't.

Unless your Google Appliance crawls them.

This is the Lotus Notes killer. A harsh stab at the next Microsoft Office's collaboration tools. When everyone is writing in to their blog, and content is immediately available, why do you need this other stuff?

What's left to complete the picture? Two things:

RSS push to the Google search crawler.
A converged microcontent client.

Who's going to buy?

The military and security complexes.
Big business, especially those who with a human capital self image.
Civil government: cities, states, public service agencies, larger not-for-profits.

Why buy Pyra? Klogging creates searchable, linked content, and that sells appliances.

Mind-mapping for projects and Wikis.

Thu, 13 Feb 2003 02:45:47 GMT

Is your project plan suffering from outline-centric thinking? Break out of the box with Julian. Julian is using a mind-mapping tool for project start-up. If you're into project visualization, read Synesthesia about mind-mapping integration with MS Project, MS PowerPoint, and wikis. Julian is on to something.

Reign the Conqueror gives Alexander the Great an Aeon Flux.

Wed, 12 Feb 2003 10:34:15 GMT

Miniseries craft. I'm fascinated by very long form storytelling. Not the infinite loop of soap opera and telenovas. But the telling of stories that take 10 to 25 hours. How do you deliver catharsis along the way? How do you sustain forward movement in character and plot? How do you avoid repetition? How do you balance small focus with large scope? How much cinematic variety will viewers tollerate?

Some examples I've seen at least once.

Alex Haley's Roots and sequels were 28 hours.
Steven Spielberg executive produced Taken (imdb) in ten two-hour episodes, arranging them to be shown on consecutive weeknights. The story runs for three generations.
Frank Herbert's Dune and Frank Herbert's Children of Dune come to 12 hours.
24 and 24: Day 2 are 24 hours each.
Hitler - ein Film aus Deutschland (1977) is eight hours of surrealism.
Homer's Illiad and Odyssey were meant to be told, not read.

Reign: The Conqueror, in 13 half-hour episodes, is long for anime. Running on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim of late night fare.

In the ancient world of Macedonia, science and magic are one. One man controls them both ...

Reign, a 21st century sci-fi spin on the epic exploits of Alexander the Great, is a visual feast of cutting edge animation, with engaging characters, an intricate plotline and majestic battle sequences.

From the minds of Peter Chung (Aeon Flux), Rintaro (Astro Boy, Metropolis), and Masao Murayama (Trigun, Cardcaptor Sakura). Animation by Madhouse (Trigun, Vampire Hunter D).

What an amazing team! Rintaro's cinematic remake of Metropolis made a fan of me. Chung's Aeon Flux blended action, philosophy, stylized drawing, and story lines that took the whole series to complete.

And what a challenging subject. Alexander's accomplishments inspired the ambitions of every world-beating general for the last 1600 years. And they're going to tell it in five and a half hours. I'm just starting to watch. I'll let you know if I agree with Charles Solomon's review.

So what does this have to do with project management?

Your job.

Create project focus, vision, interest, and enthusiasm.

Then keep it going every day for months or years.

Dramatic and comedic structures underly our ability to do this. So storytelling should be part of a PM's people skills. Finding the interesting story lines, the plot complications, the moments that define the character of your team. And how you tell that story, in ways that engage, keep attention, suggest meaning, propel forward momentum, and leave memes that linger usefully.

It's a lifetime skill. Soft stuff. But worthy of study and practice.

Localization Project Management.

Sun, 09 Feb 2003 01:13:08 GMT

I've been reading Multilingual Computing & Technology for a very long time. Good article in their recent issue, Challenges of Localization Project Management: Educators interview language industry professionals about technical, logistical and business issues. I love practical field interviews.

Some of the bullet points:

Technical Challenges

Large-scale CM and translation tools
Compatibility among CM systems, databases and localization tools
Developing systems/tools that let vendors work better, faster and cheaper
Tools that can handle XML, scripting and bidirectional languages
File transfer automation
Bug tracking in multiple languages
Need more localization professionals with technical expertise

Logistical Challenges

Not enough headcount at clients or vendors
Missing or incomplete localization kits
Vendors have responsibility but not authority
Educating clients about localization process
Late scheduling and/or lack of planning
Network connections and time differences
Efficiently managing increasingly larger translation projects

Business Challenges

Competing in the current economy
Marketing localization services to new clients
Doing more with less
Marketing-driven localization schedule
Having clients involve vendors in core product development
Ensuring payment for completed projects
Finding localization professionals with high technical, language and project management skills
Moving localization into the mainstream

more...

How many software engineering projects go global at some point? Lots.

Project Management as Journalism.

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 05:45:57 GMT

You heard of storytelling in project management.

Let's refine the idea.

PM as journalism.

Rebecca Blood:

A reporter tries, to the best of their ability, to construct the whole story by seeking out a variety of witnesses and experts, and to convey that story as accurately as possible, for a general audience.

Project journalism.

PMs cover a beat.

As journalists, PMs interview and research. Their sources are project members and external resources and stakeholders.

PMs verify information, find trends and patterns, dig up urgent and important news.

Reporters use notebooks and tape recorders. Use blogs to organize your notes and sources.

You write status reports, exception reports, issue reports.

You get to the heart of the story, wading through mundane, picking through the information overload.

You communicate clearly. Terse, unbiased, using your voice.

You tailor and route messages to each audience, frugal with their time.

You write headlines with impact, that drive decisions.

You tell stories that create project cohesion, that explain the visions, the plot twists. The truth.

If that's not journalism...

Where klogging meets moblogging.

Fri, 24 Jan 2003 09:24:09 GMT

How can I apply the work context to moblogging? I'm using the term as taking pictures using your mobile phone or mobile camera and posting them to a weblog with a time/date/location/permalink stamp. I guess I'm also making the 3-year leap of assuming video capture where we get snapshots today. Marc Canter comments on responding to Russell's thoughts on moblogging. I agree with everything said so far.

What makes moblogging novel?

More opportunistic. Like your mobile phone, you'll have image capture with you 24/7. Snap as opportunity strikes.
More ubiquitous. Low cost means everyone will have moblogging devices. Your workforce. Your customers. Your consultants and advisors. Your investors.
More real-time. Digital flow-through means that events are captured and published in near-realtime.
More collaborative. The ability to swarm on an important or interesting event lets you form a rashomon and blind men with elephant composite view.
More organized. The 2004 generation of moblogging gadgets will have the royal trio of ID, date/time, and location. Thumbing a few keywords for topical context feeds search engines.

Enjoy a psychotic split with me. Imagine that you work in ...

MarCom.

With mobile cams and vids you can roll your own ethnographic studies. Watch buyer behavior in real time. Correllate with sales statistics by location.

Help sales teams. Enhance your CRM profiles with photos of major account contacts, meetings, facilities.

Moblog sales and promotional events. Create immediacy, share results, and broaden event reach.

Accounting and Logistics.

Nothing compares to eyeballing where the rubber meets the road. Moblog inventory. Moblog your customer, supplier, and partner operations. When combined with RFID tags, this may be the first time you visualize your supply chain.

Due dilligence? Get more done, faster, when you assess personnel, plant, products, and other assets.

Operations Analysis and Industrial Engineering.

Document processes, the better to understand them. Photograph bottlenecks and other contraints, the better to fix them.

Record how people really work, the better to help them understand their own processes.

Competitive Analysis.

Shop the competition and share the results before you get back to the office.

You're WalMart investor relations: marshall 10,000 small investors to show the competition all across the country.

Field Operations.

A field view. Add moblogging to everyone who drives a company van to install, measure, or repair things. Let them document their routes, their visits, the problems they encounter. Makes for better watercooler conversation. Helps the next gal to visit that customer.

Education and Knowledge Sharing.

Informal moblogging can ease personnel transitions. With experience, they can enhance the role of blogs as knowledge repositories.

Project Management.

A picture is worth a thousand GANTT charts. When your projects aren't virtual, moblog your status reports.

Real world experimentation will prove or disprove these applications. I can't wait to start.

[a klog apart community]