Project

To accomodate the new features in Project 2010 there have been some new fields introduced. Here they are with some idea of what they are used for:

In case you missed the live event, here is the link to the webcast I did earlier this month:

http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/epm.aspx?tab=Webcasts&seriesid=51&webcastid=12426

It covers how you can best use some of the new functionality in Project 2010 including the new interface, the team planner view, the timeline view and using active tasks to do scenario-based planning. Active tasks fill a big hole in Project and allow you to do what-if analysis in a quick and intuitive way.

Go take a look!

I'm doing a free webcast on some of the new ways to work with MS Project 2010 on Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 8:00 AM Pacific Time. You can register in advance at this link:

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032434176

I'll post the slides after the presentation.

I'm in the business of improving project management. That generally means there needs to be change in an organization. One of the most difficult things is getting people to decide to change. This book helps:

Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions – Gary Klein

This book covers the topic of what Klein calls “Naturalistic Decision Making” which is defined as making decisions in a “natural” setting – one with which departs from the ideal by being under time pressure, with high stakes, inadequate information, ill-defined goals, poorly defined procedures, context (Klein gives the example of conflicting goals and stress), dynamic conditions and team coordination. Klein uncovers what he calls sources of power – intuition, mental stimulation, metaphor and storytelling. It sounds pretty soft, but these often are the real factors behind how decisions are made. If you want to influence an organization and help them decide to change, you would do well to read this book.

On the critical side, it is attractive to think of yourself as an experienced decision maker and this book justifies the use of your “intuition”. In the hands of the anti-analytical this could be dangerous, but on the other hand, it makes them no more dangerous than they already are.

Check reviews at Amazon: Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions

One of the most tedious parts of applying for the PMP exam is filling out the application. It requests a bunch of information about each project you have worked on. The worst part is that it presents it one screen at a time, so it is difficult to figure out how many hours you have entered in what domain. On top of that, you may find yourself stuck in it trying to dig up a phone number or address for the contact person and finding your session timing out.

To help with this I've put together a spreadsheet:

It has two tabs. One for the project and contact information. Fill it out for each project to make sure you have the information at your fingertips.

The second tab is for the experience hours. It breaks them down into the same domains that the on-line form uses and contains the descriptions. You can start using this even before your exam application to see how close you are. The spreadsheet then totals the hours and offers a sanity check of hours entered against the time that you spent on the project. For example, if you worked on a project for two and a half months, the spreadsheet will calculate the number of working hours and compares that against what you have entered as individual hours.

You can download the spreadsheet here:

Download PMP Application Experience Record

I see that the Project Management 3.0 bus has already left.

• Project Shrink - "the real challenge will be a social one"
• Ed Lawler - writing about "Management" but same idea
• Shim Marom - a bit tongue in cheek...
• Craig Brown - talks briefly about leadership in a 3.0 world.

But don't worry, I'll come up with something which is mine alone! Look for it the day the sun returns to work.

Look how long this blog has been dormant! With the Winter solstice approaching I am reminded that darkness can again turn to light so I'm making an early New Year's resolution to post weekly once again. This is the first of those posts.

I've been digesting a lot of claims and ideas about the future. Things like cloud computing and Project Management 2.0 come to mind. One of those is a technology, a capability which may allow new practices. The other is a bit more foggy with a shifting definition. From Andrew Filev at Wrike software comes the Project 2.0 Definition 2.0:

Project Management 2.0 is an approach to managing projects that is brought to life by the use of Web-based, emergent, collaborative project management software and that focuses on collective intelligence, productivity and project leadership as the basic factors of project success.

Personally I think this definition misses at least one of the critical success factors that I've seen in projects. So I'm going to leap over 2.0 and start in with my derivation of Project Management 3.0. .

If you are familiar with my blog, you know I that I use it to help solidify my thoughts. So don't expect a manifesto at first, just some apparently random thoughts. The first is to reveal that the one basic factor of project success which went unsaid in the 2.0 definition is Trust.

Well, the sun must be out, because my cloud computing has gone away. I tried to upload a photo to illustrate my previous post at my usual photo-hosting site today, but it appears to have flickered out of existence for a while.

Here I get to rant about two things. First, what is it with the whole name of cloud computing? Sure, it is easy to draw the cloud on a whiteboard, but it appears to be some sort of magic word these days and people are getting remarkably excited about something which has been around for a long long time (in tech-years).

The second rant (or maybe it is a lesson) is that when the cloud evaporates there is nothing left. Just blue sky and the sun - or should that be SUN(TM).

If you are running your business in the cloud you should certainly take backing up or otherwise arranging for that rare sunny day when the clouds disappear. Every cloud has a silver lining, so it would seem that there is a business opportunity for an on-the-premises system which backs up everything as it goes into the cloud so you can support yourself in sunny weather. Something sitting at the edge.

With Windows 7 ready to release in two days, I thought I'd share my experience running it on an older laptop. The basic answer: Much better than Vista ever was. Here are the details:

Dell Latitude 800 circa 2004
2 GHz Pentium M processor
Windows Experience level 1.0!
2GB memory
This machine was never much of a performer even when new (see review here) and when I installed Vista on it on a lark it became unusable even for web-browsing.

So when Windows 7 was released to manufacturing (RTM) I installed it. Performance for everyday tasks like web browsing is acceptable. Applications work OK, but the more computation intensive they are, the slower they go. The main thing is that the operating system no longer chokes the machine to death. This has given the machine a new lease on life.

As part of the slim down program on this machine, I also decided to use Google Chrome which is billed as a slimmer and faster browser than the others. I'm pretty happy with it, but to reduce the computation and networking load I wanted to block all those spinning, flashing, video-playing ad's that show up on almost every website. Of course, Google makes the bulk of their revenue from serving ads, so the browser has no ability to block advertisements. Chrome doesn't offer any of the wide variety of ad-blockers like firefox does either. So I went to the most basic solution possible and used a hosts file to control what the browser finds and pointed it to the local machine for most of the annoying ad providers.

The way this works is that the URL for the ad which is embedded in the page has a domain name in it somewhere, for example google.com is a domain name. When you want to access that url, the machine goes to a DNS (domain name server) to find out where that domain is. For example, currently the IP address for this site is 74.200.29.57. If you query the DNS with "zo-d.com" that address is returned and the browser will go there. I won't go into details about DNS, except to say that for most operating systems there is what is called a "hosts" file which is looked at FIRST. It gives the IP address for domains, but because it is on your own machine you can edit it and specify what that address is.

So if you edit the hosts file and add a line pointing to your local machine instead of the real address

0.0.0.0 zo-d.com

then the browser will not find that host and will move on to the next thing it is supposed to do. Nothing will be downloaded, no scripts will run, nothing will flash or scroll across your screen. The browser will just skip right over it which is exactly what we want.

Editing the hosts file is simple and can be done with a text editor. The format is also simple, first the IP address you want it to use (0.0.0.0 or 127.0.0.1 will work for this) and then the host name. So if you want to block ads served by doubleclick.com, then add a line like this:

0.0.0.0 doubleclick.com

Of course this would be a tedious thing to do for all the things you would want to block, but someone has already done it for you. So just download the hosts file here and follow the instructions.

Now on Chrome this will leave some blank holes in the page which is kind of ugly, but I just want this machine to work so I don't care that much. But if I look at the holes, I find that Chrome is trying to look at those URLS and suggest a different address for them. This means that it is sending a message to google's server somewhere and trying to find an alternative URL. I don't want another better URL here and I don't want my browser sending more requests or creating anymore network traffic on my little old machine's struggling hardware. Fortunately, you can turn this feature off in Chrome by:

• Click on the wrench icon
  
• Click on "Options"
  
• Choose the "Under the Hood" tab
  
• Uncheck the "Show suggestions for Navigation errors" option.
  

There. That does it. The browser works much faster and reliably without loading and running all of that stuff that I don't care about.

There is probably some debate out there somewhere about the ethics of blocking ads. My hosting costs for this site are paid for by advertising as is much of the "free" stuff on the internet so I am generally in favor of them and I hope you to investigate any of the ads here that you find enticing and relevant, but this machine just won't run well without blocking them so I feel no remorse in this instance. Maybe in some small way it will encourage advertisers to make their ads consume fewer of my computing and network resources and find their way back to 2004.

An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe it.
~Don Marquis

A half-baked idea is okay as long as it's in the oven.
~Author Unknown

The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas, and throw the bad ones
away.
~Linus Pauling

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have.
~Emile Chartier

An idea not coupled with action will never get any bigger than the brain
cell it occupied.
~Arnold H. Glasgow

OK, it's only an opportunity to show a few photos I took of the temporary section a while back, but they are closing the Bay Bridge to reroute traffic onto a new temporary section so that the rest of the construction of the new East Span can proceed.

The temporary section is supported by some of the slenderest concrete bridge columns I've seen

No, not the steel pipe columns, but the concrete ones. They are still quite slender but are packed with some beefy rebar cages. You could walk through the center of this one:

The canteliever section shown on the right in the photo below will be lifted out and traffic will run to the South on the temporary section.

This makes room for the new cable-stayed section (sorry no pictures until they build it) to connect between the convential concrete span on the East (shown below) and Treasure Island.

It is certain to be an exciting weekend for everyone involved. Operators will definitely be standing by.

I just read this blog post about being frustrated by search because it does not solve a user's problem. John Battelle writes:

But the next step is the harder one. I am not “smart” about how to buy a classic car. I don’t know enough to buy one with confidence. I don’t know what to ask about. I don’t know if it’s good or bad that an engine, electrical system, or transmission is original or rebuilt. I don’t know how one model does versus another in resale value, or insurance cost or…well, you get the picture. There’s a lot to consider, and I don’t know how to value everything. The world of classic cars is complex, like most major decisions. In short, there’s no easy way to decide in this case

In this case his problem is he is not "smart". But can a simple search make you smarter? Or move you any closer to your goal? I'm reminded of the old joke where a man rubbing a lamp finds a genie and commands "Make me a Martini". The next panel would show the man to be composed of gin, vermouth and an olive. A single simple request is just too ambiguous to respond to. And to be honest, anyone who has searched for any length of time has learned that you MUST put in enough information to have the search engine help you.

My point here is that to solve any complex problem, and looking up something on Wikipedia is not a complex problem, the problem must be explored and defined sufficiently before it can be solved. As a consultant I find this to be what I spend much of my time on. The client request may be simple: "We want to do X". But to get to a solution of that problem involves understanding the current situation (in John's car example - what level of expertise does the user already possess), understanding the end result (what does doing "X" do for you), understanding the tolerances around the solution (would "W' or "Y" be good enough?), and understanding what effort the client wants to expend on achieving that result (In John's classic car example, is he actually going to read all this stuff and track down the right kind of hose clamps? or is he just having fun imagining how nice it would be to own a classic car). The typical search box on a search engine does not allow this sort of input which is essential to giving an appropriate response. And knowing your search history, which may help to some extent, is still never going to understand your intent.

I don't know why using a search engine should lead to frustration any more than one would be frustrated by the responses from the magic 8 ball. Becoming a professional tennis player requires more than a trip to the library, Becoming a classic car expert requires more than a couple visits to Bing or Google. Imagining that it would be otherwise is apparently a recipe for frustration.

That said, perhaps the way search engines can help is by training people to search better. Give them search strategies which work. But I doubt that will help much. Like owning a classic car, most of the fun is in figuring it out yourself.

There is another issue embedded in the same post, that of making decisions, valuations and tradeoffs. It is probably a discussion for another time, but it all hinges on the quality of the information. In a world where information quality is uneven and can be gamed, I think this may be another windmill being tilted at.

I was at the De Young Museum viewing the King Tut exhibit and went up to the viewing tower which offers great views of San Francisco in every direction - assuming the weather is cooperating - and in September it is very cooperative. One of the features of this level is a giant aerial photo of the city mounted on the wall. You can see it in the picture above. The De Young is located on the map just above the left shoulder of the guy wearing the checked shirt.

When viewed from the side, the map reveals an interesting thing. Because the map can be touched, certain areas have been worn and are shiny. The shiniest spot on the map is the De Young museum itself. The other shiny spots reveal other areas of interest, and they are not really all what I'd expect. The other shiny spots are Van Ness Avenue, The Palace of the Legion of Honor and St. Mary's Cathedral.

I'd expect that some other more prominent landmarks would have been rubbed the same amount, but it doesn't appear to be the case. I guess my point is that you never can tell what people are interested in, given a choice. In this case, everything on the map has equal prominence, unlike those sorts of maps which highlight the attractions. The ones rubbed smooth here are not the typical tourist attractions, though they must serve as landmarks or familiar places to the museum visitors.

Windows 7 is coming out soon (October 22) and Microsoft wants you to celebrate and have a party. To encourage you they are giving out all sorts of stuff if you host a party:

All hosts will receive:

One limited Signature Edition Windows 7® Ultimate
One Deck of Playing Cards with Windows 7® Desktop Design
One Puzzle with Windows 7® Desktop Design
One Poster with Windows 7® Desktop Design
Ten Tote Bags with Windows 7® Desktop Design for hosts and guests
Also included in USA party packs:

One package of streamers for decoration
One package of balloons for decoration
One table top centerpiece for decoration
One package of Windows 7® napkins

Sign up here:
http://www.houseparty.com/windows7
Good Luck!