Motivational Speeches

Nothing like a little motivation once in awhile, right?  The video is a cool (and funny) montage of clips from a bunch of Hollywood flicks.  My personal favorite is from Any Given Sunday and is given by Al Pacino – just awesome.  If you are unnerved by some R-rated language, you should pass this clip up.  Of course, how could we not remember Matt Foley.

- Bill Weber

Scrum – a Project Management Approach

Scrum – noun

1: a rugby play in which the forwards of each side come together in a tight formation and struggle to gain possession of the ball using their feet when it is tossed in among them; also: the arrangement of players in a scrum b: a usually brief and disorderly struggle or fight.  2a: (British) madhouse.  2b: a usually tightly packed or disorderly crowd

The Scrum I am talking about is none of these.  Scrum is an iterative process of software development that is typically used with agile softward development.  Even though it was intended to be for management of software development projects, it can be used in running software maintenance teams, or as a program management approach.

I have found it to be very effective in managing ongoing projects – meaning projects that are not building something from the ground-up.  If you read my post on Context Switching, you will remember the diagram of “Total Demand” to “Completed Work” – Scrum is the way in which I manage the “Total Demand”.

Work/Life Balance

This is something I rememeber my Dad always telling me when I was (still am?) growing up – Balance.

You can break work and life into more granular pieces.  Life – immediate family, extended family, friends and self for example.  Work – subordinates, superiors and clients.  The simple concept is not to let any one of these, or “Work/Life”, to dominate your time and energy for an extended period of time.  You may work 65-70 hours in a given week, maybe even 3 weeks in-a-row – you will be out of balance for a period of time.  The key is to stay balanced over a long period of time – their will be ebbs and flows.

A blog I read on a fairly regular basis, The Art of Manliness, just did a piece on the Work/Life Balance.  While their target audience is men with kids, the concepts apply to both genders.

How do you deal with the Work/Life balance? Leave a note in the comments.

- Bill Weber

photo credit: star5112

Are newspapers just a thing of the past?

On the way into work the other day there was a story featured on NPR about The Tribune Company filing for bankruptcy – this includes most notably the Chicago Tribune and LA Times (it does not include the Chicago Cubs).  The story primarily focused on how the Wall Street journal is changing since Rupert Murdoch bought the paper in the summer of 2007.  The WSJ, now a part of massive News Corporation, has been positioned to be a content distribution channel to other media outlets owned by News Corp.

The quote from the NPR story that really struck me is from Robert Thomson, Managing Editor at The WSJ…

“You think in terms of the cost of content as a once-only expense, and the potential
revenue of content is how much you’re able to repurpose that.”

News Corp media outlets include movie studios, magazines, television, newspapers, book publishing – and not just 1 in each category, but a whole bunch in each of those categories.   What Thomson was getting at is this – if you can have content generated at The WSJ and use that content in several areas (other papers, tv newscasts, etc) than the cost to create content for other areas in News Corp is now reduced.  So the obvious conclusion is that The WSJ can run in the red because it is simply an expense to News Corp’s other businesses.  Well… that’s not the official statement, here’s what Thomson said to that…

“… The Wall Street Journal has to make money to prove that they’re relevant, because if you’re not relevant, you’re irrelevant.  And irrelevance is unsustainable.”

Sure, that may be the company line, but I don’t really buy it.  I think The WSJ will be relevant because of it’s record of journalism and because it’s THE paper of record in the business world and on Wall Street.

eCommerce Scams

I am still shocked that after all the resources that people can reach on the internet that they still fall victim to scams.  I frequently read theconsumerist.org and once or twice a week they have an article about someone getting ripped off.  My first reaction is a “aw man, that’s stinks” but then you read into the story you think “wow, what an idiot”.  Maybe that is because I have been actively buying stuff on eBay since September of 2000 and using online retailers even longer than that.

I have been “ripped off” once through eBay.  I bought a pair of speakers for my 1991 Saturn SL1.  They were way underpriced, the feedback on the seller was iffy and there wasn’t very much of it.  But for $35 I was WILLING to take the risk – the retail price was over $150.  I completed the transaction through eBay’s website and paid via PayPal (with Credit Card).  Speakers arrived – one was blown, it sounded like high pitched fuzz.  My fault – that’s on me.  I lost $35 – no real harm here.  I could have went after the seller – but for $35, the cost to ship the bad ones back, etc – I’ll eat the $35, live and learn.

WordPress Widgets are Goofed-up

You will notice the sidebar is really lacking in content – look over to the right side of the screen.  Apparently there is a bug in the WordPress code – slightly annoying.  Ok, really annoying considering I spent about 30 minutes thinking I was doing something wrong and finally googled it.  I assume it has something to do with the upgrade to WordPress 2.7 on December 4th.

So until then I don’t have a blogroll, links, rss subscription, etc – hopefully full functionality is restored soon.

- Bill Weber

Context Switching

There are lots of issues to be concerned with when leading a team – who is dependable, who is not?  who is your go-to problem solver?  how do you raise the overall “level of the water” on your team?  All valid concerns.  However, what I struggle with the most is the having a team that must deal with planned strategic-type work and also ad-hoc requests – or better yet, context switching.  Context switching is the changing of focus for one or more of your team members – it is absolutely a productivity killer.

The simple formula that I use to go from a pile of work to the delivery of work is a series of filters or stages… Total Demand -> Prioritized Demand -> Capacity Constrained Demand -> Completed Work

Total Demand – this is the total “list” of all things that must be completed.  It is important to get EVERYTHING on the list and accounted for – if everything is not on the list to begin with you are setting yourself up for failure.

Prioritized Demand – this is a forced ranking of Total Demand – it must be a forced ranking… no ties.  Once forced ranked or “prioritized” the top items should be given estimates – they can be ballpark.

Capacity Constrained Demand – this is understanding how many hours per week (month, deployment cycle, etc) your development team has available.  Example – you have 4 developers on your team.  You assign 40 hours of work per week to each developer for a 4 week development cycle – that is 640 hours of capacity.  Your team can work on the first 640 hours of highest prioritized items.  Clearly this is a simplistic scenario.

Consulting Basics – Dos and Don’ts

Here is a presentation that I gave to a couple internal areas a week or so ago. The presentation is a compilation of positive and negative practices that I consistently see happening with regard to meetings, email, presentations and documentation. While some of this may seem like common sense – I see these same mistakes being made time and time again. Take a couple minutes to read through this presentation and try to internalize these “dos and don’ts”.

Consulting Basics – Dos and Don’ts

- Bill Weber

photo credit: EJP Photo

BA/PM Resources – Methods and Tools and Productive Magazine

I have been subscribed to Methods and Tools for some time now and find many of the topics informative and helpful.  In the Fall 2008 issue they talk about Risk Management as well Scrum Meetings – both topics of these topics are relevant on my current project.  In the Summer of 2008 one of the topics was Control Your Project… again directly applicable.  There is a good mix of technical stuff and BA/PM stuff each issue (quarterly).  Take some time and go through the back issues here… http://methodsandtools.com/mt/download.php .  If you like it, you can subscribe here… http://methodsandtools.com/forms/submt.php. I just ran across this brand new publication (attached PDF).  Unfortunately it is a pay subscription but the first issue is free.  If you are familiar with the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodologies this will be a good resource for you.  If you are not familiar with David Allen’s Getting Things Done – this is a good way to get familiar with some of the concepts.  http://productivemagazine.com/

Productive Magazine Issue 01

- Bill Weber

photo credit: Eric Gjerde