Our Story » Management

On the Radar: Web Calendars, Lip-Syncing and Love (oh, my)

Ken — Fri, 05 May 2006 04:16:34 +0000

* “Boil the ocean”:http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=%22boil+the+ocean%22&btnG=Search, an egregious consulting term used to limit the scope of a project: “we’re not looking to boil the ocean with this.” Fast Company took “a shrewd look”:http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/88/debunk.html at the phrase, and Bob Congdon digs up its “earliest use”:http://www.bobcongdon.net/blog/2004/06/boil-ocean.html.
* “Moleskine Bible”:http://www.esv.org/blog/2006/04/journaling.bible.coming (”via Tim”:http://www.challies.com/sideblog/archives/001828.php). Very forward-thinking book design on the part of the Standard Bible Society. Bibles used to be beautifully constructed books that were admired, but rarely touched. That’s beginning to change as people want to — literally — interweave the story of their lives with the Scripture.
* YouTube: “Two Chinese Boys”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbdpTCJgnwc (”via Slate”:http://www.slate.com/id/2140697/). Be sucked into the vortex of incomparable splendor that is YouTube.
* ??Fortune Magazine??: “The Great Escape”:http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/03/20/8371767/. Forty million American employees toil in soulless cubicles. How did they get there — and can business ever break out of the box? Probably not.
* ??Crain’s Chicago Business??: “The new face of technology”:http://chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/mag/article.pl?article_id=25714&bt=37Signals&arc=n&searchType=all (”via Jason”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/crains_chicago_business_cover_story.php). Start-up! Start-up! Start-up! ;-)
* ??Kathy Sierra??: “The myth of keeping up”:http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/04/the_myth_of_kee.html. You can’t keep up. There is no way. And trying to keep up will probably just make you dumber.You can never be current on everything you think you should be. Good to know I’m in good company.
* ??Michael Idov?? for ??Slate??: “Bitter Brew”:http://www.slate.com/id/2132576/. You know that charming little cafe on New York’s Lower East Side that just closed after a mere six months in business — where coffee was served on silver trays with a glass of water and a little chocolate cookie? The one that, as you calmly and correctly observed, was doomed from its inception because it was too precious and too offbeat? The one you still kind of fell for, the way one falls for a tubercular maiden? Yeah, that one was mine. Pragmatic advice for anyone who handles money. Worth listening to…twice.
* ??Sam Andreades??: “The Redefinition of Simon Peter”:www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/sermons/2006/01/the-redefinition-of-simon-peter/. Are you really free from how others look at you? I don’t just mean saying ‘I don’t care what other people think of me’–there are plenty of people in New York saying that. … Are you really free of carrying the responsibility of your reputation with others?
* Apple: “Get a Mac”:http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/?ilife_medium (”via Dan”:http://hivelogic.com/links/133). Quietly brilliant new “switcher” ads by Apple. Is it me, or does PC look a little like Mr. Gates? :)
* ??John Gruber??: “Good Journalism”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/05/good_journalism. One can only hope that Apple will one day handle security issues as well as Microsoft does now. Wow, you can _taste_ the bitterness in this article.
* ??Evan Ratliff??: “Now for a Quick Lesson in International Relations”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/fashion/sundaystyles/30love.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin (”via Angela”:http://hereisangela.blogspot.com/2006/04/modern-love.html). Feeling suddenly like a shy 10-year-old in the playground, I pretended not to understand. But he walked off, and there was nothing to do but follow. I was already uneasy in Dhaka, unable to blend in or communicate, and now self-consciousness was joined by a simultaneous thrill and fear that I was walking into some vortex of cultural misunderstanding.
* ??Angela Wu??: “Religious map of America”:http://hereisangela.blogspot.com/2006/05/religious-map-of-america.html. Like, if you grew up going to church all your life and everybody else you knew did, too, you might fervently believe lots of things… (bonus: “cows”:http://hereisangela.blogspot.com/2006/05/beating-dead-cow.html)
* The Village Church just might be getting “a new calendar”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/events/ based on the open-source “WebCalendar”:http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php?topic=About. WebCalendar has been okay to work with, but not trivial to integrate with the site — due in part because it’s “ugly as a dog”:http://www.k5n.us/webcal-screenshots/wcss-month.png out of the box. Still, it will export an iCal feed, so if you’ve got 30 Boxes or Google Calendar, you can “subscribe”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/events/publish.php?user=public.
* ??Fast Company??: ” Varnished History”:http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/94/pr.html. The documentary itself won’t be featured in any film classes — but in the tawdry realm of corporate propaganda, there has been worse.
* ??InterVarsity??: “Ministry Exchange Overview”:http://www.intervarsity.org/mx/item/3674/. IV constructs a massive content management system to share ministry materials, providng features as web-2.0 savvy as tagging and RSS feeds. Well done–this is worth watching for a while.
* ??Ken Walker??: “The Debate Over Newark, Part II”:http://blog.newarker.info/2006/05/04/the-debate-over-newark-part-ii/. Have you heard? We’re getting a new mayor in Newark after 20 years of the same administration. The candidates recently debated — here’s how it went.

Projects vs. jobs–what’s the difference?

Ken — Tue, 28 Dec 2004 23:40:28 +0000

When Mike replied to my blog on the 21st, he said:

Thats just a really deep way of saying, ‘I have a job that makes me think.’

Er, well, actually it’s more than that. By saying that projects are journeys, I mean they are a means of going from one place to another. The skillset that I had before the TVC site was different from the skillset I have now. The things I know about our church are different. The way I approach working on the site now is different than when I started.

It’s also the same where I work. One particular project I’m working on now has to do with deploying a CRM tool to a sales organization. Once you get involved in enterprise-wide systems, you start to learn all sorts of things about the enterprise–both its people and its systems. I have learned a lot in the past several months on this project and, if all goes well, I will be able to look back several months from now and see what I’ve learned and accomplished and, perhaps more importantly, see how I can use those learnings on future ventures.

Mike included in his comment my remark, Systems design is both passive and active; it�s simultaneously something that you do and that happens to you. This highlights my point about the journey. When you embark on a project, it’s not immediately clear what information is known and what is unknown. It’s not clear what is to be built and with what reqiurements. It’s not clear where the budget is coming from. It’s not clear who will take ownership of the completed product. It’s not even clear whether or not the proposed idea is even going to work. This is an epistemological problem–how do you know what you know?–which is, I think, really unique to project management and delineates it from other work.

Jobs have a relatively constrained set of rules by which you play. These are usually understood well in advance (”I fold papers and stuff envelopes”) and determine the majority of your choices. Systems design is way different. There are constraints that go into systems design, but they are not all well known at the start and are learned along the way.

True, this does make me think, but stating that projects are journeys isn’t just a flowery way of saying so. :)

A project is just another job. You have nothing, or very little when it starts and a product at the end. It actually kinda bothers me that it is being thought of differently.

Actually, the difference between a job and a project is fairly well defined. The Wikipedia definition isn’t great (and I might just go change it myself after this blog), but a project is, essentially, the coordination of resources within a set of constraints (such as time and money) to accomplish a goal. That goal is inherently the creation of of something new that didn’t previously exist.

If I could perhaps rework the terminology a bit:

work: an ongoing process of doing what is necessary to run the business; e.g. turning on the lights, maintaining software, filing paperwork
project: a time-bound process of creating something new for the business; e.g. installing new light fixtures, designing a new software application, creating a new filing system
job: a role that may encompass work, projects, or a combination of both

Mozilla Changes Gears

Ken — Fri, 04 Apr 2003 06:40:17 +0000

There’s quite a buzz in the Mozilla community about an organization restructuring. This restructuring comes with the third modification of Mozilla’s roadmap.

Mozilla: Mozilla Development Roadmap. We have come a long way. We have achieved a Mozilla 1.0 milestone that satisfies the criteria put forth in the Mozilla 1.0 manifesto, giving the community and the wider world a high-quality release, and a stable branch for conservative development and derivative product releases. See the Mozilla Hall of Fame for a list of Mozilla-based projects and products that benefited from 1.0.

This is but a small section of the rich discussion of the Mozilla restructuring available at the site, which contains some exciting announcements. Among them:

* Phoenix is going to become Mozilla’s major browser development effort
* Thunderbird—a mail client similar to Phoenix’s agile application design—is going to become Mozilla’s major mail client development effort
* Aside from the migration towards these applications, much of the development effort will now focus on making Mozilla do what it does with a more streamlined codebase
* Advanced-user featuresets will be built as modular plugins—this is particularly good news if you’ve ever tried navigating the drop-down menus in Mozilla and got overwhelmed with too many options

…and there’s more interesting activities that aren’t explicitly constrained to the application end-user.

I’ve had a growing interest in Mozilla over the past year or so as I’ve encountered more educational experience in programming and project management but little ‘real world’ work experience. What’s cool about the project is that everything is out in the open for everyone to see. If you want to learn how to hack Mozilla, you can. If you’re interested in seeing the latest bugs in Phoenix, you can. If you want to discuss issues with the developers directly, you can. If you want to peruse code, you can. Even their development timeline is available. The Mozilla project offers, for the wannabe hacker, an opportunity to see real development efforts in action and, for the project manager, the opportunity to see what works and what doesn’t.

What’s more exciting, though, is that the Mozilla project seems to be undergoing a turning point similar to the one that Linux underwent a couple of years ago: the popularization and user-orientation of the project. Not only has the Mozilla project created a viable, standards-based choice for cross platform development (such as the much anticipated OpenMind project), but is now creating applications that are meaningful for the end user. My favorite of these is, of course, the Phoenix web browser. (Haven’t made Phoenix your primary web browser yet? Here’s a good list of reasons why you should.)

As Mark Pilgrim put it recently, In the future, there will be so much open source software available, programmers will be judged by how much they know about it and how well they can glue it together to build solutions. Looks like this year is going to be a pretty exciting jumpstart into that future.

Project Management Methodologies

Ken — Tue, 04 Mar 2003 09:21:50 +0000

One of the interesting (if tedious) responsibilities for my Senior Project class at NJIT is to discover, interpret, and choose a project management methodology. Having had no real prior experience in the theory of project management, this has been a real challenge to me: I feel like I’m desperately trying to claw my way up from the bottom of the learning curve. Read on for more.

A coworker had asked me recently what sort of study Computer Science is (we were looking at colleges on the web at the time). The answer is actually a bit more interesting than simply “a science.” CS actually finds its roots in the Engineering field since the adding machines that once passed as computer technology looked a lot more like car engines than the pleasant beige boxes with which we now find ourselves. As the descendant of the Engineering field, Computer Science has inherited a number of organizational and developmental disciplines.

However, over the past several decades, thought has changed significantly regarding the development of information systems. It is interesting to note that analysts and economists have coined the phrase, “Information Revolution” to describe the latest trend in market forces. Before the rapid advancement of computer technology, the most recent market dynamic had been governed by forces put into effect by the “Industrial Revolution.” One revolution is defined by the way material things are produced for consumption. The other is defined by the way people manage the flow of information—a far less tangible commodity. This is an obvious reality that has far more subtle implications for the way their respective commodities are produced, which leads me to the topic at hand.

It was once thought that Information Systems should be constructed in similar manner to the way we build bridges. If you don’t know, engineering on a large scale is generally done in phases, during each of which various discrete tasks are given to people of different skill sets. For example, architects set out a design on paper, which is then given to several different engineers (environmental, civil, and so on) to determine feasibility and flesh out the resources involved. The engineers turn around and give their more concrete blueprints to contractors, who go out and do the work that has been defined for them in previous phases. This approach is referred to as a Cascade or Waterfall approach, where the output of one team becomes the input for another and so on down to the project completion. The first phase begins with the idea of a thing, which takes on more concrete reality as it is passed to the people who actually do the building. The builders do not have to deal with having to think about the placement of a staircase or the direction of waterlines, because all of these details have been determined before they put the bid on the project. All large-scale manufacturing follows a similar monolithic model.

Information Systems, for some time, have been modeled after a similar fashion. I spent my entire CIS 490, Guided Design in Software Engineering class learning that this is how a system is built, from idea to reality, all while filing hundreds of specifications reports as the work is passed from one level to the next. Architects architect. Analysts analyze. Designers design. Programmers program. Testers test. This approach to software engineering has official sounding acronyms like UML and advertises such stalwart names as IBM and Microsoft. With such powerful backing and proven entities, one might wonder what reason anyone would have to dissent. As it turns out, though, the monolithic approach to systems design does not comprehensively deal with the realities incumbent upon the intangible information system.

From a 50,000-foot view, the waterfall methodology looks like it sounds: one process leads to the next such that the output of one is the input of the next:

The major difficulty with this approach is that it assumes that the process of developing software is a repeatable, predictable event. Those in the trenches of software development know only too well that requirements change, budgets constrict, and timelines evolve. In order to deal effectively with this chaos, the process needs to adapt to look like this:

Here, the processes in software development occur simultaneously, with milestone releases to keep the processes in sync with each other and with the customer. It provides an inherent mechanism of efficiently and quickly developing code that is to the customer’s specification and welcomes changes in requirements. The overarching name for this category of software development is the Agile methodology, which comes in all sorts of flavors: Scrum (2), Extreme Programming, and Evolutionary Delivery.

Because the product life cycle for the senior project is approximately 12 to 13 weeks, an agile methodology really seems to be the most appropriate and will be adopted by our team. Of those available, Scrum seems to best fit the management style I believe I can contribute and is the most flexible model that can be adapted to our very busy schedules.

This document at ControlChaos.com has been most helpful in discussing the advantages of scrum.

Open Source Project Management

Ken — Thu, 20 Feb 2003 09:08:32 +0000

Update: it’s no secret that I am using Basecamp for project management these days.

The Linux desktop may not be ready for Joe User and his grandmother, but is it ready for the knowledge worker? This is a question I’ve somewhat accidentally been endeavoring to answer since the semester started. A lot of people go looking to prove Linux out when it comes to the desktop in a sort of anti-Microsoft methodology. My latest experimentation, though, wasn’t born out of a desire to prove Linux right or Microsoft wrong—it came out of an immediate need for tools to get my job done as project manager at school. While NJIT provides a lot of these programs for download through Microsoft’s Academic Alliance program, I wasn’t able to get a hold of them easily (the intranet site required that I authenticate three separate times, and still wouldn’t let me do it!). Read on to see just how Linux is performing in these areas.

Email Client

I had previously written about how I was in dire want of the killer email application for Windows, a task that I didn’t think would be quite so hard. I mean, email has been around for at least 25 years or so—you figure that somebody would have gotten it right by now. Much to my frustration, though, no one could suggest a viable alternative to my buggy Microsoft Outlook or the MSN-happy Outlook Express. I had, for a time, gone back to Outlook Express, but the idea of using Ximian Evolution got a hold of me and wouldn’t let go. However, this wasn’t the main reason that I started booting to Linux for personal use. Update: I just totally realized that Evolution will read XML news bites from the web! What does that mean? Well, in Geek it means that I can add a news source to my Summary page by simply typing in the address for the RDF file, such as ours, here. Woah.

Diagramming

Though I didn’t write about this, Darin and I had engaged in the search for an alternative to Microsoft’s Visio some months back because we were both so psyched about the Redhat 8.0 release. Darin really wanted to find a tool that would be able to create some of the diagrams that he worked with on a regular basis at work. In the process of looking for that tool, I found Dia. Dia is an open-source diagramming solution for Linux, which has been ported to Windows. While it can’t import Microsoft’s proprietary (read: market-preserving) file formats for Visio, the tool serves quite nicely on its own to let you create network diagrams, flowcharts, and entity-relationship diagrams. It will also export to a number of formats, including .jpg and scalable vector graphics.

Project Management

One of my requirements for this project is to provide the team and my professor with task lists and Gantt charts to show the team productivity. Microsoft Project is the standard for such project management, but as I searched the web for alternative methods (stumbling across cheesy web-based JavaScript Gantt generators along the way), I discovered MrProject. MrProject is essentially a GNOME-based Gantt generator—no frills, no huge featureset: just Gantt charts and some basic project information. But, man does it do a good job at it. Though still a somewhat buggy release at v0.9 (updated Feb 17th!), MrProject is able to deliver functionality in letting me record my project data and then output it all to a PDF (buggy) or PostScript file. This is actually the program that tipped me into booting to Linux: there is no Windows port available.

Web Browser

Of course, my favorite web browser is available in Linux as well as Windows, so there was no problem here. :) I had spent some time about two months ago getting antialiased fonts to work with it as well, and copied the Windows fonts into Linux to make for a very sweet browsing experience.

Productivity

No project manager can be without his productivity applications for documentation and spreadsheets. Thankfully, OpenOffice 1.0 is free for the taking and compatible with the Microsoft Word and Excel proprietary (read: market-rigging) file formats. So, as long as no one tries to go nuts with creating OLE-embedded movies in our specification documents (does anyone really do that?!), I should be compatible with the rest of the team’s productivity apps.

Is it possible that I will be able to successfully manage this project after having spent $0 on software? About 12 more weeks will tell the story. :)