First Advertisement

I found an opportunity to include a small advertisement in an up-coming supplement in a major UK daily newspaper "Report on Project Management". They plan to focus on why project management is vital to every business strategy as efficiency & effectiveness is key to succeeding in a recession. Here's what will be published. I was going for the "look" that I remember from Mobil Corporation's ad's on the editorial page of the New York Time from the 1980's.

Saturn V Launches

In honor of the Mercury, Gemni, and ultimately the Apollo missions and people behind them, watch this video of Saturn V rocket launches. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rXtG3vfAlA. The most powerful machine ever built my humanity.

Math on the Television

Last evening on UK's Channel 4 news there was an alarming report about planned increases in charges by water companies to customers. Gosh, but they propose "9% increase from £345/year now to £375 by 2014".

Isn't that slightly over 1% per year? Isn't that a reasonable plan? (Unless of course deflation occurs, but how can water companies or us know that?)

Example of the Media Not Serving Us

On a weekend with Iranian authorities arrest employees at the British Embassy in Teheran (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/world/middleeast/29iran.html?_r=1&hpw), the media (television news, newspapers, etc.) are leading with stories of the tragic death of a sad and damaged man.

Windows 7 Install Scratched my Laptop Screen!

Not really. But it sure seemed to.

At the invitation of Microsoft I download the ISO image of the latest Release Candidate for Windows 7. It was about 2.3 gb and amazingly the download worked. I launched the install process inside of VMWare Fusion running on my brand new Macbook.

Once the black screen turned into Windows 7, there was what looked to be a scratch on my beautiful and brand new Macbook screen. Upper left quadrant there was this ugly white streak. I went searching for my screen cleaner cloth and try as might I could not remove it. It was hard to see in the daylight as I was running the laptop in the back garden on one of the first beatiful sunny days this year. But none the less, the "scratch" was there.

After Windows 7 finished loading, I noticed it was not a scratch, but some sort of light flare on the new Windows 7 desktop. Sigh.

In any event. Windows 7 seems to work just great in VMWare Fusion, alongside XP, Ubunt, and OS X (the host operating system).

--rms

Five Disease Outbreaks that Are Worse Than Swine Flu

Joshua Keating writes in Foreign Policy Magazine about five outbreaks THAT EXIST NOW that are worse than Swine Flu which are not discussed in the media. More support for my view not to worry about risks that talked about in the papers and TV news.

: Cholera
: Spinal Meningitis
: AIDS
: Ebola
: Dengue Fever

Wow. The Reference Still Exists

I was meeting with someone this week who was heading out to the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston. That conversation made me remember that many years ago I was a co-author of a paper presented at that conference.

Thanks to the internet, found it!

http://www.onepetro.org/mslib/servlet/onepetropreview?id=OTC-3802-MS&soc=OTC&speAppNameCookie=ONEPETRO

NY Times Notices Zoho

The April 4 edition of the NY Times has an article by Randall Stross about Zoho, and in particular its word processor tool:

The best online word processor, however, may be the one from a tiny company, Zoho, a nimble innovator. Zoho Writer is running close enough to Word to imagine that it and other online word processors will be able to do most everything that Word can do, and more.

I've been experimenting with Zoho for a few months now. I'm impressed at it's capablities for team collaboration. Collaboration requires much more than a word processor, and Zoho has what's required.

Two Articles on "The Other Side"

In my daily newspaper reads, I have ran across two articles each with the common theme of looking at the "other side" of the convential (politically correct?) view.

In the New York Times, Daniel Hamermesh writes I Fell for Their Data in Freakonomics about

I fell for a stupid article and turned off my home PC last night. The article says that Americans who leave computers on overnight are wasting $2.8 billion on energy costs per year.It ignores the cost of turning computers off — and having to turn them on again the next morning.

And in the Telegraph there is an article The rise of sea levels is 'the great lie ever told' by Christopher Booker who writes about Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change.

Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm". And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about. The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on "going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world".

P.S. Why can't Mr. Booker punctuate and capitalise his title correct? When did the apostrophe replace the quotation mark? I frequently see apostrophes when quotation marks should be used.

One Line Project Plans. Makes for Higher Performing Organisations

When I talk to people about using Microsoft Project as a great tool which can save managers an awful lot of time and bring valuable MI into the organisation at low cost, some (many/most?) share back with me how their experience with Microsoft Project was not satisfying. Often that experience is based on one or two examples--after which they abandoned the tool. The common themes that emerge:

• "When we used it, the project plans ran to scores of pages with hundreds of tasks and we didn't have a clue about what was going on".
• "Project gives funny answers. " they say.
• Those who don't use Project because of these issues, then report proudly how they keep it "simple" by using Excel and, if they use Project it's only to do a Gant Chart that they paste into PowerPoint.

I respond by saying "Sound like self-inflicted complexity. That's not Project's fault. And "funny" answers is a clue about possible deficiences in the plan. Project, far as I know, has very few--if-any--calculation bugs. In any event, Excel is hardly simple as it's no better than a blank sheet of paper. Programming complex project management algorithms in Excel is always complicated and error-prone. "

"Keep it simple and enjoy complex benefits. Why don't you simply require your organisation to have for each "project" one-line plans in Microsoft Project?"

That floors them. "That can't possibly be enough detail", I hear.

I think that level of detail for most organisations is much better than projects with hundreds of trivial or individually-managed tasks, or projects "planned in PowerPoint". Maybe once 1-line project plans are achieved, you can move on to 5 or 6 line project plans. But no more.

Here is an example.

See the screen shot where we have a project called "Project 6" with one task: "Do Project 6". This project is slated to start on 27th May 2008 and use four resources:

• 2 Geologists
• Half of James Roberts' time
• A small amount of Susie Thomas's time
• A little less than half of Anne West's time

Project computes the total cost, based on the billing rates for the above people, to be £133k.


But this isn't the only project or activity being done by the organisation. There are many more, and nicely each has their own one-line model. The following shows how all these line projects are pulled together into a single view in a master project

They now don't have just a simple one-line project, but they have a much richer understanding of eight activities, all which have time demands on the organisation. Without going into all the details here, you now have all the capabilities of Project go look at deadlines, milestones, resource planning, etc.

So what other benefits do we get by doing this simple project setup in a complex product like Microsoft Project:

• Project handles all the complicated time-based computations.
• If one resource file is used, we can use the built-in capability of Project to show resource commitments, clash, over/under allocation.
• Simple scheduling can start to occur, for example make sequence the 8 projects in some sort of order--not by priority by but by successor/predecessor links.
• Let Project do the work of telling you when the projects will get done. If you don't like the answer, then change the plan.

This Brings Back Memories

I was a fluid mechanics lab instructure while in graduate school in the '70's. The favorite experiment we did was to demonstrate "Non-Newtonian" liquids by mixing cornstarch with water. The mixture has amazing and fun properties. Always a hit with the students. Sadly, we could never explain how it worked other than to say it was "Non-Newtonian".

Science Friday has video both demontrating and explaining it. I especially like the idea about tryingit out on speakers.

Global Warming News Flash: Global Hurricane Activity Reaches 30 Year Low!

Ryan Maue of Florida State University shows how the recent peak of hurricanes in 2005 has receeded to a 30-year low. From their web site see where global hurricane activity has "sunk to levels not seen since the 1970's."

Food for thought when we think of the media message on climate change projections.

The Days of a Document are Numbered

SharePoint Joel writes on the future of documents, and concludes their days are numbered.

What is a document? Is it that restrictive format that has a bunch of text in it with all that formatting to make it presentable? Sometimes they get corrupted. Not so much as the late eighties, but really what is a document is it the file? Is it the format? Is it the information inside of the document that is what really defines it? The .Doc and .DOCX today is simply a description of the text and layout of the information in the file.

I especially like his observation--which closely matches my own thinking:

Putting information into a .doc is like throwing something in a closet. The closet might get opened again, now put it in a folder and it's like putting it in a filing cabinet in a closet. Nest those more and more and it's likely to never be read again. SharePoint to the rescue and search might make those stats more likely to be found. Meta data and all that jazz will again increase the likelihood of it being read again.

I've learned that we don't need most documents that are created and emailed in Corporate Land. We don't need them and we don't need to invest to make, publish, read, store, or retain them.

We probably need some of the information, and that information needs to be put into places which work better. Those places are being discovered.

If it's difficult to pronounce, it must be risky

Study published on www.pubmed.gov by H. Song and N. Schwarz:

"...food additives were rated as more harmful when their names were difficult to pronounce than when their names were easy to pronounce."

They also studied the relation between the names of amusement park rides and the expectation of excitement.

Yet more proof of the irrationality of risk management by most people.

Proud

A few weeks ago a friend of my son invited many of her school friends to a party via an internet site that promised to inform everyone. Indeed, emails were delivered to everyone. The emails contained attachments. Most everyone opened the attachments. Most everyone's computers got infected and commenced delivering mail to everyone in their contact lists in MSN.

Everyone, that is, but my son.

He knew my message of "don't open attachments in email unless you are very sure." That message was drilled into the family the earliest age. He ignored the first email about the party--probably didn't want to go anyway. He ignored the scores of emails from all his "friends" which were generated and propagated by the malware on their machines. He smiled when he told me all this.

He is, however, chagrined to report that the only way his friends and their parents could stop the deluge of outgoing emails was to shutdown the machine. Further, he hears that some of the machines will no longer work. That cuts into their collaborative game playing (Football Manager).