Car Show - June 28, 2009

We visited a car show in East Windsor today. This is an annual charity event. I am standing next to a Graham. I think this is the first time I have seen a Graham in real-life, and it has a striking profile and distinctive design.

The yellow hot rod started life as a Ford Anglia. The new engine and other improvements makes it a completely different vehicle to the one that left Henry's factory.

One of the enormous benefits of summer time in Connecticut is the car shows. There is a car show almost every weekend within driving distance, much to my delight.

Unseen benefactors

If you had been with me on this past Friday in the late afternoon, you would have been overcome with extreme gratitude. I was meeting with two other project managers to find a resolution to a problem on an enterprise-wide project for a multi-national corporation.

Here is the short version of the story. A defect was found in the final round of testing an enhancement for the enterprise-wide application. The business partner is willing to accept the workaround and live with the inefficient work-around until the defect can be fixed in the next version of the application, scheduled for release in 2010.

However, the project managers responsible for this project are not giving up so easily. The project managers have involved many stakeholders over the past week, and worked relentlessly to find a way to get this defect fixed and tested now, so that the business users will have the benefit of functionality, defect free. The enterprise project manager has taken ownership of the defect and is working relentlessly to deliver a great product.

The end users of this application will never get to know the enterprise project manager. The end user will receive the new version of the application and go about their work, without ever being aware of the effort that went into resolving the defect. The end users will never even know that they should thank the enterprise project manager on this project.

Project managers are usually unseen benefactors in large corporations. Working with other IT professionals and influencing decisions, so that end users don't have to work around known defects.

The two points from this story:
1. When you receive a new version of a software application, don't be too quick to complain about the defects. Be thankful that many project managers worked late on Fridays, to remove the large defects which could have caused you frustrating moments.
2. When you are the enterprise project manager for a software application, then take ownership of defects, even if your business partner is willing to accept defects. You know what is the right thing to do for your project, your users and your organization. Do the right thing, and don't give up too soon. Where there is a will, there is a way. You will probably find the way if you try hard enough.

Winning

Last Saturday, I crewed the good ship Asterix, out of Noank. We took part in the West Cove Yacht Club Annual Regatta. As you can see from the smile on our faces, and the beaming captain with the first prize trophy, we won in our class. Yahooo!!

You know that your project is in trouble when ....

1. Your status spreadsheet is so complex that it is stretched across two wide screen monitors, and you still cannot see all the status columns.
2. Your project manager tells you that there is no time for planning.
3. You say that there is no time for planning. (You should wash your mouth out if you ever say this).
4. Your project manager thinks that sending cryptic directives to each team member through instant messaging is a substitute for a communication plan.
5. You are asked to fill out a status spreadsheet, and you first have to study the instructions before you can determine how to fill out the spreadsheet.
6. Project progress is measured in terms of "How many hours were you in the office over the weekend?"
7. Your project manager is astonished when you propose the use of a project plan.
8. Team members spend more time retaking decisions and double guessing decisions than executing the actions flowing from decisions taken.
9. Your project manager firmly believes that a giant "to-do" list eliminates the need for a project plan.

If you are working on a project that displays the above behaviours, then your project is in trouble. You need to stand firm and bring sanity to the situation as you apply your project management skills. Don't allow this behaviour to go unchallenged, because you know that the result will be sub-optimal. Project management can be summed up as "Plan the work, then work the plan". You can't work without a plan.

Prop me up

Have you noticed how speakers in a Toastmasters club use props? How often do you see Toastmasters win contests when they use props?

Over the past five years, after critiqueing many speeches, I have observed that props distract from speeches.

Most winning speeches exclude the use of props. In contrast, I have predict that if a prop is included in a Toastmaster speech, then the speaker will lose the speaking contest.

This is because props limit our imagination. As speakers, we have the opportunity to conjure up images in the minds of our audience. We can describe a fire truck, and a cat up a tree with a child crying in despair at the situation. Our audience can feel the circumstances and emotionally support the child while the fire truck hurries to get the cat down from the tree.

Yet, I observe that as soon as a tangible prop comes on stage, the spell is broken. Suddenly we are focused on a speaker and a ladder and logistical complications, including climbing up the ladder and so on.

If you want to speak well, and win speaking contests, then learn how to create images in the mind of your audience. Get inside their minds. Do not resort to using props. Even if you are well intentioned, props are not a substitute for the real skill of creating images in the mind of your audience.

You are doing a disservice to your audience when you resort to using props, and are likely to pay the price by losing a speech contest as well. (Of course, there is no need to share this advice with your fellow contestants.)

Feeling old?

Tetris is celebrating it's 25 year Anniversary today.

Now I feel old!!

I recall playing Tetris on PC's which required a diskette for the Operating System to load and then a second diskette to load the games. Why? Because the PC's in the UNISA computer lab did not have hard drives in the 1980's.

Not that I would ever violate University computer lab Policy and play computer games on these PCs, of course :)

Diskettes in the 1980's held 360 KB of data. You could count the data bits with the naked eye. I am in the process of purchasing a new computer as I write this. It comes with a 1 Terabyte hard drive. Let's see. 1 Terabyte is equivalent to .... Uhmm, many, many, many 360 Kilobyte diskettes stacked on top of each other.

My new PC is quad-core. This means I will soon be playing Tetris faster than a 1980's PC could drop monochrome objects down a 14-inch monitor in a month of overclocking.

Here is a toast to another 25 years of Tetris fun. WooHoo!!

P.S. Can you believe that when I ran the spell checker on this blog posting, that it did not recognize the word "Tetris"? Where have the "Blogger" developers been living for the past quarter century? Or are "Blogger" developers too young to remember IT before the Internet? Come on Blogger developers - Add Tetris to the spell check dictionary, with honor.