Successful Projects

I promised a post (or two or three or four) on Action -what to do now that you’ve identified and verified that you have a project in trouble. So here we go….
You’ve identified you have a project in trouble. Now what?!?
Step number one:
Stop EVERYTHING! (if this is not possible recovery can still happen it’s just [...]

So I decided to do a post between knowing when your project is in trouble and action. I thought it might be nice to discuss the causes of troubled projects.
Almost always people issues rarely if ever technology issues!
Failure to plan, or failure to follow the plan
Lack of risk management
Poor communication, both within and without [...]

Yesterday I met with the IT Director for the Wyoming Department of Health. Ostensibly we were meeting to discuss me coming to Cheyenne as a contractor to help them turn around the Wyoming Client Information System – a project with which they have been having a great deal of trouble. It was pretty obvious from [...]

One of the things I do for some clients is to introduce them to the wonderful world of Web 2.0 and all that it can offer them. For example I’ve got a client who owns her own organizing business. She’s been sending out quarterly email newsletters for quite some time now to her customer base. [...]

On Sunday Patrick May posted an article on The Mercury News titled, We’re connecting – and wasting time – on Twitter. It’s a very insightful article on Twitter in general, its growth in popularity and how some users are utilizing it to get/share information and to conduct business.
The opening line of the article is, [...]

Josh Catone at Read Write Web wrote an awesome post about what he calls “badge soup” – a term I absolutely love – which is a condition where you’ve got so many social media badges on your site your users can’t find the one they want.
Aza Raskin has developed a bit of JavaScript code [...]

This is a major issue with almost every team running a project using an Agile methodology. Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software has a terrific post on his blog about how to handle those tasks that pop up during every iteration that have no specific stories associated to them.

I find myself once more in a familiar environment though my familiarity with it makes it no less frustrating and uncomfortable. The CEO of my current company has made the statement that the software developers need to work more hours. He has said, “We’re a start-up and the developers should work like we’re a start-up.” [...]

I’ve just spent the last two days cleaning out my NewsGator Inbox. I’ve read, clipped or deleted over 43,000 – yes that’s 5 digits – posts. Obviously it’s been a while since I’ve read my 144 feeds. but now I’m all caught up – at least until morning.
The problem with having such easy access to [...]

Thanks to a post from Erick Schonfeld over at TechCrunch I just tried a sweet little web app called Presdo. Erick is correct this is exactly what a modern web app should be. Simple. Easy to understand and use. Powerful. Fun and something that adds value or makes the life of the user better.
I just [...]