You’ve identified you have a project in trouble. Now what?!?

Step number one:

Communications
Change control
Risk management
Personnel issues
Process

And immediately!

I’m sure if we all sat down and thought about it for 30 minutes we could come up with a list of a hundred or more causes of project failure. But I’m also fairly sure that if we thought about it a bit more we could fit all 100 of those into one or more of the listed items above. My experience has taught me that project trouble almost always comes from two main sources – personnel issues and poor choices by management or a combination of the two.

Over the years I’ve developed a process I use to accomplish a recovery. I didn’t invent this process all by myself it has bits and pieces from others who’ve gone before me, but it has been tailored over the years to provide a framework that is most effective for me. This project recovery process is what I introduced the folks within SoWY IT to and what I left behind for them to use to hopefully recover the WCIS project. Here is a picture that provides an overview of the process:

My meeting with SoWY Department of Health is a perfect excuse to discuss, once again, the process for project recovery. So I’ll be breaking it up into bite size chunks over the next month and posting about the specifics. Stay tuned!! Hopefully this refresher will be beneficial.

Another issue is that rigid spam filtering causes many of her newsletters to get lost.

So I’m helping her enter the world of blogging. The benefits are that by blogging she’ll be creating a dialogue with her customers – something more interactive as well as timely. By posting regularly instead of 4 times a year she’ll be building a relationship and a space where her customers can come on a regular basis to get advice or tips. Additionally, she’ll be creating a space where her customers can participate through comments – this can create an almost addictive quality where customers feel the need to come to the site frequently to read and participate.

Further, blogs have their own search engines and optimization schemes so combining a blog with a traditional marketing site means that she’s now increased the likelihood that her business will be discovered.

As I prepare my client to begin blogging it’s important to get her mind wrapped around the difference between writing for a blog vs. a newsletter. Jane Smith at PR In A Jar wrote a post called How To Blog that talks about the basics of blogging – how to get started and the right way to think about blogging. It’s very informative for new bloggers but it’s also a good review for those of us who’ve done it for a while.

The opening line of the article is, “Some have called Twitter “the ‘Seinfeld’ of the Internet – a Web site about nothing.” This is so true. Yet another hugely popular bit of geek technomasturbation with no real business model, no definable usage model but with a following of millions (1.2 million unique visitors in May according to Patrick) of loyal/addicted fans/followers/fanatics. I would love it if my application had this kind of following.

Apparently Twitter are trying out ads on the Japanese version of their site in an attempt to find a revenue model. The problem with any revenue model at Twitter is stated quite eloquently by Jere,iah Owyang of Forrester Research – “to expect everyone to use
this tool is very unlikely; it will be for only a small percentage of
Internet users. And it will absolutely have competition, once the cell
phone industry figures out another way to enhance their text-messaging
systems and charge for it.”

There it is in a nut shell. Few will use it and the ones who do aren’t typically the types to pay a lot of money for a service that really isn’t that much more valuable than SMS. All of that not withstanding Twitter is a phenomenon albeit a time sucking somewhat useless one.

The lesson is: 1) Whatever you’re building try like hell to make it crack-like in its appeal to your target user audience and, 2) make sure the appeal is as broad as possible and that you’ve thought of a business/revenue model that can/will capitalize on the ferocity of your users passion about your thing.

Aza Raskin has developed a bit of JavaScript code called SocialHistory.js that solves the problem in a crafty and efficient way. SocialHistory.js works by exploiting the feature in modern web browsers
that automatically uses a different link color for visited links. The
JavaScript loads up a bunch of links from a list of top social media
sites in an iFrame and looks at which have been visited based on the
change in link color. From there, it can assume which you are most
likely to use.

Nifty, efficient and handy as all get out.

I can’t tell you how many times in my career I’ve heard this comment or something very similar. It always shocks me though you’d think by now I’d be so accustomed to it that I would expect it and its arrival would offer no shock.

I guess what shocks me the most is the naivety of the notion that a software developer can code as effectively in hour 10 as in hour 1. Perhaps because I have been managing software development for so long I just don’t have a lot of patience for this attitude. It seems like any reasonable person could intuit that a developer only has a certain number of productive hours in a day. After that threshold has been reached the law of diminishing returns kicks in and at some point the number and frequency of errors negates the additional hours worked.

Jeff Sutherland the CEO of scruminc wrote a really good post on this subject back in late 2007 called Why Time Sheets are Lamein which he shows with supporting data the adverse effect of trying to shove software developers into the clock punching box.

The problem with having such easy access to RSS feeds is that I find myself subscribing to a lot of them because I have such varied interests. RSS rocks but it can be a bit overwhelming – like drinking from a fire hose – if one isn’t careful.

I just used it to set up a meeting between Ori and me to discuss the UI design for audio.

Try it. You won’t be disappointed.