Category: IT and Project Management

One of the skills that we need to learn is “when NOT to take action.” In present times when almost everything is driven by benchmarks and deadlines, sometimes it may be prudent to take a broad overview of the various factors involved in a project and know when you should stop doing some things instead of forging ahead and finding yourself stuck between a rock and the very hard place.

It may sound counter-intuitive, but sometimes the best way to move forward is to either standstill or take a step back.

As professionals, we should not need to remind our colleagues to follow-up on requests that we have sent to them either via email or otherwise. As much as possible, we should reply to emails as soon as possible and if a quick reply is not possible, then the least we can do is to send an email reply stating that it may take a while to fulfil the request.

I heard of a really sad anecdote from a friend: there was this Government/Temasek-Linked Company (which will remain unnamed) where Person A actually sent an email praising Person B for constantly harassing Person A’s team members to get things done. What takes the cake is that this email was actually copied to everyone involved in the project (total of about 20-30 people)! I think that was a seriously disturbing case of organisational dysfunction and nothing to be proud about. My personal opinion is that Person A requires self-reflection…

In short, the Bible puts it succintly: Do unto others what you want others to do unto you.

I did feature OpenProj as one of my open source recommendations not too long ago, and it has since been acquired by Serena Software. However, there is an irritating bug with the software where some of the task dates are calculated wrongly.

In this case, you’ll need to download a MS Project Viewer so you can view the files correctly. One software that was recommended by my colleague that represented the date correctly is LiveProject. You won’t be able to edit files though…

There’s a saying that you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

It’s true in the sense that sometimes its very hard to get a grip on reality and the progress that a project has made unless you institute mini and major milestones for project members to keep track of.

Personally, I do not like to have “mammoth” project milestones where they appear on the project progress chart week after week. It can get quite demoralising at times for the project members involved in that milestone task and it may also make it difficult to explain progress to higher management. When managing projects, it will be better to cut the mammoth milestones into mini milestones so it will be easier to track progress as will as improve morale.

For a well-established organisation like Oracle, I can’t believe that they actually let this issue past their QA. As of now, there are still quite a lot of companies worldwide that are using Oracle 9i as they may not have the impetus to upgrade to the latest Oracle database. So, it is not unexpected that the Oracle 9i client will be installed on present-day machines.

When the Oracle 9i client was installed on my notebook, I immediately experienced problems with my Java applications. At first I was wondering if Java was acting up and I restarted my notebook. When the problem persisted, I ran Java app from the system console and found an exception that a particular package could no longer be found! This was strange as I did not change my Java installation.

Turns out that the Oracle 9i client installed an older version of Java in order to operate properly. I do not fault Oracle for this. What I was incredulous about was that they changed the universal PATH settings used by all Windows applications and probably broke a vast majority of modern day Java applications! And we all thought an Oracle is supposed to be all-knowing… (hmm… or did it knowingly break my Java apps???)

In armed forces real-time operations where decision making can be a matter of life and death, the leaders often do not have the benefit of time to ponder over their decisions and analyse decisions fully before deciding on a course of action. Oftentimes, having 70% to 80% of information is enough to take action.

In certain situations, this can also be carried over to the working world. Too often, people are afraid to take action unless they have all available information. This may lead to “paralysis by analysis” as no one dares to take the next step.

If you ever find yourself in a position where you are “stuck” because you’re trying to gather ALL possible information, just take a step back and see if you can make do with 70% of the information and proceed with a suitable level of confidence. Remember, in this dynamic environment where business moves so fast, it is essential for decision making to be fast too.

I’m commenting from an IT perspective, but if you did not observe diversification in your personal investments, then you might appreciate it a bit more ever since the financial turmoil began.

When you form a project team, I’ve observed that good project managers tend to bring in people from diverse backgrounds so that all bases are covered and a good variety of viewpoints and opinions can be obtained. If a project manager is weak or feels insecure, he may recruit people with similar skillsets to him — albeit weaker — into his team so he can exert his superiority and feel that he is in control of things.

Of course, that is non-beneficial to himself and his company and it is self-serving and does not brood well for the project. A good leader on who knows his weaknesses, acknowledges them, and teams up with people who can complement his weaknesses. Having said that, the leader should still possess basic skills in his weaknesses, otherwise his team members may get frustrated having to explain basic ideas and concepts.

Then you’ve got to switch to the Process Explorer! I was having some problems with undocking my office Lenovo notebook from the docking station because Windows insisted that my dvd drive was in use when I was very sure that was not the case because there was no DVD disc in the drive at all!

Suspecting that it was a problem with an errant process, I downloaded and launched Process Explorer and found the culprit quickly. Just by searching for the “cdrom” handle, I found out that it was (tada!) Microsoft Search Indexer that was causing me grief. Turning off the service and disallowing it from starting automatically solved my problems.

In the course of managing and planning for projects, you will inevitably need to cater for training the users to use your system. What usually happens is that you will not be able to get all users to attend the training for the rollout of your spanking new system as they have their daily work to handle. You will either have to conduct multiple training sessions in order to reach all your users, or you will instruct a few users and leave them to pass their knowledge on to their colleagues.

Both choices are not very ideal. The former is not a conducive use of your time, while the latter is not a reliable method — let’s say your users can retain 80% of their knowledge (which is already obscenely optimistic…). At first glance, this may not seem to be a bad thing. However, note that these same users are expected to pass on their knowledge, and they may not have the proper presentation or training skills. If their colleagues have an 80% knowledge retention as well, then the end result is only 64% of what you originally taught!

Through my experience, one feasible way to improve knowledge retention and facilitate training is to use a screen capture software like CamStudio. You can take screen captures of various system scenarios and upload them to a corporate website where users can download and view if they need a refresher in the future. Although this may seem to be time-consuming, it is an invaluable resource especially if you are rolling out a brand new system that no one has seen or used before.

One of the tools that I absolutely cannot live without at work is Freemind, the open source mind mapping tool.

In my previous workplace, I was only assigned a desktop, so I was unable to utilise Freemind fully. Now when I have my own notebook, I have unleashed the full usefulness of the tool: organising my thoughts, note-taking during meetings, etc.

Why don’t you try it out for yourself? It’s really easy to use and before long you’ll also find it indisposable. Go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/freemind/ to download a copy and try it out yourself!