Project Management

Thoughts… on plans

November 30, 2011
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I’ve been having discussion regarding plans with some folks recently. It got me thinking and I’ve come to the conclusion that you should keep Eisenhower and Powell’s Axioms in mind, namely: Eisenhower’s Axiom: “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Powell’s Axiom: “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” To this I’d like to add my own: Eugen’s Axiom: “The foundation of a good plan is to rely on those you trust.” It makes the planning quite useful if you know that when the plan becomes obsolete you can move forward with conviction.

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Darth Vader: Venture Capitalist

May 28, 2011
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I’ve been through a number of start-ups and friends of mine are still toiling through theirs. And although I have rejoined their ranks as a CTO in a research-oriented startup I don’t miss the turmoil associated with trying to please investors, customers, and employees all before you have a product. Especially when it seems that you don’t get to include yourself in that mix of who has to be pleased. Like most geeky types I’ve been watched the Star Wars series repeatedly. My kids watch the original three at least twice a year, with my son and I’ve come to notice something: Darth Vader is a venture capitalist. Now, you may think me nuts — I’ve been called that before, usually before heading off on another start-up adventure — however, hear me out. When you listen to Darth Vader motivating the troops or attempting to get the upper hand on the competition (i.e., the Rebel Alliance), he speaks like a seasoned venture capitalist. I’ll provide some examples although this may mean you can never watch the Star Wars saga in the same way again. On Deals I am altering the deal, pray I do not alter it any further. When

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Asylum Seekers

September 26, 2010
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Asylum Seekers

One book I constantly reference is Alan Cooper’s The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. It is an excellent book explaining the difference between what a techie sees are how software should function versus what a normal person sees and wishes software would do. It all boils down to the difference of putting the onus on the developer to make the software as easy and intuitive as possible versus making the poor end-user jump through hoops to get anything accomplished. It’s the notion that whatever is done should be as easy as possible for the programmer to code as opposed to making sure the end-product is something that doesn’t aggravate, confuse, or otherwise enrage the end-user. Cooper further states that software should just be “good enough”. This is a common refrain today, but a few years ago was rather heady stuff. I’ve long believed “good enough” would solve a lot of our troubles but most people in high-tech are perfectionists who spend an infinite amount of time honing their craft and their software to such an extent that it either never gets out or when it does get out is rather useless. In this way Cooper is also proclaiming that Agile

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DRiVE

September 6, 2010
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DRiVE

I pointed out the great video explaining what truly motivates people before. The book just goes into more details, highlighting research and what it takes to truly motivate people. The irony of much of the book is that the answer to how to motivate is simply “Get out of the way.” Throw in some trust and you’ll have folks truly motivated. Of course, it presumes that the folks you’re hiring are capable. But if you’re in any type of company that requires intellectual effort, motivated people are not that hard to find. Keeping them motivated is the trick. And most firms fail by simply failing to realize that so-called “incentives” are anything but. The book is filled with tidbits, such as: “Careful consideration of reward effects reported in 128 experiments lead to the conclusion that tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation … When institutions … focus on the short-term and opt for controlling people’s behaviour they do considerable long-term damage.” (pg. 39) “For artists, scientists, inventors, schoolchildren, and the rest of us, intrinsic motivation … is essential for high levels of creativity.” (pg. 46) “… researchers at Cornell University studied 320 small businesses, half

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On Design

April 20, 2010
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I’m quickly reading through Brooks’ latest tome, The Design of Design. As usual, Brooks is straight up and to the point explaining his views on design and why it’s a solo or, at most, a 2-person task. This makes sense to me, but I tend to be biased. The implementation is a team effort, but not the design. One thing I noticed courtesy of John Cook’s blog is what amounts to two new additions to Brooks’ Law. Brooks’ Law is the famous “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” We can now add: “Many hands make light work” — Often. Corollary: “Many hands make more work” — Always. And what I’d call Brooks’ Law of Design: Most great works have been made by one mind. The exceptions have been made by two minds. Obviously, I highly recommend anything written by Fred Brooks. His Mythical Man Month is a classic that everyone should read, especially project managers. His new book is the same, a must read. I’ve always loved the fact that Brooks has little use for the Waterfall Model. I loathe it, and it seems he does too. I like being in good company .

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Coders at Work

December 14, 2009
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I recently finished reading Coders at Work by Peter Seibel. You can pick up a copy at your local bookstore or on online at places like Chapters or Amazon. You can read Peter’s blog here, also well worth visiting. I found it a great read, though there are a number of typos, format errors, and grammatical mistakes. I do also find he should have cleaned up the format a bit. It’s in an interview format, which is fine, but there are places where it could have flowed better. Sometimes there’s a single interjection by either the author or the coder being interviewed. I didn’t quite see the point as those small interjections didn’t offer much, if anything. However, overall, I really enjoyed the book. There are some nice tidbits, including the overall dislike of C++ — with which I can sympathize. While reading the book I decided to tag passages I thought were insightful or interesting. Here’s a summary. Jamie Zawinski   (7) Brad Fitzpatrick  (7) Douglas Crockford  (12) Brendan Eich  (7) Joshua Bloch   (7) Joe Armstrong   (9) Simon Peyton Jones    (4) Peter Norvig   (4) Guy Steele   (14) Dan Ingalls   (7) L Peter Deutsch  (13) Ken Thompson   (9) Fran Allen   (4)

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The Management Myth

September 11, 2009
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I’m reading Matthew Stewart’s The Management Myth. It’s an excellent book and I recommend it highly. Although I hope to write a bit of a review once I’m through the book, this post, however, concerns a quote from his book that just struck me on a number of levels. Strategy makes sense as a project only in the context of uncertainty, or, more generally, in a context where pure reason will not deliver a definitive answer to the question “what is to be done?” But a purely rational framework … leaves no space for such “irrationality.” So the framework solves strategic problems only in a context where there is no possibility that such problems will arise. A stunning statement. And it reminds me oh so much of Project Management, especially as applied to software projects — which, to be honest, are highly irrational. However, we try to push some form of framework atop a project only to watch projects flounder the more tightly we adhere to a given framework or project management strategy. Stewart’s book reminds me of deMarco’s recent paper in the IEEE on Project Management and this choice quote: My early metrics book, Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement,

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Free

July 11, 2009
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Just read Chris Anderson’s Free online via his online blog. You can get it in a variety of formats if you read through recent entries there, including an audio format. Note that the book is available for free but not if you’re outside the US. The audio book is free regardless, it seems. It’s an interesting read, but a quick read as well. I could probably summarize the whole book as follows: Give away something that’s common or easily created in abundance while selling something that is rare or precious or more fully featured to those who wish a more intimate, more private, or simply more extensive instance of the thing you are selling. Thus, he’s proposing that that which has become a commodity — too cheap to meter, say — should be given away or provided in an open fashion. That which is rarer, say the statistical analysis of some data, should be sold to those wishing access to it and then at a premium. He even uses his own book as an example. The audio book is literally free (gratis). You can download it and listen to it. However, the abridged version is somewhere in the neighbourhood of

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Density

July 6, 2009
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I’ve long been complaining — some would say bitching — about how verbose it is to code in many languages today. In many cases I am sorry witness to people programming in C/C++ or Java and writing thousands upon thousands of lines of code only to end up with a piece of code that coudl easily have been expressed in a denser language in a few hundred lines of code. Today I came across a nice table produced by Larsson Omberg comparing the code required to do some value decomposition in Mathematica, Matlab, and Python. It’s from 2005 but much of this probably still holds for his example.  What we see is the following: Mathematica: 276 lines of code Matlab: 52 lines of code Python: 71 lines of code What we see is a density advantage of 5 times for Matlab and about 4 for Python over Mathematica. And Mathematica is already a dense language. Imagine coding the same solution in C/C++ or Java? We’d probably see at least twice as much code over Python for C/C++ and Java. That means the Mathematica code would be 10 times as dense, an order of magnitude. What that means is that on

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Why I Hate Programming

May 29, 2009
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I had a chat with an old friend last night about a bevy of CS things and we came to why I haven’t programmed much the past decade or so. It’s not that I can’t. I had to for one of my Ph.D. courses. It’s just that I find it too low bandwidth. It’s a general problem I have. I find many things too low bandwidth. That includes pursuing a Ph.D. wherein they want you to know all kinds of minutae while I would prefer to just ask someone else to do that work for me. Why do I need to know about probability? I’ll just hire someone to do that for me. It’s obviously my entrpreneurial streak, but really, why would anyone want to know everything? Seems like a pointless effort/exercise. And thus my take on programming, and my missive from yesterday. Most programming languages are way too verbose. And being someone who likes high bandwidth tasks it’s been easier for me the past 20 years to get someone else to code while I just orchestrate what needs doing. Over time I’ve simply left coding behind as its too low bandwidth requiring too much time for what I perceive

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Musings

A blog of my musings. Some folks find it interesting and so I continue. Hopefully it will remain fairly interesting. At worst, it'll keep me writing orthogonally to my day job.

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