The Passionate Project Manager Percolating

Google's "fatal flaw" kind of explains Google+

Wed, 02 May 2012 13:19:20 -0400

“And therein lies the company’s biggest flaw in my estimation—impatience with those not quick enough to grasp the obvious truth of Google’s vision.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304911104576444363668512764.htm…

Google’s expectation regarding Google+ seems to be that we would all dump Twitter and Facebook for Google+, thereby accepting “the obvious truth of Google’s vIsion”. I’m guessing that this probably explains why it is impossible to share to Twitter and Facebook from Google+ (and vice-versa). The end result? I rarely post to Google+.

I’d post this on Google+ but I can’t from here. This post will show up on Twitter and Facebook, though, as well as a few other sites.

So much for my accepting Google’s “obvious truth”, eh?

Of these scarily ambitious start-up ideas, my favourite is replace email. Yes, please.

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 12:39:36 -0400

Email is so broken that it stuns me that we still haven’t replaced it yet. But it needs to be replaced with something that’s just as easy (if not easier). And, no, not Google Wave.
As for the “sufficiently smart compiler”? Yeah, that one went kind of over my head.
http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

Of these scarily ambitious start-up ideas, my favourite is replace email. Yes, please.

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 12:36:02 -0400

Sure, Free is a business model. Just don't forget the revenue part.

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:11:03 -0400

I loved Chris Anderson’s book Free which I listened to…wait for it…for free. (On iTunes, in case you’re wondering.)
But even Chris preaches the idea that Free has to lead to money eventually, whether it’s the freemium model (aka Flickr), give me your data and I sell advertising (Facebook), or sell a toy and provide the website for free (Webkins).
As put by this blog post from Pinboard (link below): free forever and for everything just can’t work.
The irony of typing this in my Posterous blog (free) on my iPhone using a (free) app is not lost on me…

http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/

I'm celebrating a milestone 18 months in the making with a Pinot Grigio #PMOT

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 13:55:16 -0400

See the full gallery on Posterous

I threw in a risotto ai funghi misti just for fun. (And a tiramisu. Because of the 18 months part.)
Celebrating milestones is the first rule of project management, isn’t it?
On Fridays, it most certainly is.

Trying to understand #occupywallstreet? Read these. Then get angry.

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 20:41:06 -0400

First, read about who are the 99%.

Then understand that “It’s the Inequality Stupid”.

Then get angry.

The centuries-old problem of information overload.

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 15:25:57 -0400

via boston.com

I love it how history teaches us, over and over again, that nothing is “new”. Including the Internet.

This video makes me laugh. Because the hydrocoptic technology is soooo Rockwell. ;)

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 03:42:59 -0500

Even though I am “only” a Project Manager, even I know that a much more effective solution to the side fumbling problem, rather than the cumbersome fitting of six (6!) hydrocoptic marzul vanes to the ambaphascient lunar wain shaft, is to replace the lunar wain shaft entirely with the much more elegant fault-tolerant optomodal cavity, which creates the population inversion condition at the outset.

I mean, hello!

But then, after all, I did work for Honeywell for four years…

An anthropological look at how Relationships influence Language, with lovely art thrown in. So many levels of awesome.

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 14:15:04 -0500

via youtube.com

This is awesome on so many levels: how relationships affect innuendo in language, the power of crowds (my favourite subject), and why you should avoid powerpoint bullets in a presentation (didn’t feel those 10 minutes go by).

Oh look, there’s a video on how we broke Capitalism!
(And she stayed in her pajamas all day glued to the computer.)

Tunisia, Egypt...is the corporate monarchy next? I can only hope...

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 21:04:40 -0500

via youtube.com

Even the lawyers have discovered the value of project management. So what are you waiting for?

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 12:41:30 -0500

I attended a great event at PMI-Montreal this morning: apparently there’s this wave of change in the legal field. Lawyers have discovered the value of Project Management to stay competitive, and add value to their customers.

No fricking kidding, eh?

Being a mother of teens is a prerequisite to survival as a project manager.

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 13:28:29 -0500

My advice gets ignored at home. (I only have 40+ years of experience, what do I know?)

My advice gets ignored at work. (I only have 20+ years of experience, what do I know?)

This is surely my Mom’s revenge, isn’t it?

If you know more about other companies' performance than your own, maybe it's time to start looking at data.

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 16:58:39 -0500

Spent the day touring another company (manufacturer in the food industry) as part of a networking group. They have data EVERYWHERE.

You can’t improve what you can’t measure.

Sounds so obvious, doesn’t it?

It's Digital Scrapbooking Day today. Go ahead, let your right brain have fun. It'll make you smarter. Daniel Pink says so. #PMOT

Sat, 06 Nov 2010 10:47:47 -0400

I’m working my way through Daniel H. Pink’s book “A Whole New Mind”. His basic premise is that any right brain activity makes you smarter.

See? I always knew that my hobbies, especially scrapbooking, make me a better Project Manager. And now I have proof.

Ha!

via danpink.com

This week I've had many discussions about what is, and is not, project management. My blog's about to explode...#PMOT

Sat, 16 Oct 2010 16:05:00 -0400

…as soon as I put my head back together.

This is going to get…interesting.

The Project Management Plan IS the Project Quality Plan. So there. Thoughts? #PMOT

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 13:59:28 -0400

Help me settle a PM geek argument. In cases where your project has an external customer (who is paying for your project), I say that the PM Plan IS the Quality Plan, because it describes how you are you are planning to manage the project in such a way that the customer’s requirements are being met. Thus, there is no need to have a PM Plan AND a Quality Plan. The PM Plan IS the Quality Plan.

All right?

All right.

Let me know what you think…

Tattoos. Body-piercing. Men walking around with babies. And enough learning to make my head explode. #wcmtl #pmot #in

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 19:08:00 -0400

A mere $40 got me two days worth of learning of all things Word Press at the extraordinary Word Camp Montreal. I’m already done one day, can’t wait for tomorrow. (Yes, I am doing this for fun.)

Here’s how I could tell that this was not your typical PMI* or corporate event.

No suits or ties. Lots of flip-flops, converse shoes, tattoos and body-piercing.
Did I mention the men walking around with their babies? (This is, after all, Montréal.)
I was one of the oldest people in the room. (No, I am not that old.)
They gave out a Twitter hash tag at the beginning of the event. (I am on Twitter…but are you?)
Besides WordPress (of course), we talked about Facebook, Twitter, SEO and Google Analytics all day. (Are you still afraid to open a Facebook account?)

And I learned so much, in one day, that my head exploded. Fortunately, I was able to put it back together again for tomorrow.

Learning is always a good thing.

As for getting out of your comfort zone? A much better thing.

* PMI = Project Management International. No tattoos or body-piercing at our events. Most definitely not.

Why I moved one of Tumblr blogs to Posterous but didn't move the other one. And still kept the original one. Got that?

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 17:53:48 -0400

Well, I finally moved one of my Tumblr blogs over here to Posterous. Here’s why:

1. Less really is more. Sure, Tumblr has more themes. But have you ever tried to go through them all to pick one? It takes forever. And then you try another one. And then you can’t remember where you found the first one. Before you know it, three hours have gone by. Posterous has about 10 themes. Sometimes, it’s better not to have too much choice. (But I have to say that the Tumblr theme that I finally found sure is pretty…)

2. Tags are Zen. It really bothers me how I can’t find my tags easily on my Tumblr log. (And, yes, I have tried about 10,000 themes, they’re all the same.) I’m a tag person. I love tags. Tags make me happy. But most of the Tumblr themes have the tags hidden in the archive views and it takes me 10,000 clicks to get there. My Posterous blogs have my tags on the home page, right where I need to see them. Zen.

3. Control over my auto-posting. With Posterous, I can get very specific about auto-posting. Some stories I want to post to both Twitter and Facebook. Sometimes it just a Twitter story. Sometimes it’s a family-and-friends story that goes only to Facebook. When I added Flickr for my photo stories, I got even happier. I love that I can control my auto-posting (although it did take me a while to figure out how to do it, and that I have the maximum control in the web view, as long as I remember to click on the Post Options before I post.) With Tumblr, it just everywhere all at once. So I had to disable Facebook. Yuk.

4. The title is the story in Twitter. I really didn’t like how Tumblr was auto-posting to Twitter: the title would show up, and then the rest of the story, which of course was more than 140 characters, so the tweet would end up looking incomplete. I put a lot of thought into my titles in my Posterous / Tumblr blogs: the title is the 140-chararcter story. There’s just a little bit more information in what comes after the story: a picture or two, maybe more details. But Tumblr was mashing them all together. No. Wrong.

Having said this, I did keep this Tumblr for collecting my little bits of scrapbooking inspiration all over the web. Although I can’t easily see my tags (grrr), I do enjoy how this gallery-type theme lets me see everything at a glance. Besides, other scrapbookers have found me and I’d hate to disappoint them by leaving…

My take on Posterous versus Tumblr is this: Posterous is great for telling stories, and for controlling to whom you want to tell these stories. I find Tumblr easier to collect bits of photo inspiration all over the internet.

But here’s the really ironic thing: I kept my old Tumblr blog because it’s just so darn pretty. Besides, I can auto-post from new Posterous blog to the old Tumblr blog.

Now that’s having your cake and eating it too…!

If you handcuff a wiki with hierarchy, do you get a slow-wi?

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 19:43:48 -0400

“Wiki” means fast in Hawaiian. But if you impose a hierarchy on a wiki (who can write what, when, who can approve it), do you still have a wiki?

I say, no. You’ve just killed your wiki.

Stupid hierarchy.

Sucks the fun out of all the fun things that we come up with on the internet and web 2.0.

The Tipping Point (yeah, me too)

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 23:18:40 -0400

This book’s a best seller for a good reason. Because it’s a really good book. My principle head-exploding moments were:

(1) Weak ties (vs strong ties). A weak tie is why I am where I am. And why I have so much fun on Facebook. This one really has me thinking.

(2) The Dunbar number, applied to keeping big companies “small”, specifically the story of Gore and Associates. Oh. My. God. So in keeping with my current obsessions on hierarchy.

(3) The Broken Window Theory. If you want to fight crime, fix the broken windows and paint over the graffiti. Loved the story of applying this to the New York subway.

All of which has my head spinning, as I think about how do I make Sharepoint sticky, how do we get crossing on crosswalks to tip, why are we still stuck in 160 year old paradigms…?

I’m getting there.

The Passionate Project Manager Percolating

Google's "fatal flaw" kind of explains Google+

Of these scarily ambitious start-up ideas, my favourite is replace email. Yes, please.

Of these scarily ambitious start-up ideas, my favourite is replace email. Yes, please.

Sure, Free is a business model. Just don't forget the revenue part.

I'm celebrating a milestone 18 months in the making with a Pinot Grigio #PMOT

Trying to understand #occupywallstreet? Read these. Then get angry.

The centuries-old problem of information overload.

This video makes me laugh. Because the hydrocoptic technology is soooo Rockwell. ;)

An anthropological look at how Relationships influence Language, with lovely art thrown in. So many levels of awesome.

Tunisia, Egypt...is the corporate monarchy next? I can only hope...

Even the lawyers have discovered the value of project management. So what are *you* waiting for?

Being a mother of teens is a prerequisite to survival as a project manager.

If you know more about other companies' performance than your own, maybe it's time to start looking at data.

It's Digital Scrapbooking Day today. Go ahead, let your right brain have fun. It'll make you smarter. Daniel Pink says so. #PMOT

This week I've had many discussions about what is, and is not, project management. My blog's about to explode...#PMOT

The Project Management Plan IS the Project Quality Plan. So there. Thoughts? #PMOT

Tattoos. Body-piercing. Men walking around with babies. And enough learning to make my head explode. #wcmtl #pmot #in

Why I moved one of Tumblr blogs to Posterous but didn't move the other one. And still kept the original one. Got that?

If you handcuff a wiki with hierarchy, do you get a slow-wi?

The Tipping Point (yeah, me too)

Even the lawyers have discovered the value of project management. So what are you waiting for?