Tuesday, August 05, 2003

Advance the Front ITS is making serious progress on multiple fronts. Fortunately I have the opportunity to be involved in many of them. I am very excited about UMD and the new web authentication system. UMD is being used in production mode for the Groupwise Instant Messenger system. Synchronization is taking place between the individual e.Directory resource trees (basically the trees that are used to grant LAN access) and UMD and HRE, the HR database. For example, when I changed my password on Groupwise IM it also changed my LAN password. This may sound simple, but it will provide a lot of value to the state as multiple applications and IT platforms use UMD for authentication. Just the costs of password administration alone would make a strong business case for doing UMD, not to mention the provisioning and de-provisioning capabilities and increased security that it offers. I am convinced that many great things lie ahead for UMD. Aside from individual projects and products, I am encouraged by the fact that project and product management are gaining momentum. This is a new way of doing business for ITS. Although we've had our struggles, the amount of collaboration and hard work that is taking place is a credit to the people of ITS. I believe it is ultimately the citizens of Utah that benefit from these improvements. 8:02:20 AM

	Thursday, July 17, 2003

Organized RSS RSS is a powerful content aggregation tool. It is useful in more applications than just blogging. At ITS, we have developed an RSS tool that will make it available to state agencies for creating things like press releases, articles on www.utah.gov and on business.utah.gov, the new doing business in Utah portal and soon to be the home of One-Stop Business Registration. This RSS tool is called news.utah.gov. News.utah.gov is not intended to be a blogging tool for personal weblogs, however it works in much the same way as a personal weblog. It is based on the Movable Type blogging platform, but again, it is not intended to be a blogging tool. The types of news feeds that are out there now are things like "Utah Business News," which is being consumed right now on busines.utah.gov. Control over the feeds that are created will be very strict. News.utah.gov is also an example of a project that used existing code bases to develop an effective application that can run in an inexpensive environment. The environment this is running in is a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) environment. ITS should be adding LAMP to its hosting product portfolio this year. I am the hosting product manager, so I will be working towards that end. 7:04:59 AM

	Wednesday, February 26, 2003

New Web Presence ITS Product Managers, Project Managers, and Customer Relationship Managers have a new presence on the web. We will be useing this space as a place to put documents and other information on our products. My page can be found here. How will this relate to my work weblog, you ask? Well, I will continue blogging, but if I want to link to specific information on a product, I will link to pages based in this new web presence. If you go there how, you will be dissappointed, because I have't put anything out there yet, but don't worry, I will have stuff there soon. 3:42:59 PM

	Friday, February 14, 2003

Fission Fiesta I had interactions today with several of our customers. I am trying to get a feel for what the business managers throughout the State are thinking and what their needs are. I think the strategic planning process that we are going through right now will provide a lot of fuel for the discussion surrounding the appropriateness of ITS' product set. What I mean is that when we complete these strategic plans and present them to the entire CIO/DCIO/ACIO structure, as well as to business managers, we will get the feedback that we need to make decisions that are in the best interest of our customers. It all will fit together because the product requirements documents that I and my peers are writing will support and jive with the strategic planning documents for each major product family, and the strategic planning documents fit in with ITS' overall roadmap and strategy. There is so much work to do, but I really am feeling encouraged by the work that is being done now. I see the possibility of creating as fulling puts it, "critical mass" around product management. We have more radioactive material, and a lot of the cadmium control rods that were in place absorbing neutrons are being raised. We just have to make sure that the reaction is controlled, and that we don't try to power the whole world with our reactor. 2:19:16 PM

	Wednesday, January 29, 2003

From 5th to 3rd In my previous post I wrote about the need for PRDs and strategy. The time has come for me to focus more heavily on producing those documents that are needed for my product. Until now, I have been heavily involved in project management, and in operational affairs. I am going to have to back away from those activities and focus more heavily on writing. This transition from heavy involvement to necessary involvement can only occur under the following circumstances: There are sufficient project plans and project management resources in place to cover project management needs. This is difficult because we have even fewer project managers than we have product managers. Project management is an intense responsibility that requires focus and dogged-ness. Operations and CRMs need to take the lead in customer communications. I shouldn't be worrying about operational communications. Of course, the job of the product manager is to be a customer advocate, but I should not be coordinating testing schedules. Any project that is not UMD, Content Management, or Authentication is going to have to go on the back burner. It is dificult to pull away from activities that accomplished something, like the AT environment project, but I gotta do it. It's like travelling up a hill at 65 MPH and shifting from 5th down to 3rd. The thing is going to make some noise, and it may slow down some, but it has to be done. 1:54:09 PM

PRDs and Strategy One of the largest parts of a product manager's life is writing Product Requirements Documents (PRDs). This document describes the features and functionality and other characteristics for a particular version of a product. Every product should have a PRD, and each new version of that product should be described in new versions of the PRD. The content of the PRD is largely determined by the strategy of the organization for that particular product family. For example, my PRD for authentication will largely be influenced by a strategic document that Bob Woolley is writing in conjunction with a cross-fucntional team. If he says it needs to slice and dice, then my PRD will describe exactly what kind of slicing and dicing it does. Engineering then figures out how it slices and dices and how it will be built. As PRDs align with the overall strategy, ITS will get closer to accomplishing its objectives. 12:12:11 PM

	Tuesday, January 21, 2003

Actuate Progress. We are in the process of creating a strong actuate environment in preparation to migrate to Actuate 6. Part of this process includes beefing up the security on our production and acceptance testing servers. This process will be the focus of the acceptance test environment war room process. We are working to make sure that all agencies needs will be met. We met with a lot of our customers last week and discussed Actuate. Some have specific report monitoring requirements that we are working to meet under the new security schema. The solution we are working on will be mostly automatic, so on-call folks can sleep during the weekend. Also, it is important to keep in mind that we are working to migrate to Actuate 6. The issues listed above are all focused on getting ready to migrate to 6. 9:53:14 AM

	Friday, January 17, 2003

Frenetic Kinetic Anesthetic It sure feels good to be a more permanently attached appendage to this organism which we call ITS. This past week, while being nothing short of hectic and frenetic, has been more enjoyable than the few weeks that I hid in a corner at STG and worked on JSPs. I guess I am attracted to the potential for accomplishing great things. That potential definitely exists at ITS. Pressure also exists, along with the sense that we must deliver. I have spent this week picking up pretty much where I left off on most things. My product families were shifted slightly, but nothing significant was removed from my plate. Instead, another major project/product was added to the mix. I am now the guy for UMD. That right there should be a full-time job. I still have web authentication, Actuate, acceptance test environment, and the immenently important and urgent content managment to name a few. By direction of management I am focusing on three products in particular which are prioritized below: Content Management UMD Web Authentication I am going to try to defer any project management work to project managers. I have a really hard time doing that, but it is the only way I will ever get to concentrate on being a product manager. I am going to be focusing on writing product plans/definitions more, and backing out of the minutia. One thing is certain (relatively speaking): I will be busy for a long time, and if I get everything done that I want to get done, I will enjoy a high level of success. The beautiful thing is that the barriers to getting things done are becoming fewer, and momentum on multiple fronts is gaining. 2:52:22 PM

© Copyright 2003 Dave McNamee. Last update: 8/5/2003; 8:02:27 AM.