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Friday, January 02, 2004
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Okay, my News is all cleaned out. I missed a lot though 'cause it deletes it after 3 days...guess I'll actually have to visit some sites.
I had a nice, long vacation with my family & friends in Arkansas. Like most of life, we choose to remember what we want and some of my favorite moments (in no particular order) are:
1. Spending the day watching Shelby (She's 13 months old). She's quite the lovable baby girl and gave me lots and lots of hugs and smiles. Her mom has been one of my best friends since I was 11, so it's going to be interesting to watch the baby of someone who's always partly a little girl in my mind grow up.
2. Christmas Day with the family. Good food, lots of laughing. I like that I'm at an age where the kids think I'm cool, but I have enough adult-stuff going on to hang out with some great aunts/uncles/cousins.
3. My new watch. It's perfect.
4. These amazing giggles of a 17-month old named Jordan Grace. Another best friends baby who has an amazing laugh she's not afraid to share with the world.
5. Late nights with friends. Regardless of the amount of e-mails or phone calls, there's no subsitute for the sitting down and talking and talking and talking.
6. A "spa-day" where I got a massage, manicure and pedicure. It's nice to pampered.
7. Oh-so-many hugs.
8. Turning 26. A few different celebrations and such. I like people to sing to me.
9. Late night dominoes. heh. I've actually never done that before, but it was fun.
10. The amazement of how much I missed my life back in Maryland. I was ready for my apartment, my friends, my laptop, my car, my freedom.....my routine!
2:02:43 PM 
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Top 10 Signs your development project is Doomed. 10. After your application starts failing everywhere, you talk to the DBA and he says, “I had to change the names on all the columns because I didn’t follow the company standard. You can still make Friday’s deadline right?”
9. New requirements are added by the business manager so that the application works on his machine.
8. The current application is evolving faster than you can develop the replacement application.
7. Four hours in a requirements meeting were spent debating “extends” versus “includes” for part of a use case.
6. Requirements consist of an Access or Excel application with tons of VBA code. Oh, and you need to fix the bugs while you are at it (we don’t know what they are, but fix them before delivery).
5. “Give us honest estimates for how long the work is going to take. But make sure you finish in 2 months.”
4. Project Management = Microsoft Project
3. When hiring two contract programmers, management asks “We don’t need two computers do we? They can just share one right?”
2. The “Senior Technical Architect” on your web application project, assigned because he has 23 years with the company, has never done web development ever.
And the number one sign your project is doomed…
1. All requirements are critical, ultra-high, or high importance. [Darrell Norton's Blog]
1:53:57 PM
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Right brain / left brain - where are you? from [The Occupational Adventure (sm) Blog] gives a link to see if you are right/brain-left-brain. My summary highlights are:
Rebecca, you are mildly left-hemisphere dominant while showing a slight preference for auditory processing. This overall combination seems to indicate a well-working blend of logic and judgment and organization, with sufficient intuition, perception and creativity to balance that dominance.
You will at times experience conflict between how you feel and what you think which will generally be resolved in favor of what you think. You will find yourself interested in the practical applications of whatever material you have learned or whatever situation you face and will retain the ability to refine whatever knowledge you possess or aspects of whatever position you are in.
By and large, you will orient yourself toward intellectual activities and structure. Though not rigid, you will schedule yourself, plan, and focus on routine and continuity of operations, rather than on changes and disruptions
When changes or disruptions occur, you are likely to consider first how to ensure that such disruptions do The same balance is reflected in your sensory preference. You will tend to be reflective and measured in your interaction style. For the most part, you will be considered objective without being cold and goal-oriented while retaining the capacity to listen to others.
Preferentially you learn by listening and maintaining significant internal dialogues with yourself. Nevertheless, you have sufficient visualization capabilities to benefit from using graphs, charts, doodles, or even body movement to enhance your comprehension and memory.
To the extent that you are even implicitly aware of your hemispheric dominance and sensory style, you will feel most comfortable in those arenas which emphasize verbal skills and logic. Teaching, law, and science are those that stand out among the professions, along with technical sales and management.
1:52:47 PM
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The Blind Leading the Blind.
 Thought you'd enjoy a taste of David Schmaltz's writing. David will be the first author we interview via a teleconference in January. Here David is writing in Winston Brill's Innovative Leader, The Blind Leading the Blind.
David uses John Godfrey Saxe's famous fable "The Blind Men and the Elephant," as metaphor to explore the nature of projects and what we can do to produce success on our teams.
(B)lindness is a continuing feature of work life today. Consider your last project. Didn't it require the enthusiastic contribution of several different specialists, each unavoidably blind to all but his own perspective?
If your project succeeded, did the plan predict the path you ended up following? Chances are you succeeded by figuring out how to blindly lead each other to success, not by following some omniscient leader or predictive plan, but by somehow integrating the disparate perspectives of all of the "blind men."
David offers six steps for dealing with the always-present blindness on project teams.
What You Can Do to See the Elephant
- Be clear about your own purpose for engaging.
- Understand your intentions.
- Extend your trust.
- Let go of how it's supposed to be.
- Stop trying to motivate others.
- Sit in the mess before tidying it up.
Visit his article to read how.
We look forward to kicking off the New Year by having a conversation with David. You're all invited! Get ready by adding The Blind Men and the Elephant, Mastering Project Work to your wish list this holiday season. Better yet, buy two copies from Amazon. You'll get free shipping. You'll have one to give away and one to keep for yourself!
Now, have a look at the announcement, http://leader.halmacomber.com/project_authors.html and follow the instructions you find there to stay informed.
[Reforming Project Management]
1:41:00 PM
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E. V. Lucas. "I have noticed that the people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them."
On this last visit home I realized how odd I am about being on time. Like I get really tense if I'm going to be 5-10 minutes late...but most people don't really care if there's not something else contingent on your arrival. I could stand to be a little more easy-going.
1:38:47 PM
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John Cleese. "If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play."
I'm going to hang this above my toy box in my office! ;)
1:37:35 PM
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Baby vaporizers.  I'm guessing that the Vicks product-naming people aren't science fiction readers: when I read "baby vaporizer," I immediately wondered if it would work on certain adults and yappy dogs as well. Link (via Making Light)
[Boing Boing Blog] heh-heh.
1:20:48 PM
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© Copyright 2005 Rebecca Schwoch.
Last update: 2/8/2005; 2:15:14 PM.
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