A great example of telling a story with pictures:
Crowdsourced Logo and Graphic Design by crowdSPRING
Social Media for Small Businesses Infographic
Getting started with Assembla for non-IT projects
I’m a great fan of Assembla having used it to manage distributed teams on multiple projects for the last year. Assembla.com is a project management tool intended for managing Agile IT projects but it works just as well for non-IT projects. Here is a quick start guide on how to setup a trial account to see if will suit your needs.
1. Select “Choose a Plan and Signup” from the assembla home page: https://www.assembla.com/
2. Select a Plan – Choose group if you have multiple projects and/or want to record peoples time. Single has the ability to store files and have a chat area. Otherwise choose Start.
3. Create a userid on the form provided, then on the next screen, select Manual Payment as the Billing Method half way down the screen, that way you don’t have to enter payment information.
4. The next page is for setting up how assembla works for you. For non-IT projects, select the link “Choose a Workspace Configuration” under step 1.
5. Nearly there! Select the second option “Issue and Bug Tracking for Agile Teams”.
6. Enter a name for your space and click “Create Space” at the bottom of the page. From experience, I suggest for your first space use a dummy name as you will probably want to delete it before you create your first real one.
Now you have a space to play with.
Assembla assumes you are going to do your project in chunks, two week chunks is a popular chunk length. So setup a couple of Milestones first.
Now create tickets for each task in that milestone. There is lots of help available on Assembla, including a video link, so I won’t go into any details.
Create a few tickets for this milestone, then select Cardwall (under Milestones)
Now select your Milestone from the drop down list and you should see all your tickets in the left most column.
You can update your ticket by dragging it into the next column. The workflow stages, New, Accepted, Test can be changed under the Settings menu option.
Click on the little blue triangle on the far left to filter or sort your tickets. Click on the little blue triangle on the right to see the closed ticket statuses.
I like the cardwall. I can see at a glance how each milestone is progressing and what people are working.
That’s just a taster, now explore!
Phoebe Bright is available to help you improve the project management skills and work with you to develop an appropriate set or methods and tools for your organisation.
Rescuing and Revitalisation a Project
Yazzgoth, a software development company based in Cork, Ireland was approaching the final stages of a significant project with a European Security Services organisation and progress was slowing to a crawl. Yazzgoth was one of 5 project teams, across 3 countries and was not the only team struggling to meet deadlines.
I was asked to review the status of the project and act as project manager to bring it back on track as there was only 4 months and the team was becoming demoralised at the lack of progress.
On talking to each of the people on the Yazzgoth team, it was obvious that there was not a lack of skill or enthusiasm on the team so I went back to basics to understand where the problems were.
Step 1 – Understand what the overall objective of the project is and what we are responsible for delivering.
There had been a number of changes of leadership on this project at the client side and a scarcity of high level documentation so it was not easy to discover what the objective of the project was and what the expectations of us were.
Step 2 – Made contact with the other project teams and asked what their tasks and deadlines were and what we could do to help them.
As people were already feeling a bit defensive about the slippages, my approach was to speak to all those in the other teams responsible for delivering tasks what their problems were and how we could work together to help each other meet our deadlines. This worked well and we agreed a few simple changes, particularly around communicating with each other regularly would improve the situation.
Step 3 – Introduced short daily calls for the project management team and another for the developers. This daily call was used to review work done yesterday, tasks for today and to share any actual or potential roadblocks.
These meeting, via skype, s initially took a full 15 minutes as we were tempted to use them to solve problems as well as give our status reports, but we soon got them down to an ideal 5 minutes and organised additional calls to sort out any issues.
Step 4 – Got all outstanding work onto an online ticketing system so we could keep track of current and outstanding tasks.
Once we could see all the work that needed to be done, we could start making real progress. Having all our tasks online also meant we knew what each other was working on, very helpful for me as I was working from home for much of the week.
Step 4 – Introduced a regular cycle of two weekly releases, agreed and prioritised with the product owner in advance.
Once we had a clearer idea of the tasks to complete the project, we started to get into a rhythm two weekly cycles. The week before a new cycle was spent agreeing the priorities for the release and rehearsing the work to be done. Then a week and a half of development and a the remaining couple of days to document, complete testing and do a demo the client of that cycles progress. The following week we analysed our own progress and implemented ideas to further improve our work practises.
Step 5 – Introduced time recording to improve our estimating skills and auditabilty of invoices.
The final, and most difficult, step was to introduce time recording for all so we could get feedback on how accurate our original estimates were. While we did get a better feel for where time was going, our estimating skills were still too optimistic at the end of the project and this whole area of getting useful feedback to help improve the ability of an individual and a group to deliver is a subject I am currently addressing.
So thanks to the hard work of all involved, the project was finished on time (just!) and the client was very impressed by the improvements in our delivery and communication. There were a lot of lessons learnt by all, and I was able to further improve my project management toolkit as a result.
Is your website delivering business benefits?
Website Review Form (pdf)
Just uploaded a Website Review Form to the Resources page. The form has a few questions to help you focus on what, if anything, you need to change about your website.
It’s too easy to get sidetracked on whether you like the design when what is really important is whether the website is doing it’s job.
So let me get sidetracked on this design bit for a moment. Years ago I started a flying school with my cousin Alexander Skeaping and one of our early pupils, Jasper Partington, was a graphic designer who offered to do our branding for us. One of our key criteria was that the company logo needed to be recognisable on the tail of an aircraft wherever it was on the airfield.
The day arrived for the unveiling of the logo. We were not impressed. We didn’t like the colour, you couldn’t read the name of the flying school in the logo etc. Well Jasper was a formidable character and he read us the riot act and I have never forgotten it. It doesn’t matter at all whether you like the design or not, totally irrelevant! The only question is, does it do the job. Does the logo reflect the character of the business? Yes – the purple/pink circle is the symbol for an airfield on a flying map. Can the logo be used on letter heads, online and on the airplanes? Yes. Is the logo instantly recognisable from a distance? Yes. Humbled, we accepted his designs and used them for the life of AirBase on planes, cups, teeshirts with great affection.
Shoreham Airport - Home of Airbase for over 10 years.
The Logo (ignore the grey bits - couldn't find a clean version)
Logo clearly visible on the tail
So getting back to the form. It’s a checklist of items that I use when reviewing an existing website to see what needs to be changed or updated, apart from design!
Purpose – Why was the website setup in the first place and have the reasons changed? A site might be to sell a product online, to provide an online glossary brochure whose purpose it to get people to pick up the phone and call the company. Or it might be one page that says – this is who we are, this is how to contact us. The clearer you can be about what your website does for your business, the easier it is to make it a success.
Measuring Success – How do you know if the website is delivering benefits? Do you know what additional sales you have had as a result of your website? Are people referring others to your website? There are tools out there to help, again be clear about what success is for you.
Future – How will you know when it is time to update or refresh your website? Keep an eye on your competitors websites. Ask friends or colleagues to give an honest opinion on the look and feel. If the site was done more than 4 years ago, you probably need to refresh it, but that does not necessarily mean a rewrite.
Then the form asks a couple of questions on each of the following practicle aspects of the site:
- Content – Appropriate, updated etc.
- Usability – Can users find their way around your site – you are not a good judge of this!
- Findability – Can the people you want to find your site, find it?
- Updateability – Is there someone tasked with updating the site and do they have the skill and access to do so.
Any comments or questions welcome – and before you go there, the cobblers children go shoeless, my own site is not the best example!
Green shoots and old scaffolding boards
Long, long ago I was a great fan of Geoff Hamilton’s Gardener’s World on the BBC. Geoff was a great man for showing us how to knock up useful garden items from a few old boards and some nails. With the untimely loss of Geoff we moved on to a new generation of presenters who reviewed the range of products we could purchase from our local garden centre and I rather lost interest in the program. Two bits of great news. Monty Don is back presenting Gardener’s World, a real gardener and not a bit of garden centre tat in sight. Then, fired with a renewed enthusiasm for gardening programs, I tried RTE’s How to Create a Garden and there were the good old scaffolding boards and how to make your own cold frame. Isn’t it great to see some attention given to build your own instead of buy your own!
Including Jpeg support in PIL on centos box
There are a lot of posts out that say to install the libraries jpeg and jpeg-devel prior to installing PIL, but this did not work for me on Cento. For example this site http://www.jroller.com/RickHigh/entry/installing_pil_python_image_library suggests using the command:
$ sudo yum install freetype freetype-devel jpeg jpeg-devel libpng libpng-devel
Setting up Install Process
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Parsing package install arguments
No Match for argument: jpeg <No Match for argument: jpeg-devel <Resolving Dependencies
–> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
—> Downloading header for libpng to pack into transaction set.
……
Instead use:
$ sudo yum install freetype freetype-devel libpng libpng-devel libjpeg libjpeg-devel
If you have already got as far as installing PIL, delete it from the site-packages directory and reinstall, I use easy_install PIL, and this will rebuild PIL, this time with jpeg support.
——————————————————————–
*** TKINTER support not available
— JPEG support available
— ZLIB (PNG/ZIP) support available
— FREETYPE2 support available
*** LITTLECMS support not available
——————————————————————–
SPCs Talk at Labour Party Environment Forum
Here is what I plan to say – but there is an hours journey to get there – it could all change!
Hello, my name is Phoebe Bright and I’m a member of Cork Environmental Forum, on the executive of Feasta (an Economics think tank), a Long Term Thinker, a Techie and a horse addict. I’m going to speak very briefly, only the role of SPCs, my experience of sitting on one of the Cork County SPCs and a couple of suggestions for how we can make them more effective.
Each County and City Council has a number Strategic Policy Committees made up roughly equal numbers of councillors and external representatives from organisations representing the environment, economic and social pillars. The expectation for SPCs was that they could provide a different perspective during policy development. For example, the policy planning unit might feel they don’t more input into the farmer’s market’s. Should there be provisions in the upcoming Development Plans and if so what? A good question for an SPC. Or, are there enough provisions for dogs in the City? If not, what changes to policy should we consider?
That, as far as I can see from the documentation, was the expectation. The reality for me, and many of my fellow external representatives, was that the SPC had become another tick box on the road to policy implementation. Typically, we would receive documents for the next meeting a few days before the meeting, or at the meeting and we would spend 20 mins reviewing the Retail Policy for the City. As the councillors had already participated in discussion on this policy during it’s development, they had nothing more to say other than to repeat their position on this policy and the external representatives were desperately looking to find something intelligent to contribute from a hasty reading of the document. As we saw these documents near the end of their progress from idea to publication, there was little chance of our input having any impact, even when we were able to make useful contributions. There was an understandable air of frustration from many of those involved.
The SPCs have lately been disbanded and reformed and we hope for better things going forward. I certainly feel the idea of the SPC is valid and could of great benefit in widening the discussion on policy and helping the external representatives and their organisations to better understand the thinking behind policy development and to challenge the mindset of the of the elected councillors.
I would ask you to consider two thoughts going forward, first the questions we ask and second the language we use.
Beth Novak did a talk on for the Long Now Foundation on what Obama’s administration has done on Open Government in the last year, what they have learned and their plans for the future. On President Obama’s first day in office he signed a memorandum on Open Government, committing all the departments and agencies to “transparency, participation, and collaboration. One of the lessons they have learnt to successfully encourage participation and collaboration is to ask good questions. In this case, good questions are SMART questions (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relavent and Time bound) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria. So if you are an elected member and an issue arises during the development of policy, why not suggest that this be brought before an SPC? If you are on an SPC, try to get these types of questions on the agenda.
Beth Novak’s talk on Open Government: http://www.longnow.org/seminars/02010/mar/04/transparent-government/
The second suggestion comes from a gem in the book The Intelligence Advantage . The book talks about how culture is about language, the way we talk about our problems, the way we listen and the way we discuss. If we want to test whether change is happening, then all we have to do is listen to the way that language is used. If that has not changed, the culture is not changing either.
So if we want a different discussion in our SPCs, a different perspective and viewpoint, then we need to change the balance so that the councillors are drawn into a different conversation. At present the Chair of each SPC is part of the council, so my suggestion is to have the meetings chaired or facilitated by an external representative.
I could am happy to share further experiences and ideas for SPCs and open government, so please feel free to catch me in the next break or contact me later.
And what I actually said? I started with a rant on the use of the word sustainable and how meaningless it has become when more than one political party can say we must “return to a sustainable economy”. I did get back on track after this rant but every speaker after me was noticeably careful about using the word, until a senior politician parachuted in to give a speak peppered with the word…
The Language of Change
Dipping into The Intelligence Advantage – Organizing for Complexity by Michael D McMaster a gem of a book, I came across this section, which seems particularly pertinent to our situation in Ireland.
Organisations first appear in Language
Language is at the center of society, cooperation and the coordination of action. All social organization occurs in language. Community is a function of language. How we distinguish those who “belong” from those who do not is by the way they speak. Even when the distinction is based on common practices, these practices emerge from a society where language was the fundamental organizing medium.
A corporation, like a community, is held together by it’s language, given meaning by its language, and is distinguished from other corporations by its language. IBM, Apple and NEC (that dates it!) all have unique language, unique stories and unique ways of speaking. Equally important, their unique ways of understanding things and listening. These ways of speaking, listening and understanding not only constitute the culture of a company, but they also constitute a company’s unique way of organizing, managing and relating to the marketplace….
and further on…
If there is no change in the way that problems are described, the way challenges are spoken about, or the way values are stated, then it is very unlikely that any major change is occurring in that corporation.
I think there is a groundswell of opinion in Ireland that significant change is required in the culture of our public organisations. We will know that our decision makers and politicians also want change when we here a change in the language they use to describe our problems and how they talk about the future.
Installing GIT on Centos 5.4
Following directions from this site:http://www.how-to-linux.com/2009/01/install-git-161-on-centos-52/
I got the error:
[root@tricostar-nwlc git-1.7.0.3]# make prefix=/usr/local all
/bin/sh: curl-config: command not found
GIT_VERSION = 1.7.0.3
/bin/sh: curl-config: command not found
* new build flags or prefix
CC fast-import.o
….
When trying to make GIT. After a bit of googling, found that I needed to include curl-devel as a dependancy so the following instructions worked for me:
yum install zlib-devel openssl-devel perl cpio expat-devel gettext-devel
yum install libcurl3-openssl-dev
wget http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.7.0.3.tar.gz
tar xvfz git-1.7.0.3.tar.gz
cd git-1.7.0.3
make prefix=/usr/local all
make prefix=/usr/local install
Lessons learnt on Smart Meter rollout
Just reading an interesting post on Greenmonks Blog http://greenmonk.net/pge-smart-meter-communication-failure/ on how not to roll out a smart meter system.
The crux of it is that if you want people to change their behavior, you have to make the information they need to adapt highly visible. In this rollout, the company was expecting customers to shift their loads from peak (high cost) periods to off peak (low cost) periods and thereby reduce their overall bills. But there were no displays on the meters giving the current cost of electricity, no way of seeing current consumption or current spend. I previously suggested in this blog, that to reduce our car driving we have the current cost of our journeys displayed in real-time on the car dashboard to keep reminding us how much we have spent. As it stands, we only have the short pain of filling up our tanks followed by a long period of driving for free, and judging from our steadfast reluctance to reducing the time we spend in our cars, fuel price increases don’t lead to behaviour change.
