PI in the Sky – Paul Irvine

Today was fun.  It was the first day that my new product, Basecamp Viewer, was officially available as a freeware product.  Yes, there is a subscription SaaS version coming soon, but this was ready to roll, so why not.

And downloads have started already!  Which is even more fun!

I’m busy working on a Systems Strategy engagement for a local client in the Portland area at the moment – do please check the services I’m now offering both in PDX and across the US.  As a veteran VP of Engineering myself, and a three time CIO Magazine award winner, I often had a “I can get it done myself” perspective too.  But even though I’m doing the same things I’ve done from inside technology departments, I continue to be surprised at how clear and straightforward it can be to diagnose a client’s problems when you are an ‘outsider’ looking in. Whether organizational, process, or technology.   Or perhaps rephrased, I recall now how extraordinarily difficult it can be to see the obvious problems and do something about them, when you are the incumbent.  So much can be fouled up in inter-department politics, precedents, personalities, or assumptions about what other people’s responses can be.  With an outside perspective one can cut through all that and within a very short space of time, craft a strategy that resolves problems, enables growth, sets the foundation for success, and supports the teams that are affected.

I may be biased and looking for more business like this, but I’d have to say that if I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t hesitate to hire a pair of outside eyes on a regular sanity check basis!

If not a dirty word, it certainly seems to have become a misused and abused word that represents many things to many people, and often has little – if anything – to do with the principles embodied in the Agile Manifesto. I’ve now had several CEO’s look to me for an ‘agile’ development team, and it is sometimes hard to really get to the bottom of what they as non-technologists, are really asking for.  Indeed, I’ve even had my own staff members coming from a legacy environment, looking to me for new and ‘agile’ ways of doing things.  I think they are all looking for something like ‘quick and dirty’ and not Agile at all.

I’m not sure that any CEO for any significant enterprise can really tolerate a full Agile approach.  Can you see the conversation with the board, and investors?  “Well, we can tell you exactly what’s coming this month, maybe what’s coming next month, but the big Summer release… not sure what will be in it yet. It depends what’s working in the iterations before it.  But whatever it is, we’ll be pretty confident we can sell it, and it will work!”

Yup, that’s going to go over real well, when budgeting for sales teams, marketing plans, trade shows, coordination with manufacturing, and the other mundane staffing and headcount things that all depend on what’s getting delivered on the roadmap. All those other segments of the business are planned over 12 to 18 months.  Revenue forecasts and expense forecasts are based on what that big “next Summer” release might actually contain.  How many developers on the team is determined by what projects are required to support those goals, and what those projects will deliver.  I believe in Excel terms, we’ve just hit a circular reference error.

I’m not suggesting that the other end of the spectrum – waterfall – is without issues either.  I’d represent it this way… Agile is akin to driving from Oregon to Florida. You know roughly which direction you are heading. South-East. You will see how far you get each day, and make judgments about which route to take at each major intersection based on current local info that you find, and your compass.  You only have  a vague notion of when you might get to Florida. The plus point is you’ve set out with minimal planning, and are making rapid progress from day one. The down side is software development teams are rarely working in isolation with the luxury of when they are supposed to turn up in Florida with the goods!

Waterfall is more like having planned the entire route before you set out, with turn by turn instructions printed out (remember those? it wasnt that long ago…). You have a reasonable certainty of when you expect to arrive. Indeed, everyone else is expecting you on that date, because that’s why you are heading there.  The objective is both date and destination. Your sister/brother/best friend is getting married perhaps!  The issue here is the inflexibility of the plan, and that it doesn’t take into account the local info along the way.  There is risk  that you might not make the date if the unexpected happens along the way. You may have to throw Aunt Maud out along the way, to gain a little speed or fuel efficiency!

I’m sure the happy trail is somewhere in-between. Most places I’ve been aren’t religious zealots about a methodology, thankfully. We’ve borrowed bits of XP, bits of Scrum, bits of Agile, and bits of Waterfall.   Balance in all things… what works for one team, may not work for another.  Somewhere between Waterfall and Agile we’ll find peace and harmony.  And software development will become a relaxing and fulfilling mental exercise.

Did you know that English is the only language where a double positive equals a negative?

Yeah, Right!

I’m new to GTD in any formal sense, but had been looking for an easy to use todo list meets project tasks meets reminder meets organizer meets external memory brain dump type device.  Like many others, I’ve found that managing all the things that you need to do in a day in this highly accelerated technology driven workplace we live in is much much easier if you externalize all the things that hit you and that you are accountable or responsible for.  Try to keep them in your head, and you are dead!  Until recently, I was an advocate of the really simple spiralbound notepad.  It was easy.  Just scribble what you need, when you need it.  Then spend an hour every day porting notes forward to a new list!  It works, but is limited.  Especially when much of what we want to tag, note, remember, etc., is coming off the web.

Evernote is just one app that aims to help.  I tried several options, from the completely inadequate Outlook tasks and notes features, to Ecco, a PIM that died ten years ago but refuses to die, and Microsoft OneNote.  And researched others.

Ecco had me for a while. It is very flexible, very powerful, and very easy to start with.  Once you get GTD going with it though, much of its power and complexity isn’t really needed.  If I were to develop a new personal information manager application though, I would certainly look to Ecco as a blueprint of some very desirable features. Ecco is an end-of-life product though, with only community support.

OneNote from Microsoft has some nice features.  Some very flexible graphic and text features.  I wasn’t very happy with its search/locate UI though.  You still had to click through result sets.

Evernote on the other hand, combined the best of list management with graphic capture (a cool snagit-like thingy is built in), and the email and browser integration is great.  The ability to set up simple folders to follow the GTD ideas, and tags for context and other random tags for non context grouping was very easy.  And being able to search for text in captured graphics! Very cool.

I’ve seen a few users blog whether Evernote could do reminders or ticklers, and while it doesn’t have a calendar or tickler feature, I have found a very easy way to implement it.  Create a notebook called ‘Appointments’ for example, and then create a new note in there for each appt.  Open the attributes up, and set Subject Date to the appt date/time.  It isn’t obvious but you can switch views using the F10 key to do a single line “list” display… then drag the SubjectDate column to be left most… and sort by it. Ascending.

For one off appts, dentist etc, that’s all that’s needed. And when they are complete, I drag the ‘appt’ to my ‘Done’ folder.   But for recurring appts, say a weekly reminder to prepare my summary status report… as soon as I have completed the task, and update my evernote reminder, I simply update the SubjectDate to the Next Action recurrence date that I need.  Not quite as elegant as a full on tickler but it fits in Evernote, and it fits in the a simple GTD folder model.

I’m looking forward to Evernote expanding its capabilities in the tickler area, but for now this works for me.

We’ve all been there, right? You have an applicant for a job, and you are taking up references.  If the applicant has half a brain, then you will be given references that are the best they can summon.  If you do the usual “what can you tell me about Joe?” or even the more searching “How did Joe Engineer interact with the sales team?”, you still won’t get solid answers because those questions are easy to deflect with generic ‘really good’ responses.

Here’s how I get the answers I want… Read more

Hulu TV (http://www.hulu.com/start-up-junkies) is now running all eight episodes from this reality series about life at Earth Class Mail in the early days. It was fun, there are a lot of ‘dead bodies’ along the way, bumps, wins, misses, glitches, successes, all the fun of the startup environment. If you are really dedicated, iTunes has the episodes available for download now, and the DVD’s should be available in September.

Now the 15 minutes is over, we can all get on with creating value for customers and shareholders!

Even if you manage to get to an interview, an engineering hiring manager isn’t going to give you an appraisal of your resume. Your friends and family are somewhat less than objective. Your work colleagues are probably not the ones you want to trust with brushing up your resume, either.

A little while ago, I started giving a few candidates with awful resumes, some pointers pro bono. They committed some cardinal sins in my book, yet clearly they believed they had a sharp resume. They were tripping all my yellow and red flags, and with just a few changes, they might have made interview instead of the express lane to the reject pile.

But it takes time to do that properly. And I can only really offer help to those in the software engineering space. I’m VP Engineering at Earth Class Mail, and actively recruiting at the moment. But I decided that I’d carry on offering the service to a few people each month, and created Resume Redux. I personally do the review either just on your resume, or in the context of the job you are applying for. And I’ll help on all levels, from experienced VP’s and Directors to entry level positions.

Are you getting all the interviews you could? Or are you inadvertently setting off my alarm bells?
www.ResumeRedux.com

Believe it or not… the digital age is catching up with the dear ol’ Postal Service. I just joined up with one of the most amazing new services this side of 2000. Remote Control Mail takes your postal mail, junk and all, digitizes it, and then serves it up securely and safely on the Internet. The applications are endless! Road warriors, snowbirds, divorcing couples, PO Box owners (especially in rural areas), small businesses, virtual businesses, ex-pats or anyone else who wants an address in the USA but immediate delivery via the internet. And that’s before we even start talking about large corporations with expensive mailrooms and an increasingly mobile workforce.
We already have hundreds of customers and Read more

This is an opener about some experiences I have had with Open Source solutions over the last four years that I’d like to share. There are a lot of misconceptions about Open Source, and what you need, and quality and so on, so I thought I’d share some summary experiences. Enjoy! I’d be interested in your experiences and feedback too. As I get to it, I might write more about individual packages.
Software covered includes RT, vqwiki, Plone, IRM, Joomla/Mambo, Apache, Red Hat and Resin, Bugzilla, and WordPress (this site is in Wordpress). Read more