I’m having fun with my phone again.

Then the kicker… it was FREE!! With VZW online instant rebates, and my new-every-two credit, it was entirely and astoundingly FREE! Sign me up! How wrong can I go??

So what else do you get? I’m a three day old user so far, but I’m impressed. The phone itself feels outstanding. substantial yet small and comfortable. really solid. the keyboard is better than droids. webOS lives up to the hype too. a really smooth multi-tasking experience out of the box. And the built in calendar/contacts/mail work perfectly for me because I run three calendars and ten email inboxes (check my side links out… I have several business adventures running). So this thing not only brings all my inboxes in, it syncs and merges my calendar into one, and handles the contacts the same way too. It can integrate to your facebook, linkedin, or twitter, google, exchange, any imap or pop email. And its easy to set up. and the UI is very well thought out to handle all that. It wasnt an afterthought.
If you want faster access, and you are near an available wi-fi hotspot, you can switch to using the wi-fi instead of your carrier data plan. It is really good. For me its outstanding as I cannot get any signal actually in my house from any carrier – even VZW.
And if you need to use your Palm Pre Plus as a wifi hotspot, just pair your laptop with bluetooth (if not built in to your laptop, you can get a bluetooth USB dongle for about $15). Surprisingly, try Barnes & Noble for best price and free shipping!
The apps catalog is often cited as weak, but quite frankly there is nothing more I need right now. Having 100,000 poop applications? I saw some stats the other day that showed that over 80% of all app downloads from iphone app store are uninstalled within the first 30 days. I’d rather have a few good ones that worked really well. And Palm Pre Plus with webOS works exceptionally well. I’m a happy camper.

Did I mention the big surprise? This phone was free!
Hope you found this useful.

And if you get the chance check out the Youtube performance of her doing a live rehearsal with an incredible use of looping and layers of voice and instruments.  Live.  Solo.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25VGdNU3nrU

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!

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!

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.

Here’s how I get the answers I want…

Instead, ask the reference about the project team the applicant worked in, and drill to some specific other project roles, not just the applicants role.  “so Joe was the main project lead? What was your role?”.  The referee is now responding about their own role in relation to those projects success. This usually sheds a different light. Your goal here is for the referee to disclose their own project accomplishments, which your applicant may be taking credit for.

You can also lead off with a feint question which isn’t quite according to the applicant’s resume, but is close, such as “So Joe was the technical architect?”  “Oh no… he was the project lead, but Dennis was really the designer and architect”.  The only advantage you possibly have in getting to a real understanding of the applicants abilities, when discussing with an applicant provided reference, is that you have the applicant’s resume in front of you, and you know what has been claimed.  The reference usually does not!

It’s not entrapment, or trickery, you are just trying to elicit the facts from the claims.  The reference won’t even know whether he has confirmed or contradicted the resume, and you should not indicate either way.  Assess each reference’s responses in a balanced manner with other reference responses and make your judgment.

Calling references is never a ‘rubber stamp’ even if it is right at the end of the interview process.

Shawn Lane – Amazing