Online project management resources: shared

Some of our readers would like to share resources they've found useful. Isn't that what blogging is all about?

The first relates to project management tools. See Squeezed Books: Online Guide to Project Management Resources.

The site gives a short review of several tools and how they can prove useful in projects. They range from cloud-based tools, open source, apps etc. and cover such software as : Zoho, Microsoft Project, Teamlab, Campfire, Basecamp, Huddle, Binfire, the jxProject, Dot Project, Task Juggler, Open Workbench, Gliffy, GQueues, gTrax, and Google Drive among others. Any of these ring a bell with you? Are you using them or others like them?

The second resource that's recommended is 10 Tips for Project Management Prosperity.

Although these are tips for general project management, you'll recognise their value. We major on all the aspects in this blog. Perhaps the Tip Number 9, Test Deliverables, seems to lean towards the older waterfall methodology of software development rather than the Agile approach, but the principle remains valid.

Many thanks to Stacy and her students. Anyone else like to share? We're listening.

To program or not to program ...

... that is a question that is getting an increasing airing these days, especially when it comes to schools. Following hot on the subroutines of the BBC Micro anniversary the Sinclair Spectrum celebrated its 30th birthday this week. More on this via the Register. Now the Raspberry Pi is finally reaching its market and the low price and included easy and not-so-easy programming languages [including Scratch, Python, Java and C/C++] would make it an ideal schools machine. ICT is not synonymous with spreadsheets and data-prep after all.

I read about the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones's description of attending a coding course recently. The story is on the BBC web site. This appeared to be mostly to do with HTML and CSS with some JavaScript for good measure and certainly exercised some Register readers (and their ever-readable ringmaster Andrew Orlowski) as to what the value of this was, and even whether using HTML and CSS was even coding. Probably not ... but I continue to be frustrated on a regular basis by the lack of logic that seems to permeate CSS which might even make it anti-code! But enough of my problems.

I've long held the view that to manage a process you should know something of how it works. Up until the latest version of Managing Interactive Media we included a number of technical backgrounders on the component parts of multi/interactive media – such as audio, graphics and programming – to help this process. The final versions of these, from the third edition, are available free on the web as PDFs. If you read the testimonials from the course RCJ attended you will see that many of the executives who attend such things (run by a company called Decoded ... of whom I must say I have no direct experience) are of the same view.

When we have a better-than-skin-deep understanding of technology, two things happen: we have better ideas and we also treat our internal and external partners in a considerably more effective manner.

Says Mel Exon of BBH Labs. I couldn't agree more.

I would add that in my experience the technical people you work with will appreciate you more if you have a little experience of their expertise. At the very least you'll have more vocabulary in common.

[Bootnote: Should have invited RCJ on our course!]

Digital Archiving – who should, and, what to archive?

Happy New Year.

It is timely to address the thorny issue of archiving projects because, as with the other aspects of digital project management, this area has matured and continues to develop in its own right. As developers, we have encouraged you to systematically archive each of your projects to protect yourselves from issues about the project being raised later by your clients, any companies that take them over, or even increasingly in this present economic climate, administration companies.

However, archiving has been a wider society issue for several years with national interests like museums, libraries, universities and governments taking the lead in recognising the importance of harvesting, defining and providing access to the vast online information resources. Software tools for each of these stages have multiplied to the point that now archivists have to understand the differences between them and assess which suits what they need best.

• See for a Government level example : www.guardian.co.uk
  
• See for a library level example: www.bl.uk
  
• See for an academic level example: www.data-archive.ac.uk
  

We've realised that perhaps you need to go further with archiving than before. Now you should be seen to recommend that your clients take archiving their own online resources seriously. It is an area that needs defined personnel resource, expertise, a strategic perception and an understanding of the social and legal implications for an organisation. For example, in the Digital Curation Centre’s 2010 report Web Archiving, Alex Ball defines points under the section Motivations for Web Archiving, Page 5, that demonstrate an organisation might need access to their historical online resources for audit, investigation and/or freedom of information obligations. He notes that if a site provides advice or guidance, the precise wording and presentation may be questioned if the guidance is called into question later. This has immediate relevance for any financial clients you have from pension providers to banks. Do your clients expect you to archive because nothing has been stated? Would they perhaps take the opportunity to use that excuse to imply blame on you if they were asked specific questions later? You never know! So better that you are seen to encourage them to take their own archiving seriously, surely. Alex covers many interesting points in a very readable report. It is worth a scan, particularly the Tools Employed section where there's a useful summary of the type of tools and their focus.

Are website gremlins ‘black swans’?

Well, no they aren’t strictly – but what are black swans? Now, this is an interesting project management concept from IT. Black swans in project management terms are catastrophic risks that happen rarely but when they do, they have dire consequences.

We have used IT project management concepts of risk management in the past as the closest to our field of developing iMedia. The classic risk management assessment asks you to assess the risks to your project, starting with the most frequent and important, so that you control these away in the course of the project by various means. But, black swans would appear low on the traditional assessment, if at all. They are low probability but high impact. They are rare in threatening the business and if and when they do occur, humans have tended to sorted them out onerously. However if the technical system is not designed to deal with them and people come to rely on the systems, it can be too late once someone recognises what is going on. Also, the consequences to the business can be compounded by other factors happening at the same time that have nothing to do with the software.

Take a good look at the BBC Technology article on Black Swans earlier this week, where Auto Windscreens is cited as having been the second largest company of its type in the UK but after trying to implement a new IT system, it went into administration in February.

We have the Boo.com story and the dot.com bubble as salient lessons in our sector – hope you’re all old enough to know about those! The article centres on research from Oxford Uni investigating massive IT project budget over-runs and the causes. Perhaps we should be thinking black swans too? Upgrades (for example) can be a big problem for shared hosting, since updating a web or database server on a system where they are shared by hundreds of different web sites risks some of them being broken by the changes. Unfortunately this results in shared hosting continuing to run using out-of-date software, including missing out of security patches.

And the website gremlins? This is a common concept where small changes to a site can have radical and unforeseen consequences. We’re quite used to the idea that any change must be checked out thoroughly and that it can have unforeseen impacts. Most of us rely on systematic testing to check out any changes, I imagine. But where non-professionals are building and repairing sites often for themselves, these gremlins cause lots of angst and can affect business badly too. Here are some examples to bring a smile to your faces – unless you recognise some of the consequences!

• P9 forum has a classic rant – a bit old, but amusing nevertheless (I like the boffinus notaclueii).
• Cast Fireplaces saw a change in customer behaviour when their website developed gremlins.
• Smart Telecom aren’t immune either as a rant on their Broadband Customer Support thread shows

Look out for ‘Black Swans’ now!