After watching Guy’s Kawasaki presentation video I got sort of interested in stuff related to stratups and venture capital. Not surprisingly I met Guy’s name here and there while exploring the topic.

Everything turned out to be not as simple as it seemed at first. There are several critic articles I came across on Guy’s VC activities: The curse of Guy Kawasaki and COFI v. KOFI. Well, that once again proves that there is no gods among us and everybody can make a mistake.

Every once in a while I see situations which have fairly strait forward projections on software development (and in fact other customer oriented businesses). A week and a half ago I came to my bank to order a reissue of my MasterCard Standard which was about to expire. They said that for my being a good client they can offer increased credit line. I agreed. But this operation required me close my expiring card and open a new one. Not a big deal, almost the same process as with simple reissue. So I got back home waiting for my new card. The more so I wanted to buy some books from Amazon and pay for ACM membership.

Several days ago I came to my bank again to get my new credit card. And (what a surprise!) I got MasterCard Electronic which can not be used for online payments! I asked them: why?! They said because Electronic costs $2 whereas Standard cost $5. But it can not be used for online payments! Frankly, the only value of this card for me was that I can use it to pay online. And they knew it because I came to them some time ago to relax restrictions on Internet payments for this card. After all they could have called me to ask which card I wanted, but they did not. Bank will issue a new card of required class for $5, but I will get it a week later than I originally expected. And I’m frustrated about that.

Message here is that you should know what customer expects of you and you should match his expectations. If do not know – ask him, offer him choices, help him to choose, but never make groundless assumptions that will frustrate your customer.

Bob Walsh has published a book Clear Blogging (at Amazon). Chapter 9 “Successful Blogging” is available for download from Apress.

I’m going to use this book to make my blog kind of more successful.

Every observation you make in day-to-day life can draw useful analogies to your professional activities. Today while I was serviced by the girl at the cash register at the super store I noticed that she wanted to optimize the process of scanning product codes. She grouped units of the same products to scan their code only once and correct quantities in the register. Theoretically this should have taken less time than scanning code of each product unit. In fact, because of this “optimization” I had to stay at the register longer that it would without optimization. Grouping of the units the same products took her very long. So although the cashier made fewer operations the whole process took longer. The main lesson from this observation is that you should optimize the whole system (end to end sequence of steps) not separate steps or parts of process. Theory of constraints tells us that every process (or system) has a bottleneck and it is this bottleneck that should be addressed by optimization. So be sure to measure and keep an eye on performance of the whole system while optimizing.

Reading different project management related blogs I’ve come across Visiting Gantt Again. While this post by Glen Alleman gives valuable insight on underpinnings of Gantt chart, it also describes a common problem with relation between the form and the meaning, between the tool and the goal. Gantt chart is only a tool and what goals are achieved with the tool is up to project manager. After all you can run projects without Gantt charts and having a good Gantt chart does not necessarily mean that project will succeed. But it can be a valuable tool in skillful hands.

If you are interested in more information and opinions about Gantt charts check out this series of post from Reforming Project Management:

What Has the Gantt Chart Done for You Lately?
How Are You Using Gantt Charts to Brief Project Teams?
Don't Give Up on Gantt Charts Yet
Use a Gantt Chart as a Conversation Starter

Just making sure that you did not miss the Recipe for Success from David Anderson.

Recently a friend of mine dropped a link to a video for presentation The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki. I was really amazed by the Guy talking about technology start-ups and I suggest you check out this presentation even if you are not going to start your own business in the nearest future.

After watching this presentation I visited Apple’s site to find out what products are offered in Ukraine. Also I went to Amazon to order Guy’s book “The Art of the Start” even the video was over.

Actually, this was the second time I ordered book in such situation. The first one was when I watched Writing Agile Software – interview with David Anderson. At that time I ordered Agile Management for Software Engineering.

For whole my conscious project management career I was and I am now a believer that manager’s great goal and destination is to help other people to be successful in what they are doing. Indeed, manager does nothing with his own hands. He has to do everything to make sure his subordinates are productive, creative and effective.

From my experience it is very important to give all team members a “sense of utility”, they need to see that what they are doing is important to someone, that someone appreciates their accomplishments. At the end of the day you want to develop pride of workmanship (how it is called in new MSF) in your people. Roots of this principle are in Edward W. Deming’s 14 Points for Management (pay attention to point #7).

If it is not possible to provide developers with connection to user and customer, or when these connections have long round-trips; as a manager you can take this on yourself. To do that I regularly, at least once a day, I walk around the office to talk with developers at their workplaces. I want to find out what they are working on, what difficulties they have, give advice and compliment for accomplishments. Not only I want to show them my care, I really want to help them do their job better. And I do that via informal one-on-one meetings that generally allow developers to feel more comfortable than on formal scheduled in advance meetings. Recently I came across interesting discussion of this technique by Jim and Michele McCarthy. I suggest you check out their podcast to learn more about One-on-One.

ReformingProjectManagement is running a poll to find out "What Has the Gantt Chart Done for You Lately?".

From my personal experience Gantt chart did not prove to be extremely useful for the amount of effort required to maintain it. But most of my projects involved a great deal of uncertainty and changes/clarifications along the course of the project. So I will not manifest Gantt chart to be bad or ineffective tool, just it was not well suited for my particular situation.

It would be interesting to see what others say on this matter.

At last I've put online my presentations from Microsoft Developers' Days'06.  If you are new to AJAX you'll find useful ASP.NET AJAX overview presentation. Windows Presentation Foundation presentation may also be of interest to you. You can check out both presentations (in Russian) here.