Rick's Picks (weekly)

• Bribes end up with sour just desserts? Snap!Japan - a long-term resident's perspective

  Since the Lockheed scandal brought Kakuei Tanaka down in the late 1970's, Japan has seen many and varied incidents, their occurrence only escalating in recent years. Even the Tanaka protege Ichiro Ozawa, who has been stressing a (rather two-faced) populist agenda of late, is now tainted by a bribe scandal via a top aide accused of taking corporate donations. Ozawa san, so much for that "for the people" agenda eh? Who's going to replace Aso?! I like talking to just about anyone, and it's frequently the case that I find myself talking to a random taxi driver about something or other happening in Japan. The other day, during a conversation variously about Ozawa, bribes, the US Sarbanes Oxley legislation and "settai" (client entertainment) in Japan, my "over 60" year old driver told me he worked at Mizkan, the vinegar maker, for 40 years. I assume was his whole career, and he said he was in sales, in charge of large corporate accounts.

  tags: bribe, snapjapan, snap!Japan, ozawa, tanaka, settai

• blog:Cogley - Large Project Inequities

  The thought that "no correctly-spec'ed project gets approved" leads me to lots of questions, and no real answers this morning. I was thinking about the massive projects that the world has seen, like the Pyramids, great Dams, Bridges, Skyscrapers and Railways, or well-designed and -architected cities in general, and wondering: Are these things we marvel at, built on great inequities? Inequities that people of certain demographics cannot even imagine (thinking about myself as a white, male, middle-class American). It's not comfortable to think about, but would such marvels even exist if there were not the exploited and the exploiters? Can this said to have been even necessary for technical progress?

  tags: rick, cogley, rickcogley, project, pm, management, project management, inequities

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Major Projects - Inequities Necessary?

The thought that "no correctly-spec'ed project gets approved" leads me to lots of questions, and no real answers this morning.

I was thinking about the massive projects that the world has seen, like the Pyramids, great Dams, Bridges, Skyscrapers and Railways, or well-designed and -architected cities in general, and wondering: Are these things we marvel at, built on great inequities? Inequities that people of certain demographics cannot even imagine (thinking about myself as a white, male, middle-class American).

It's not comfortable to think about, but would such marvels even exist if there were not the exploited and the exploiters? Can this said to have been even necessary for technical progress?

Food for thought.

Rick's Picks (weekly)

• TeePee - Super Cool Local Area Info iPhone App for Japan - Mobile in Japan

  TeePee - Super Cool Local Area Info iPhone App for Japan.

  tags: teepee, rainbow, iphone, location

• Priya - The Indian Restaurant

  Great restaurant in Hiroo Tokyo that my friend Arup introduced me to. -- Rick Cogley Priya offers a truly royal array of authentic north Indian cuisine. Cooked and served by the vastly experienced staff, the menu has been designed after several years of research and experienced gained. At Priya, we assure you warm, friendly and personalized service with a smile. A place to relax whether just by yourself, or with family, friends or colleagues. At Priya, each delicious meal - prepared with pride and served with care - is of the highest quality and yet very reasonably priced. Give a try and see the difference!!

  tags: priya, indian, cuisine, hiroo, tokyo

• Changing Wiki Server's repository

  How to change the Apple OS X Leopard Server's Wiki Server's repository location. -- Rick Cogley | From the site: I was able to change where the Wiki Server (the thing responsible for the blog you're looking at) keeps its "repository" (all the files and pages you've added). Merely use the serveradmin tool:

  tags: repository, leopard, osx, wiki, change, serveradmin

• Interview with Masato Inoue about Green Design

  My friend Masato Inoue, Nissan designer, is interviewed about his Pivo. -- Rick Cogley | From the site. March 10. 2008 | Hannah Macmurray. Interview with Masato Inoue. Masato Inoue has been the Chief Designer of Nissan's Exploratory Design Department for about 8 years in Japan. On the surface he doesn’t seem like your run of the mill Japanese businessman, his Italian tailored suit and styled shoes, slightly longer hair than ‘regulation’ allows, but don’t let that fool you. He is 100% Japanese and this makes him proud of his culture, something which most Japanese have grown up to reject because of the shame of WWII. Inoue san has an open eye on whats happening around the world, an open ear to listen what people have to say, and an open heart for Japanese design. He knows what Nissan’s customers want before they even know they want it, and likewise he knew what Nissan needed before management did…an electric car!

  tags: masato, inoue, experimental, nissan, pivo

• MapMyRide.com - Map your Cycling and Mountain Biking Routes and join our Community of Cyclists. Cycling Social Network, iPhone, Topo Maps, Elevation Profiles, GPS Support.

  Pretty poorly designed website (so busy, it looks like a Japanese site), but an interesting concept nonetheless. -- Rick Cogley | From the site: Plot your bike rides over mountains (view elevation), through the woods (topo maps), and speeding through the city (street level views) with just a few mouse clicks. Once your cycling map is complete you can quickly view it in 3D, satellite form, or share it with friends.

  tags: maps, cycling, map, bike, routes, fitness, googlemaps, google, mapmyride, mapmyfitness

• AppleInsider | Japanese "hate" for iPhone all a big mistake

  Balanced article refuting a Wired article about how iPhone in Japan is a failure. Prince McLean quotes my blog in this article as well. -- Rick Cogley | Japanese "hate" for iPhone all a big mistake - By Prince McLean A report intending to portray the iPhone as "hated" in the Japanese market turns out to have been built upon fake quotations from industry writers and observers who were misrepresented by remarks attributed to them that they never made. Their actual comments on the iPhone's prospects in Japan are far more interesting.

  tags: appleinsider, prince, mclean, iphone, rick, cogley

• blog:Cogley - Bus tours give insight into Japan PM

  A friend mentioned that she understands better "why Japanese are like they are", after having been on a weekend bus tour to Mt. Fuji. I've been on Japanese bus tours before, but it never really dawned on me that they could be a window on the soul of the Japanese, but I suppose they are, in a way. I've always been against them, but occasionally bow to pressure from the higher authorities at my house, like my wife and daughters, and go on a bus tour.

  tags: bus, tour, bustour, japan, pm, cogley, rickcogley

• blog:Cogley - Guerilla Collaboration

  Aaron Fulkerson, the CEO at Mindtouch - makers of the awesome mashable wiki "Deki" - writes about the state of collaboration in his post Three Decades Later. Revolt Or Die. As Aaron mentions, the current state of affairs with regard to collaboration is very much email centric. However, email is terrible for collaboration. If you have never given this much though, sit a moment and really think through what it means to try to manage a project, with file versioning, in email. If you think on it, you can see how easily email can snowball out of hand, with noone on the team knowing what file or which piece of info is the current, latest version. I know this from painful experience. We have had to manage very large projects via email, because of the strong resistance at the client to any web-based applications. People have been adamant: "we use email for everything." Yikes. There are even project management applications that cater (pander?) to this attitude, like Wrike.

  tags: cogley, rickcogley, deki, mindtouch, collaboration, aaron, fulkerson

• iPhone in Japan - from a satisfied user | Snap!Japan - a long-term resident's perspective

  In general I am satisfied with my iPhone in Japan. This article is a response to an article in Wired, and talks a bit about the iPhone, differences from Japanese cellphones, and what I've felt and heard from Japanese users.

  tags: snapjapan, snap!japan, iphone, japan, wired

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Japan Bus Tours - Example of Project Expectations?

A friend mentioned that she understands better "why Japanese are like they are", after having been on a weekend bus tour to Mt. Fuji. I've been on Japanese bus tours before, but it never really dawned on me that they could be a window on the soul of the Japanese, but I suppose they are, in a way. I've always been against them, but occasionally bow to pressure from the higher authorities at my house, like my wife and daughters, and go on a bus tour.

On projects I've groused with other PMs that people here expect everything to be presented on a silver platter. And by people, I mostly mean Japanese people, who are the users in 99% of the cases where I'm managing projects. It has been difficult to explain why I would not write out every step for every action by users, and I think the bus tour is at fault! Consider the careful service you get on a bus tour:

• Everything laid out in great detail with to-the-minute scheduling of every stop on the tour. Now we're using the bathroom, now we're buying souvenirs.
• A tour guide with a little flag to lead you around the site, in case you can't read the detailed map you've been given. This is a famous sight, is it not?
• Continual announcements about what's next and what just happened, as well as the rules you'll need to follow. Just in case you did not get it from the detailed itinerary.
• Big signs saying how many minutes you have at the particular stop, again, in case you did not understand the repeated announcements.

Westerners certainly have a different approach to things of course, and generally take a more independent, less supervised approach. So one could either feel a bus tour in Japan is either incredibly well put together, or incredibly overbearing. A taxi driver I mentioned this to said that Japanese expect this type of treatment, because their mothers tell them what to do at every turn.

Maybe the PM title stands more for "Project Mother", in Japan. I suppose I should just get used to it, after such a long stay here.

Velociteach PM Poster - Observations

Velociteach created this excellent Project Management-related poster, talking about the gap between what users say they want, what they really want, what's sold, what's delivered, what's paid for, and what's supported. Are things really this bad? From experience on many a large project I would say they are.

Some Current Problems in Projects Today

This poster hammers home the concept that stated requirements have to be well-linked to what's delivered, a concept that has been emphasized for quite some time in software development camps as a reaction to "waterfall" type project management. If you're not familiar, waterfall is a "command-and-control" concept of PM where everyone marches lock step through phases, changing phases when the documents are signed off. That might sound comfortable to people who are not detail-oriented enough to really understand what is going on, but the reality is always messier. Other approaches such as or stemming from "Agile" or "Lean" software development, help keep the focus on what's valuable to the customer, and avoid meaningless rounds of documentation and signoff. Note, I did not say those approaches advocate not documenting at all, because that does not appear to be the case.

I was the Japan-based PM for an ERP implementation, where the head of the PMO at my client generally encouraged the use of more Agile methods. We never talked about Agile and what it meant per se, but recently studying Agile for how it might help me manage non-software development projects or general projects, I can see similarities between what's in the Agile Manifesto and Agile Principles, to what we actually did on the project.

One thing that we did which was rather too "waterfall" however, was an attempt to document all the user requirements up front, in a huge list. This quickly got unmanageable partly because we were trying to do requirements this way, with users inexperienced in ERP implementations, and partly because we were using email as a collaboration tool, which was a mistake as well. Thinking about that, users would have had a terrible time trying to remember what they said, in requirements meetings many months back, in specification review sessions. Adding to that the need for translation and interpretation services, it's a wonder we went live as successfully as we did. An attestation to having the same developers and coordinators involved the whole way through, and just general tenacity, if you ask me.

What to Do About It

In summary, my current feeling about what to do is the following:

• Though Email has obvious benefits and applications, attempting to collaborate in Email is not the right approach or, dare I say, any project. Instead, use a system like TargetProcess, LiquidPlanner, Unfuddle, MyIntervals or even BaseCamp.
• Use a V-shaped project process, to link user requirements to user acceptance tests, designs to design validations and so on, so that there is a check and balance in your process. Make it easy for users to see the link between what they asked for, and what was done in the end.
• Poorly-done Agile is just as ineffective as Waterfall, so if you are going to implement different methods, make sure they fit and that you do it skillfully so the whole entity supports it. Don't use Agile as an excuse to be lazy. In fact, Agile requires even more discipline in the team.

The jury is still out for me what the "best" method is and what the best collaboration software is, but I have taken my time to understand methods besides waterfall, and am beginning to apply them in practice. I will post here about my experiences from time to time. I hope you Enjoy this.

Rick's Picks (weekly)

• Niigata's Anti-Miniskirt Crusade - Snap!Japan - a long-term resident's perspective

  Niigata's Dubious Claim to "Fame" - The Shortest Skirts. Here's a screenshot of a couple images of the posters being used in Niigata prefecture's crusade to try to prevent girls' skirts from getting any shorter. That Niigata has the girls with the shortest skirts is a dubious claim to "fame" unless you're a lecher or a horny male high-school student.

  tags: snap!japan, snapjapan, niigata, miniskirt, poster

• Top tips for project managers? (Tony Collins's IT Projects Blog)

  Tony Collins' PM truisms. -- Rick Cogley | Below is a compilation of project management truisms. Some have been around years; a few are my own concoctions - the result of researching and reporting on countless IT projects and programmes.

  tags: tony, collins, project, management, truisms

• 20 cynical project management tips | IT Project Failures | ZDNet.com

  Accurate, funny, cynical list of project management truisms. -- Rick Cogley | Ever wonder why so many projects fail? Well, here’s your guide to the seamy underbelly of IT project management. From Tony Collins, who writes a well-researched blog on government-related IT failures in the UK: 1. Projects with realistic budgets and timetables don’t get approved 2. The more desperate the situation the more optimistic the progress report 3. A user is somebody who rejects the system because it’s what he asked for 4. The difference between project success and failure is a good PR company

  tags: zdnet.com, tony, collins, project, management

• blog:Cogley - Guerilla Collaboration

  Aaron Fulkerson, the CEO at Mindtouch - makers of the awesome mashable wiki "Deki" - writes about the state of collaboration in his post Three Decades Later. Revolt Or Die. As Aaron mentions, the current state of affairs with regard to collaboration is very much email centric. However, email is terrible for collaboration. If you have never given this much though, sit a moment and really think through what it means to try to manage a project, with file versioning, in email. If you think on it, you can see how easily email can snowball out of hand, with noone on the team knowing what file or which piece of info is the current, latest version. I know this from painful experience. We have had to manage very large projects via email, because of the strong resistance at the client to any web-based applications. People have been adamant: "we use email for everything." Yikes. There are even project management applications that cater (pander?) to this attitude, like Wrike.

  tags: cogley, rickcogley, deki, mindtouch, collaboration, aaron, fulkerson

• How To Backup Your Twitter Account

  Nice collection of tools to backup your twitter. -- Rick Cogley | How To Backup Your Twitter Account - The issue of backing up data from your Twitter account is becoming more important as people spend considerable amounts of time and effort building a valuable reputation and network of contacts.

  tags: twitter, backup, tools

• Project Flow & Tracker

  Interesting Agile tool concept to be built upon Drupal CMS. -- Rick Cogley | From the site: PFT is an Agile tool to develop web applications with Drupal. Built in Drupal itself with commonly used modules such as CCK, Views, and Organic Groups, it is both a construction kit and a staging ground for best practices. Business objects are translated into roles and user stories, mapped onto a selection of Drupal modules, and then planned as a self-documenting list of tasks assigned to various iterations, with issue and acceptance test tracking and integration with version control and other staging tools.

  tags: pft, project, flow, tracker

• Scrum Alliance - Unlearn What You Have Learned - Nine Habits You Must Break To Be Successful with Scrum

  Unlearn What You Have Learned - Nine Habits You Must Break To Be Successful with Scrum.

  tags: scrum, scrumalliance, nimesh soni, habits

• EtherPad: Realtime Text Collaboration

  SubEthaEdit is one good desktop collaborative editor for the mac, but this EtherPad looks good too. -- Rick Cogley | From the site: Etherpad is useful whenever multiple people with computers need to work together in real time.

  tags: etherpad, collaboration

• The Omni Mouth » OmniWeb, OmniDazzle, OmniDiskSweeper, and OmniObjectMeter now freeware

  OmniWeb, OmniDazzle, OmniDiskSweeper, and OmniObjectMeter now freeware.

  tags: omnidazzle, omnidisksweeper, omniobjectmeter, free, freeware

• An Agile Workflow « AvailAgility

  I'm interested in these topics lately. Karl Scotland is examining a mix of kanban and agile. -- Rick Cogley | From the site: An Agile Workflow - A common topic of discussion around kanban is whether the workflows or stages in a kanban system are counter to the Agile principles of cross functional and collaborative teams. Its easy to talk about a feature going through the following flow in a kanban system: Analysis –> Build –> Test –> Release which I confess looks very waterfall-ish and I can understand why this can raise warning flags about the suitability of the kanban approach. This got me thinking about how best to express a typical agile-friendly workflow.

  tags: availagility, agile, kanban, karl scotland

• Snap!Japan - JR Stations in Tokyo to be smoke-free

  JR Stations in Tokyo to be smoke-free, as of 1 April 2009. -- Rick Cogley

  tags: jr, station, japanrail, smoke-free, non-smoking, snapjapan

• blog:Cogley - How to Backup FriendFeed, Twitter or other RSS Feeds -- Rick Cogley

  How to Backup FriendFeed, Twitter or other RSS Feeds -- Rick Cogley | Using a similar technique to my previous post, we can use an RSS-to-email service like FeedBurner to essentially backup RSS feeds via email. This will give you a pretty-good backup to IMAP, or, by using email-to-blog services, a post of your posts. Here's how I plan to do this...

  tags: rick, cogley, rickcogley, feedburner, rss, backup, twitter, friendfeed, archive

• Instructional design - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  Thanks to Amanda Fenton, I'm thinking about how to apply ID to IT projects, especially the training part. Hopefully ID will help communications about projects... --Rick Cogley | From the site: Instructional Design is the practice of creating instructional tools and content to help facilitate learning most effectively. The process consists broadly of determining the current state and needs of the learner, defining the end goal of instruction, and creating some "intervention" to assist in the transition. Ideally the process is informed by pedagogically tested theories of learning and may take place in student-only, teacher-led or community-based settings. The outcome of this instruction may be directly observable and scientifically measured or completely hidden and assumed. There are many instructional design models but many are based on the ADDIE model with the phases analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. As a field, instructional design is historically and traditionally rooted in cognitive and behavioral psychology. However, because it is not a regulated, well-understood field, the term 'instructional design' has been co-opted by or confused with a variety of other ideologically-based and / or professional fields. Instructional design, for example, is not graphic design, although graphic design (from a cognitive perspective) could play an important role in Instructional Design. Preparing instructional text by E. Misanchuk, Instructional-Design Theories and Models edited by Charles M. Reigeluth, and publications by James Hartley are useful in informing the distinction between instructional design and graphic design.

  tags: wikipedia, design, instructional, learning, ID, amanda fenton

• The Best Free Website Uptime Monitoring Services on Internet | Digital Musings

  Alternatives to montastic. -- Rick Cogley | From the site: Website Uptime Monitoring and Tracking is important for any site owner. One should be aware if his site is working okay or the server has tanked or having some issues. If the server is having issues, the owner can contact his web hosting company , and make them sort this out quickly so that he doesn’t lose many visitors. Website Uptime Monitoring services, ping you web host every few minutes to check if your site is working okay. If the server goes down, these services alert you via email or text messages.

  tags: digital-musings.com, uptime, Website, monitor, monitoring

• Free website monitoring service: Montastic

  This looks like a useful service for site monitoring. -- Rick Cogley | From the site: The free website monitoring service that doesn't suck. Website monitoring made cool: # Get an email when your site goes down # Get an email when it goes back up # Read statuses via RSS or Mac & PC widgets # Fun, easy and elegant user interface # Up to 100 websites monitored # NEW! Support for https and port number

  tags: montastic, tools, monitoring, web

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.