The project management DON’T DO list

In an effort to change things up from the usual list of things to do, I thought it would be just as valuable to make note of what not to do. Print out this list or bookmark it and keep it handy. The format should make it is easy to look over on a regular basis during all phases of a project to make sure you’re not falling into any bad habits.

Don’t lose focus. It is very easy to be motivated when starting a new project. It is not so easy to maintain that same vigor and energy a few months into it. Become a good finisher, not just a good starter.

Don’t rush in. Remember, the sooner you start, the later you finish. Improper planning costs you big throughout the life of a project. Don’t succumb to pressure to just start cranking away without following basic project management methodologies.

Don’t always say yes. Trying to include all of the functionality up front is a recipe for cooking up an over-budget and over-the-deadline project with a side order of negative ROI. Learn to be selective. It is an art, and one that you will get better at with time. Show the project sponsor the critical components that need to be included, and let them know why you wish to exclude the non-essentials. It is usually the seemingly small non-essentials that can cost you the most time and money.

Don’t take sides in a political battle. Stay neutral. ‘Nuff said.

Don’t forget to communicate. If communication is not your strong point, find someone on the project team who is good at it. If you usually get knee-deep in the technical aspects of the project, it is easy to ignore the communication issues. Make sure you or someone you trust is keeping the right people informed.

Don’t put the wrong people in the wrong roles. An apple is still an apple, even if you color it orange and put a Sunkist sticker on it.

Don’t let any one individual on the team burn out. We all have to put in late hours here or there, but don’t let anyone continue to do so for an extended time without taking a break. It’s just not healthy.

Don’t make up excuses. If you made a mistake (which we all do), admit it and fix it.

Don’t over-promise and under-deliver.

Don’t ignore problems. Prevent small problems from becoming large ones. Ignoring them will come back to haunt you.

Don’t forget to keep the big picture in mind. There is a delicate balance between processes and resources that we must maintain. It is our job to ensure that things come together at the right time and for the greater purpose of the project.

Don’t forget about your team. Remember to keep them motivated and informed.

Don’t take all the credit. As Harry Truman once said, “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”

6 Ways to Tackle Boring or Irritating Tasks

[1] Don’t think about it that much

One way to deal with the task is to put your mind elsewhere and not think about it that much. I have noticed, that especially if I’m busy with my other tasks, my mind is not focusing on the annoying task that much.

I try not to think actively about the exercise before it actually happens for two reasons. First, I want to be present at work and second, I’m wasting my energy on to something, that I don’t need to focus on right then.

[2] Find alternative ways to do it

Another great way of tackling the task is to find alternative ways to do it. For example, if you hate cleaning your home, you may want to think different ways of handling the task – like cleaning it room-by-room, cleaning it by starting from a living room first (if you have started from a kitchen normally) and so on.

This way you may think about that irritating task bit differently and starting the task may not be that difficult.

[3] Do it as soon as you can

I have realized that as soon as you get the irritating task done, the better. Once it’s off your mind, you can put your focus and your energy to other things instead.

Once I get past the task, I feel good about myself and the task is not on my mind anymore.

[4] Break the task into small pieces

In order to make the level of entry lower and prevent procrastination on that task, break it into smaller pieces. I used this example in tip # 2 above (cleaning your home – room-by-room), but obviously you can apply it to other situations as well.

For example, if you have to write a report, you could make a decision to write 3 pages of that report every day. Alternatively you can decide that you will work on the task at least 1 hour per day. By this way, you are not overwhelming yourself with the task, since it’s broken down into manageable pieces.

[5] Praise yourself for starting the task

Remember, as soon as you get started with your tedious task, you have already done something that most people are not willing to do.

Starting is the hardest part – especially when a boring or irritating task is concerned. However, as soon as you get started, it may be difficult to stop working, since you got the momentum going.

For example, you could decide to work 5-10 minutes on a task. After you have worked that amount of time, see if you are still willing to stop doing the task or would you like to keep going.

Every time I start my hardest exercise of the week, I feel like a winner. I know that the situation cannot get any “worse” and since I’m doing the workout already, it gets done soon.

[6] Remember your past experiences

Everyone has tackled tedious tasks before, but do you remember, how you have felt afterwards? I don’t know about you, but almost every time, I have felt very good about myself for completing the task.

When a boring or irritating task arises, focus on the good feeling you have had before – when you did complete the task. That good feeling helps you to get started with the task and pull it through easily.

I guess the tedious article is now done and I can focus on other tasks instead.

Source

5 Features That Shouldn’t Die With the HP TouchPad and WebOS

Barely two months after the HP TouchPad launched, and we’re already writing its obituary. Even RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook tablet has survived for longer than that. I was among the reviewers who took HP to task on the TouchPad–but even so, I’m saddened by the news that the tablet world has one fewer competitor. After using the TouchPad over the past few weeks, I can say that I liked certain aspects of the TouchPad and WebOS, and that I was looking forward to seeing these features in second-generation hardware. I can only hope that other tablet makers take a hard look at their mobile operating systems and tablets, and that they find ways to prevent these five hardware and software capabilities from dying with the HP TouchPad and WebOS.

Activity-Card Stacking

I’ll admit that calling an app window an “activity card” felt a bit foreign. That said, however, I loved the ability to group related items together, regardless of which app they were in. The idea of gathering, say, a PDF with a related document, a map, and a Web page is a terrific rethinking of what “multitasking” can mean in practical use. I hope that Apple and Google figure out how to integrate a similar concept into their respective operating systems–in iOS and Android, related app content is siloed, not as manageable as in WebOS.

Synergy

C’mon, it’s a Web-connected world: It would be nice if the now-defunct WebOS weren’t the only mobile operating system to truly exist in concert with other mobile services. The ability to unify contact information–and even access images stored on Facebook directly from the tablet–were nice add-ons that made the WebOS-based TouchPad feel more connected than its Android and iOS competitors do. The Web is one big sandbox, and everyone needs to play nicely there. The better the integration, the better users can maximize their presence across the Internet. Keeping information isolated runs counter to a connected world; the level of service integration that WebOS and the TouchPad had was a differentiator, and it’s something that Apple and Google should, again, look at closely.

Multitasking

On tablets, I’ve seen just two approaches to multitasking work well–and neither one is in use by the market leaders. The first is the jog-wheel approach of some Android widgets (such as on the Lenovo IdeaPad K1, where you can move through apps that you choose to add to the wheel at the touch of a finger). And the second is the horizontal-scroll-bar approach of WebOS on the TouchPad (and, to be fair, on the QNX-based BlackBerry PlayBook, another tablet on life support right now). The horizontal-scroll design is much more finger friendly than Google’s vertical-scroll “recently accessed” pop-up. Apple’s approach is great on the iPhone, but on the iPad it’s annoying to have to move your finger all the way down to the bottom of the tablet–far from the iPad’s center of gravity–just to change apps.

Apple, Google: See how you can rework what you’re doing now into something even better. The more I use tablets, the more I find that even though the bottom of the screen is useful for menus and buttons, navigation requiring two hands (such as multitasking) is better situated in the center of the screen.

Easy Menu Access

Software can always be transformed. Android is particularly malleable, thanks to its open nature. Already I’ve seen numerous takes on Android 3.x Honeycomb, such as re-skins of annoying buttons and changes to the settings pop-up. But the base, stock Android falls a bit short–after all, tablet makers wouldn’t be customizing the OS if Google had nailed the Honeycomb interface in the first place.

So what did I like about WebOS on the TouchPad? I liked the notifications system–though I fear that with my email volume, I’d have worn my fingers out flicking through incoming notifications. I loved the settings shortcut pop-up: One touch at the top of the display, and the menu gave me access to brightness, Wi-Fi, VPN, Bluetooth, airplane mode, rotation lock, and mute–in other words, most of the settings I might need quick access to. Android has some of these settings up front, but not all of them. Samsung’s new TouchWiz UX rework of Honeycomb, as seen on the Galaxy Tab 10.1, adds these features to Android’s quick-settings menu, but you need to scroll through them. I liked the simplicity of the menu in WebOS. Heck, I liked the clean simplicity of most menus in WebOS–something that Android can learn from (yes, Google, full disclosure is useful, and information is power, but your settings menus remain a turn-off for the average consumer).

Terrific Audio

The one thing that HP’s hardware had going for it: The TouchPad has, to date, produced the best-sounding audio I’ve heard from a 10-inch tablet. The 7-inch RIM PlayBook does a surprisingly good job as well, but in my tests I often inadvertently covered the front-firing speakers with my fingers. The TouchPad’s bottom-firing speakers produced well-balanced, undistorted audio that didn’t make me cringe; in fact, I enjoyed listening to music on the TouchPad, a lot. The speakers on most every other tablet I’ve tested–including the Apple iPad 2 and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1—leave so much to be desired that using them is a last-ditch option, when you need speakers and have nothing else on hand to pipe your audio through. Tablet designers, take note: Whatever HP did in its TouchPad design (the tablet’s plastic backing seemed to help with the acoustics, though HP never did pinpoint what was responsible).

Rebuilding Spotlight’s Index on OS X (Manually)

After doing a number of disk clean up and optimizations, I found myself in the circumstance of OS X’s spotlight returning no results. Whether I searched for a keyword in Mail, or by Spotlight using Command-Space, I got no results backs – just an empty list for my troubles.

It turns out there’s a neat utility out there called Rebuild Spotlight Index 2.7 that does all the grunt work for you. Problem is, it didn’t work for me. What’s going on is actually fairly trivial, and it’s possible to simply do everything via the command line.

The metadata utilities need to run as root, so to see what your drive is up to, you’d enter something like: sudo mdutil -s /

This shows the status on the root volume.

To turn indexing on for a volume, you enter: sudo mdutil -i on /

And, to force Spotlight to rebuild its index, you simply erase the master copy of the metadata stores on the volume like this: sudo mdutil -E /

However, while I did all this, Spotlight was still not building the indexed for me.

Here’s how I solved it, using just the Terminal.

First, I wanted to see the schema file, so I printed it out using to the standard input using: sudo mdimport -X

At the bottom of the schema listing, I say a reference to a schemaLocation, and took a shot in the dark that perhaps that Spotlight’s index rebuilding needed to check data against its schema before it would start. To do that, it might need network access, if not back to the local machine. And, for good measure, I went to check the date/timestamp on the Spotlight directory using: sudo ls -la /.Spotlight*

While most of the files had the timestamp of when I tried to delete the index, not all the files had the current date and time. Additionally, the file sizes were not growing, a good indication the index was not being rebuilt.

Then, I did the following commands to ensure indexing was on, the spotlight metastore was really gone, and that I wanted it rebuilt:

sudo mdutil -i on /

rm -rf /.Spotlight*

sudo mdutil -E /

The moment I did the last command, this time the system sprung to life, the directory /.Spotlight-V100 was created, and the files inside it were growing quickly. Spotlight on the toolbar showed a progress bar, indicating the system would be done indexing in a bit.

Too much of ’2′

Def. two |toō|cardinal number equivalent to the sum of one and one; one less than three; numerical 2;

’2′ is inherently the most unexceptional number for humans, 2 eyes, 2 hands, 2 ears, 2 nostrils, 2 feet, 2 distinguishable sections of brain but of-course i was talking about

• 2 feelings of Love & Hatred which lead to every single action of us
• 2 sets of dear ones – Family & Friends
• 2 places where most of the time is spent – Home & Office
• 2 forms of acceptance – Agreement & Rejection
• 2 directions of lifetime – towards Past & towards Future
• 2 desires – Love & Lust
• 2 forms of intention – Selfish & Selfless
• 2 forms of needs – Necessity & Luxury
• 2 necessities to survive – Breath & Water
• 2 states of world – War & Peace
• 2 states of existence – Life & Death
• 2 forms of decisions – Right & Wrong
• 2 forms of reasoning – Intellect & Emotional
• 2 forms of truth – Validated & Trusted
• 2 states of interests – Excitement & Apathy
• 2 kinds of qualities – Positive & Negative
• 2 kinds of feedback – Pros & Cons
• 2 requirements to live – Love & Money
• 2 kinds of happiness – Contentment & Laziness
• 2 kinds of pressure – Gravity & Burden
• 2 kinds of darkness – Insincerity & No Light
• 2 forms of gyaan – Learnt & Experienced
• 2 forms of attention – Care & Probing
• 2 kinds of dreams – Ambitions & Sub-Conscious
• 2 forms of anger – Hostility & Helplessness

The list is too long and this is what makes me envious of multi-dynamic properties of ’2′

Metempsychosis

Metempsychosis (Greek: μετεμψύχωσις) is a philosophical term in the Greek language referring to transmigration of the soul, especially its reincarnation after death. It is a doctrine popular among a number of Eastern religions such as  Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Druzism wherein an individual incarnates from one body to another, either human, animal, or plant.

I title my post as ‘it‘ because today, after more than an year, of which my New Year Resolution was to blog regularly, i have come back to write a post. And this time, I promise I will NOT promise or even say that i will be regular in posting my thoughts as I know I can’t !! period.

Year 2009 has been the one of the most Adventurous, most Enriching, most Enlightening, very Social and Intellectually Igniting year of my life, till date. It started with some dreadful days @JIIT, followed by many laborious weeks at Infosys Technologies Ltd, Mysore.

Training at Infy [as we call it] was quite a hectic and rigorous schedule in the initial days, but the feeling, in totality was perhaps amusing. We were trained, technically, and due then due to the humungous size of the campus, very much physically too. I still remember those days, rather nights and late nights, we used to spend together preparing for a module test after every 2-3 days. Some going to sleep to get up early next day for cramming the slides, some fooling around and asking ‘kitna kar liya.. mujhe bhi kuch padha de na yar‘ and some not sleeping AT ALL, in the fear that they will not be able to wake up the next morning at the time of test. Gosh, its still so amusing

Then came the Version 1.0 of ‘2 Golden Months of 2009 @Infy Mysore‘ when we had completed our training and had to develop a ‘Project‘ which will act as our Final Semester Project @JIIT also. I cant even explain the joyous yet hostile, insightful yet lazy moments of that ‘era’. I just wish that could have never ended, sigh..

But it ended, in last week of May 2009 and on the next day, we had our Farewell @JIIT. It was the last time I kind-a loved JIIT from all 4 sections of my heart ‘coz after that, I had the WORST ever, literally worst time attending some stupid sessions at JIIT, Noida.

Nevertheless, came July 25, 2009 and I had my own, my very own iPhone in my hands !!! Sigghhhh…

Now my wish list was materialistically empty, but as we had to join back Infy on July 27, 2009 I was separated from my Macbook for 3 months. But yes, the upcoming 2 months of Extended Training @Infy Mysore undoubtedly qualified as Version 2.0 of ‘2 Golden Months of 2009 @Infy Mysore‘.

And yes, this was the same period where I got selected for SETLabs, the Research Arm of Infy and it was a moment of Pure Contentment ! [All thanks to Mr Puneet Gupta, Principal Researcher, Convergence Lab, SETLabs, Infosys Technologies Ltd. ]

Experience at SETLabs has been great till now, as I work in Mobility Platforms domain, and currently developing a thick client application for iPhone. I have some very learned yet humble people around me, with whom I can share, learn, discuss ideas quite comfortably.

And then ofcourse, Vipul bhaiya’s marriage on November 29, was a total blast. After so long, I had been with half of my family and had loads & loads of fun, all around my birthday.

Phew ! So that was year 2009 for me, in a nut-shell. I hope it must had been great for you too, and if not, WHO CARES.. Its already gone, right ?

Cheers