Consumerization of IT

Das Agitano Team hat mit mir ein Interview zum Thema "Consumerization of IT" geführt und wie Hubber zu signifikanten Einsparpotentialen bei der internen Unternehmenskommunikation führen kann: https://www.agitano.com/magazin/magazinDetails/ciointerview_mit_ingmar_bornholz_motionet_ag_22188/

Das Ganze kann man sich auch in 11 Minuten anhören :)

Pragmatic Project Mangement

WTF? Pragmatic Project Management?

Programmers (aka hackers) nowadays are called the heroes of the future - and I can not agree more. If I were a programmer, I had dozens of ideas of what to do with my skills - imagine being a craftsman, who can build whole houses on his own - great stuff.

The only problem is: I have never been a *good* programmer - yes, I've build sites on my own, I have build nice sites for customers based on typo3 and PHP but it has always been more of a "find and put together", than having a real concept and thinking of security, performance et all - programmers: I really admire your skills.

But what I have found is, my strength are combining creativity and technology, and I'm quite good in talking to developers and explaining them my ideas, so that they are able to build "the house". That's because I do have a quite deep overview of current technologies, there pro's and con's and know very well how to manage teams and projects (gosh, it must be more than 100 webprojects now in more than 10 years in that business for small companies to global bigships.)

My point is, that I haven't found the best way how to manage programmers and stakeholders (like marketing managers) together yet. From waterfall to Scrum - I tried all methods from a 2 men to 20 men project team. But the problems still remain the same, which are:

- non programmers and dev's do speak a *whole* different language

- stakeholders *never* have an idea, of how complex projects can be from a technology point of view

- developers *never* have an idea, of how complex it is to define specifications, sell or market a product

Especially in big projects, companies try to solve these issues by installing many instances of "Project Managers" to handle the projectplan, the specifications, ... But the bigger the team for a dev project gets, the complexity raises.

What I am looking for is a lean approach to dev projects - ANYONE should be able to manage a (web)projects - in the end its a question of trust, "language" and responsibility.

Just ask "why"

Instead of writing dozens of specifications, instead of writing and discussing your daily scrum-tickets I would try to just ask: "Why?!"

Given the idea for a project from a marketing guy.

He should ask himself:

Why do I want that project to be build?

Why do I need a new design?

Why do I need a contact form?

Why do I need an RSS Feed?

Why do I need a CMS?

Why do I ....

Put that guy together in a room with a developer and let the developer try to answer the "Why" questions which are presented by the marketing guy - this might be the hard part, but from that discussion, the dev gets the insights and it is in his responsibility to translate them into programming steps.

Then again, let the developer ask himself the according questions:

Why will I use MySQL?

Why will I use ruby?

Why will I write that specific function?

Why will I use that CMS?

Why will I catch that exception?

Why will I ...

Put the both of them in a room again, and let the marketing guy answer the developers questions. And it is in the developers responsibility to answer them correctly and argue "why the hell" it is necessary to do so. This again raises the understanding of the marketing guy of what the dev is actually doing, why he is doing it and from that discussions I see a very pragmatic approach, which will lead in a lean, pragmatic project management.

To be honest, this isn't thought to the end with really big projects, but my point is:

- the developer has RESPONSIBILITY for every step he takes

- the developer has RESPONSIBILITY for the whole project

- the marketing guy has RESPONSIBILITY of what the dev will do

- the marketing guy has RESPONSIBILITY to get a clue of the programmers language

The BMW R1200 GS Adventure

Been on a weekend trip with my best friend, and we each were riding the BMW R1200 - damn, what a great piece of technology. The boxer ca. 100 hp strong engine comes with 6 gears, with 3 and 4 for the "big push" ;) While it's been rather difficult to handle the ca. 300kg in slow curves, when its "running" the driving experience is unbelievable for an enduro. Full throttle in the 2nd or 3rd gear really lifts the front wheel, and leaves these japanese plastic bombers in a dark dust ;)

OSX Umlaut svn problem

We found a workaround for the OSX svn problem: You might want to add this small pre-commit script to your svn which checks for umlauts before commit and gives the user a warning:

#!/bin/sh

REPOS="$1"
TXN="$2"

SVNLOOK=/usr/bin/svnlook

## NOTE: This is a quick hack! WILL let many "dangerous" characters pass!

if $SVNLOOK changed -t "$TXN" "$REPOS" | grep '^A.*\\195' >&2
then
echo "Auf diesem Server sind nur ASCII-Zeichen erlaubt!". >&2
exit 1
fi

exit 0

MySQL Enterprise support - not that cool

For quite a large project we booked MySQL Enterprise Support. As always when working with 3rd party companies we needed to set up an NDA with them. Unfortunately MySQL germany is not able today to accept our standard NDA - they have to use the american version which allows MySQL to use everything their consultants do not "write down", but "keep in their minds". I've never seen such an NDA up today - and of course we could not accept that ;)

Vista / OSX OpenVPN

Since we got the synchronous DSL in our office, we've set up an OpenVPN - I'm using tunnelblick on the Macbook and the OpenVPN GUI from the HS Esslingen for the Thinkpad. Simple to set up and works good.

Twitter now with ads?

Or is it twitterriffic putting some ads in there... seemd to be mac-specific advertisement so I think its twitterriffic...

Exposè for Vista

Hui, what I like most with OSX ist he exposé – now it's here for Vista – free and works great.

Ideas for seesmic

Loic wanted feedback, so here's mine ;): Loic has just startet his fifth company, seesmic, and it's going t be something like twitter for video. What I like is the idea of quickly recording yourself in a video message in order to express some quick thoughts, like Oli did today. We've done something similar in a kind of karaoke system: on fan-clips.de, which is the football fan community of the 1.FC Köln, you can record yourself, while watching the official club hymn: you can win a prize when the jury has voted you as best singer – see my bad trials here – I definitely won't win ;). But back to seesmic: what I see as kind of problematic is that in video the publisher defines the speed of the reception of the viewer: I can only get the information from the video-message, when the person has "spoken" it, "acted" or whatever. When I read my RSS Feeds, or my twitter feed, I can quickly jump to the next paragraph, kind of "scan" an article for keywords and just read that particular part. So it would be great for seesmic to have a system for comments or viewpoints you can jump to, which have clear tags. They should be able to be set by the publisher in an easy way and extended by the community. When I slide over them with my mouse, I could "scan" the whole movie in advance – maybe a kind of preview picture could be implemented, too. Got some ideas in that direction…

T-Community – thanks for your support

A year ago I wrote about the then just launched T-Community, which was a first step of the Deutsche Telekom in the world of user generated content. Now I got an email telling me "Thanks a lot for all your feedback – but we'll close the community by the end of the year – you may export your data, but you can't use it any longer." (not that I have EVER used it, but anyway…) But it's quite funny, that they offer me to change my account to fussball.de – in case I want to use all of my community features in the future…fussball.de is a t-com driven special interest community in football – quite interesting strategy of them – seems as if they see no future in "global" communities but in special interests…