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Development
Designing for Devices
My last entry on design for a bit – just some thoughts on the added complexity when designing applications for multiple client devices. Fast Changing Device Landscape The “last mile” of user/computer interaction has seen a number of exciting innovations over the past year or so. Phones are getting physically smaller, yet have bulked up [...]
Interface Design Skills for Coders (and vice-versa)
Like a technical peanut butter cup – two great skill sets that go great together. What really happens when artists and coders mash things up? Intuitive Interactions: Are application developers adept at effective design? I think, as a group, no – witness all of the effort put forth to wrap “user friendly screens” in front [...]
PM Anti-Patterns That Increase IT Project Cycle Time
Lots of conversation at work these days about PMO, resource prioritization, and reducing cycle time for IT projects. I feel a series of posts coming on … IAPL, we launched a project to bring test discipline to our technology efforts. The team was writing standards and guidelines for test scripts, implementing integrated testing tools supplied [...]
Excel vs. RDBMS: Choosing the Technology, Winning the Arguments
Businesses large and small, private and public, for-profit and not, commonly control critical business processes using the EIE platform (which means Everything in Excel – always good for a laugh in your next PowerPoint – jpmacl). Folks in the business get used to the power and control they have with spreadsheets, and who can blame [...]
There’s a pony in here somewhere …
I’ve been using that phrase a lot recently at work. It’s really a callout to the process- and procedure-driven; let’s open up a bit to a less structured, iterative development / project process. We’re implementing a number of things – PMO, project methodology, wiki / KM, stuff like that – that sit at a lower [...]
Quality requirements for technical documentation are lower than user documentation
Ok, don’t freak out now … All I want to point out is that the apparent need for screen prints of every step in the process is a bit overdone, especially when we’re talking about technical documents. Screen prints / images in the documentation typically means the electronic documents get unmanageably huge, even if you [...]
Custom Code Bad, Custom Code Good – Notes for your Software License Agreement
At a vendor presentation recently, I saw something funny on a slide of “best practices” for implementing supply chain planning in SAP: Avoid ZAPO and ZATP … which means Avoid customizing ATP and APO functions in SAP <aside> A bit of tech humor there; the convention for naming customized code in SAP is to prefix [...]
Flexible intranet search does not have to mean a single search interface
Trying to provide a simple, flexible search capability for your organization’s reams of historical documents? Using a project process that generates the typical stacks of documents, databases full of status reports and issues, and other “stuff”? It’s important to think about the knowledge we are generating, and the best way to capture that knowledge – [...]
Short collection of insights
From the past few weeks on the web (catching up on a backlog here) … Open Source for Business: This is pretty interesting stuff – Graham writes about taking organizational / collaborative ideas from the open source and blogging movements. Of course, it’s helpful if you have actually created or participated in an open source [...]
So many XML posts, so little time
Over the past few days there have been so many posts regarding Microsoft’s announcement of XML formatted files for Office 12. One of the key reasons that I am working so aggressively towards Eclipse immersion (although not necessarily my next big chunk of work – priorities …) is the view that XML will continue to [...]
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