Inspiration

Business Proposals and The Lesson of Jabberwocky

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ March 28, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

When someone asks my opinion on their writing, I’ll get fairly detailed; I’ve noted in the past that there is a lot of power and influence in the written word, and it’s fairly important to get it done well, or your project proposals just never seem to get off the ground. This particular proposal suffered from [...]

Quantifying Business Benefit of Collaboration Tools (or, What Is This Meeting Costing Me?)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ January 24, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

This post started off as an excuse to experiment with Google Docs, and this really neat feature I discovered – embedding a spreadsheet in a web page as a sharing method. However, it struck me as a potential way to cost justify the time, effort, and expense of implementing collaboration systems with the Most Cynical [...]

Why Corporate IT Fails when Competing with Consumer Tech … and How to Change the Game

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ January 6, 2010 ⋅ 6 comments

I’ve been working with internal developers over the past few weeks, experimenting with a treemap / heatmap-style visualization that is quite interesting / insightful when loaded up with data, but very tough to configure and manipulate. We are also struggling with a presentation layer (surrounding this data control) that doesn’t adapt to the size of [...]

If I Told You a Fractal Solution, Could You Change the CEO’s Mind?

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ December 6, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

As the new year approaches, debates over the “value” of IT and business projects intensify; it’s not holiday stress, but the excitement of the approaching New [fiscal] Year. Lately, I’m hearing more about the struggle to quantify business value, especially when selecting those few projects that will “make the cut”. We will definitely iterate on [...]

Collaboration “in the Wild”: Some Observations

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ November 15, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

An Enterprise 2.0 dream scenario: implementing a complex project across multiple sites, in two different time zones, with a large team (well over 100). The team was reasonably savvy with collaboration tools; core team members were quite comfortable with Instant Messaging, and we have been relying on SharePoint for many months. A centralized, coordinated document [...]

Underwhelming experiences with Google Wave

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ October 17, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

Took some time today to work with the new communication meme – Google Wave. I wouldn’t call it a fundamentally new way to communicate – well, not yet. I think Google is safe to continue with a “preview” label – clearly not even “beta” yet. No horrible bugs – at least on the Windows platform [...]

Introducing … Google Wave

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ October 13, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

Thank you for signing up to give us early feedback on Google Wave. We’re happy to give you access to Google Wave and are enlisting your help to improve the product. To accept your invitation, sign into Google Wave at the following link … Well, maybe not the most exciting email I’ve received over the [...]

A Company is like a Sphere

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ September 15, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

Where do these great analogy ideas come from? Full credit – I got this one from a speaker at the SAP Research Center in Palo Alto, last spring. A company is like a sphere. As it grows, volume increases much faster than surface area, and the larger a company gets, more people get embedded and [...]

Perfect IT

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ August 4, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

I once met with a rather thoughtful Project Manager to catch up on things. An interesting person to talk to – it’s the cadence and style of his chat, he’s a fairly laid-back guy. I asked where his Stress comes from – he shows no visible signs of any, and it made me Ponder. We [...]

Technical Debt and the Cost/Benefit of Knowledge Retention

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ July 27, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

A rather rigorous, Financial-sounding title for a high-concept line of thought …Thanks to Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror, for calling my attention to this article by Martin Fowler on Technical Debt: Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing things the quick [...]

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