Science

Does Excel 2007 VBA have Sneaky Hidden Issues?

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ August 25, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

I’ve done a lot of coding over the past few years, on a number of platforms – but since I’m not a full time developer, it’s typically limited to VBA, PHP, SQL, some simple web stuff. Still, I’ve developed some tools that people use – and need to carry forward as the underlying technology moves [...]

Finally! Relevant Applications for YouTube and Twitter in the Enterprise!

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ July 11, 2008 ⋅ One comment

If you are involved with manufacturing these days, you’ve no doubt heard about Lean Manufacturing. I’ll not go deep into this area here, but one fascinating (for me) aspect is the thread (in some quarters) that ERP and computer systems are the enemy of Lean. On the whole, I don’t disagree – process improvement, kanbans, [...]

Can you, should you, bother Executives with The Details?

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ May 30, 2008 ⋅ 2 comments

In a recent post on Thinking Faster, Phillips expresses concern about the apparent propensity for project sponsors to skim over the details and jump to quick answers. He’s talking about [what I believe is] a peer relationship, when external expertise is brought in to develop the solution that they (the sponsors) are responsible for “owning” [...]

BigDog: Impressive Robotics

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ March 21, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

I don’t often post YouTube videos, but this one elicited a “wow” … I’ve only dabbled in AI-type programming, but I can appreciate the amount of computation that’s going on in real time here. The Big Dog recovers nicely from a hard shove at about 0:40, but that’s nothing compared to scrabbling on the ice [...]

The Five Fundamental Rules of Project Management

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ October 15, 2007 ⋅ One comment

Okay, the title is a bit of a false advertising. I’m not revealing the top five rules – I’m actually looking for help in defining rules #3-5. Any input is appreciated – care to weigh in with an opinion? I’ve had a number of discussions, with some of the best project managers I know, as [...]

Five Best Conversations with my Meebo (web IM) Client

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ August 29, 2007 ⋅ One comment

Back in January, I added the Meebo client to my blog page, and over the past few months I’ve learned a lot about web chat in general … There are other clients out there, and I’ve tried a few – most recently the AIM Wimzi, which came close to unseating Meebo as my web chat [...]

Project Status Dashboards Best Practice (and a PowerPoint trick)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ May 4, 2007 ⋅ Post a comment

For a simple, easily understood indication of project or task status, nothing beats the Traffic Light metaphor (Red / Yellow / Green). My IT organization is putting together standards for Project Status indicators in our PMO application; an interesting series of discussions and emails around the assignment of those Green / Yellow / Red (GYR) [...]

More on (sic) experience with wikis

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ February 1, 2007 ⋅ One comment

no, that’s not a typo … Preamble: This starts out sounding like a diary entry, but some interesting wiki-focused observations are found below – including metrics! Catching up on old items in my feed reader: Back in November, TechCrunch had an item on AboutUs, which at first glance looked at little self-referential, a web site [...]

The Iron Triangle – Quality is a Feature that We Choose to Omit from Projects

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ October 28, 2006 ⋅ 4 comments

Atwood recently wrote about the Iron Triangle – the three critical dimensions of any project. Most project management folks refer to the three legs as Money, Scope, and Time, and Atwood gives a good treatment for the software development crowd, tweaking the three terms (which can apply to any project, not just software) … Time [...]

Look your best with little effort – Excel, Project VBA for Page Formatting

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ June 11, 2006 ⋅ 2 comments

It’s been a while since I’ve posted some code to my site, so I thought I’d pop up a few more nuggets. For the first one, I was reminded of the functionality of good-looking printouts at a recent meeting. A high-pressure project, lots of analytics design, review, code, and test in a rather condensed period [...]

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