Curtis asked me to write about the “big crunch/big bang” of digital content distribution. I think this is a wonderful topic, but not something I can address at the moment. I would like to do a fair bit of research and reflection before tackling the subject. In the meantime, here is something completely unrelated. A couple of weeks ago I swear I saw a post in the NASA twitter feed that contained a nasa.gov branded shortened URL. I have combed the hundreds of posts from that time period but can’t seem to find it; perhaps I imagined it. Maybe I am crazy… like a fox.
As it should be obvious by now, I am Manning’s productivity nerd. I am a lay member of the cult of Getting Things Done. I wanted to offer up a brief observation from my day-to-day work. Like the GTD project planning model, the GTD system consists of five discrete steps:
A couple exciting things happened yesterday. Nearly all my attention was focused on the launch of the new First Vehicle Services website. Meanwhile the rest of the world was focused on this. Steve Jobs said that it is “our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary product at an unbelievable price.” Adam at Gizmod said it sucks. My wife said “maybe we could get an iPad instead of the netbooks we have been looking at,” (no link, she said it in real life.) Well, I still haven’t gotten a chance to read or watch anything about the device, so I will leave the opinion to others. However, I do know a couple things.
- The ubiquity of hand-held mobile devices has changed how we develop interactive strategy, products and services.
- Apple will sell a lot of these things, thanks to marketing prowess and rabid customer base.
Last week we had a conference call with a client, one of the largest professional associations in the world. Twitter came up a few times and I couldn’t help be think of one of my favorite Twitter publishers, NASA. This led me to do some late night research on NASA’s Twitter strategy. What I found was interesting and thought others might find value in what I discovered. Continue Reading →
I am currently reading Ashley Friedlein’s book, Web Project Management . While not exactly up to the project management standards of the PMBOK, the book presents a complete web project management method. I will post a review once I finish reading and have had sometime to test the method. Meanwhile, the book offers little tips in addition to the method itself. One early tip: Do It Yourself accelerated learning. The author advocates that a web project manager try to create an entire site alone. This includes generating the idea, strategy, “costing”, design, programming, … The idea is to put yourself in the shoes of other members of your team to learn what challenges they face. The goal is to improve your client and team communication skills and learn empathy for your teammates.
I really like this idea, but I feel like the author missed a benefit: undertaking the entire process of creating a site will give you a better understanding of the big picture of production and project management. This exercise allows you to see parts of the process that you may not even know exist. Discovering holes at one point in the process will teach you what you should have done earlier and should implement in your daily work.
I have attempted similar exercises in the past, but mostly to learn new production skills. I would really like to try this someday on a new project to focus on the project management method.
I was a non-coffee drinker not too long ago. Then one day, in the middle of an intense project, we landed another intense job with a very short turn around. Conference calls with Europe before sunrise, some late nights, and a lot of stress led to my introduction to the bitter brew (I prefer mine iced [it was summer, but I also have a strange obsession with frozen water] with a kiss of French Vanilla Coffee-mate [okay, maybe a little more than a kiss]). In just a few months I have drank a lot of coffee.
I have learned that everyone makes coffee differently; some prefer it strong, some weak. Eventually I had to learn how to make it myself. So I approached this educational experience just like I approach cooking. I read the directions on the back of a pack of Starbucks grounds and grabbed the coffeemaker’s manual from the web. Then, I followed those directions; over, and over, and over making small adjustments as needed (turning down the carafe warming plate to avoid the burnt taste, making less coffee with the same ratio to avoid waste, moving to different machines and brewing methods, etc).
We are all creatures of habit. Some people haphazardly dump some amount of ground coffee and water. My habit is to research the heck out of something then repeat the same process time after time.
I have really started to enjoy cooking over the couple of years. But I do not cook like a lot of other people. I prefer cookbooks that are more encyclopedia than recipe repository. I have learned two thing about myself via cooking and coffee: I am a process oriented person, and very consistent. You may not like my coffee (it is strong) or my homemade gyro meat (ground turkey, not lamb; made meatloaf style) or granola; but it comes out nearly the same every time. Yes, this can be boring to some people, but I actually like it. This process/detail orientation drives my wife crazy some times, but she puts up with it because I make damn good coffee and cookies (baking is far more chemistry lab than cooking).
I know this recipe will never lead to a hip, innovate restaurant or the creation of an awe-inspiring piece of art. I am okay with that because I enjoy what I do and I think that it has merit and value.
UPDATE: Check out Patrick’s follow-up post about the art (direction) of chili cooking.
I hopped onto Google Analytics this morning to check in on all of our sites, and was pleasantly surprised to find that traffic to our newly launched Snowflake Workshop, has skyrocketed the last few days! We’ve yet to see much snow outdoors yet we are in the midst of a full-blown virtual blizzard.
Last week I posted my go-to planning methodology. If you are exploring a new project, you should start at the beginning of the process. However, here is a handy (though not extremely visually appealing) diagram to help you unstick projects that have been bogged down.
As a project manager, planning is an important part of my job. Unfortunately, not everyone plans as well as they are capable of. Being a methodical person, I like methodology. Here is the simple planning method that works for projects of various sizes that I have employed for a few years, complements of David Allen.
Courtesy of The Brokers with Hands on Their Faces Blog
As a sports fan, I am fully aware how unpopular the Bowl Championship Series is. It is a rigorously arbitrary way to crown a national champion, but also a very efficient way of making lots of money for the major conferences and media corporations who broadcast the BCS bowls. It is controversial to say the least, drawing the ire of Attorneys General and Congress. It is un-American to crown a sports champion in a beauty pageant, right? This surely isn’t how a free-market society determines who is the best.
Wikipedia tells us, “the theory holds that within the ideal free market, property rights are voluntarily exchanged at a price arranged solely by the mutual consent of sellers and buyers.” Tell me, how successful was your last negotiation with your credit card company, or phone company, or the authorized Apple merchant? My guess is it wasn’t very successful at all, because America is not an ideal free market society. So how does the little guy compete with the mega-huge homecoming king? If that little guy is the Western Athletic Conference, he hires a PR firm.
Continue Reading →