Ciaran’s Omnipurpose Blog

I'm a big fan of lists. Heck - show me a project manager who isn't a fan of lists! I'm especially fond of lists that explain how not to do something. This way, I feel as though I'm learning from the expensively-gained experience of others.

The list isn't meant to be exhaustive and isn't meant to be in order, but I hope this list proves useful to someone, somewhere:

Mistake #1:Keep the team and the stakeholders apart - I've worked in some (large) organisations where the lead developers are on good drinking terms with the Directors. I've worked in other organisations where there has been a wall of separation between the people who have the business vision and those who actually need to build the tools to deliver that vision. In one memorable case, the only contact the team was permitted to have with stakeholders was a set of documents written by business analysts from another part of the business. Of course there always has to be a balance struck between proper use of time and the importance of the project, but communication, especially at the outset of a project, is vital.

Mistake #2: Communicate infrequently - If the project is important, people will be interested and should be asking as much as being told how the project is progressing. Frequent, early communication allows for project plans and budgets to become exposed to real life challenges and be up for discussion. Early communication allows stakeholders to see what they're getting and reject or change it early. Frequent communication builds up an important level of trust: that the stakeholders care what the team is doing and that the team is doing its level best to deliver what the stakeholders need. This trust is a useful currency for when the challenges come later in the project.

Mistake #3: Save all your testing until the last minute - If you're running an agile project, you're likely to be testing every 2-4 weeks, depending on the length of your sprint. "Fail Early" is the philosophy here. If you're doing things in a traditional waterfall manner, you're probably hoping that there'll be only a handful of defects revealed during your testing phase. Consider instead breaking your project into a series of mini-waterfalls that will allow your testers to get on the case as early into the development process as possible.

Mistake #4: Don't tell a client when they're wrong - The client has brought you in for a reason, so you shouldn't be afraid of making suggestions on how to best set up the project for success. Of course, there are diplomatic ways of doing this, and it helps to know when to exercise discretion.

Mistake #5: Put the client on the critical path without telling them - Working in collaboration with a client means that very often, you're dependent on them for things like servers, meeting attendance, approval etc. Make very clear up front just what you need from the client and when you'll need it by. If you're nervous, keep it on the risk log for regular review with the client (you're doing that, aren't you?)

Mistake #6: Focus on contracts not collaboration - Something unexpected always happens in a project. If things go very wrong, there's always a temptation to throw blame around and cover your back. It's just the human thing to do. It's also the wrong thing to do. Both you and the client have a lot invested in a project; financially, emotionally and in terms of career. It's in both your interests to find a way out of a problem together: fix the problem not the blame: focus on working together, rather than scoring contractual points and you'll be much closer to a positive result for all.

Mistake #7: Mix your methodologies - Are you running this project in Agile or in Waterfall? Does everybody share the same expectations about how the project will proceed and what their responsibilities are? A common mistake for newcomers to Agile is to fix your time, scope and cost on a project, which is fine if you have contingency, but Agile doesn't work like that. Similarly, people who have dipped a toe in the Agile water and have decided it's not for them often take the bits they like, such as the great flexibility in accommodating changes to requirements, and try to apply this to Waterfall - this is dangerous because waterfall projects, by their non-iterative nature, don't allow for iterative changes without some significant upheaval or nimble footwork.

Mistake #8: Just get on with it and never look back - Make sure you kick your project off well. At no other time in a project do you get such a golden chance to motivate your team by sharing the vision with them, agreeing ways of working, setting expectations and understanding risks. Simillarly, take time throughout the project (and again at the end) to look back and see how you're all working, what to keep doing and what to do differently. Agile calls these moments retrospectives, but you can call them whatever you like.

Mistake #9: Extract every waking hour from your team - Overtime is quite often a fact of life, especially at the end of a marathon project. Overtime is demonstrated to give your team a performance boost in the short term, but carry this on indefinitely and you get burn out, a dip in quality and a loss of momentum. Swapping out burnt-out people is costly. Not to mention, it's not very nice to put people in this position in the first place.

Mistake #10: Never, ever change your plan - Again, this is where project management is as much art as science. Be risk averse: We project managers love risk and issue logs. Change is as often as not a good thing. If a plan changes throughout the project, it's a sign that it's being used, understood and reflects reality. If the plan isn't changing, perhaps nobody's actually following it.

Well, I had quite a few more than these 10, but I think I'll keep my powder dry for another post. Of course, I'd be very grateful for your comments and suggestions for the next 10.

I was at a conference today, and was surprised that anyone would need to be told:

"I know at the end of the day putting this in God’s hands, the right thing for America will be done, at the end of the day on Nov. 4." - Sarah Palin

So, either there isn't a god, or Sarah's god agreed with her and picked Obama in a massive landslide.

Obama's victory speech was fantastic. Here it is. You might find it stutters a bit. That's because 900,000 people have watched it so far and I think YouTube is a little overwhelmed:

What America does matters, so, of course, I'm filled with hope. I'm filled with hope not because Obama is a black man or a Democrat, but because of his policies and from what I have seen of the content of his character. Those who carp on about the colour of his skin are missing the point, and I think this is Obama's point too. Even this "redneck", called "Cupcake" gets the point:

"It's not a matter of race, it's a matter of what's going to happen, it's a matter of beliefs: he believes in the same things I do. Black White, Chinese, Mexican; I don't care who they are, as long as they can run our country. If they can run our country good and they're willing to take that job - if I was there, I wouldn't want that job - I give the man props: he wants to have this job. He's black and guess what, he's going to get a lot of crap about it, but guess what: he's got a good heart… I have a lot of friends who are ignorant: they're not going to vote for him because he's black and I tell them that's your own ignorance. If you're going to vote for someone because he's black or white, there's no reason for you to even vote."

Democracy favours short-term thinking along voting cycles, but Obama's rhetoric has consistently concerned with a long view over generations. It's comforting to see that the USA now has a leader who at least talks the talk about thinking through policy. I don't think he'll spend his first year playing golf like his predecessor.

Of course I'm concerned that Obama's got a massive hill to climb, as big as anything since FDR: war, economic catastrophe, an electorate undergoing massive social, economic and technological upheaval, a battered infrastructure and an abysmal standing in world affairs. Part of the reason he's in is because he's got the usual Democrat job: he has to sweep up the mess of a Republican administration.

He knows he's got to do this and recognises that everyone will have to pull together, hence the oft-repeated line about there being no red states, no blue states, just the United States. In this spirit, McCain's concession speech was magnanimous. It is a shame that the crowds who booed Obama at this concession have not yet realised that they're all in the same boat. It's also disturbing to see lots of gloating already by "liberals". You've selected a leader who preaches reconciliation and unity, but you're ignoring the message to score points.

There's clearly a lot of healing to do along the liberal/conservative fault-line. But please don't for a second think that this is the end of the racial fault line.

Obama won the popular vote across all Americans by roughly 52% to 46%. Looking at the BBC's demographic coverage of who voted for Obama, it's interesting to see that there's a split amongst whites that's similar to the popular vote split. The split amongst Hispanics was roughly 65% to Obama, 25% to McCain. The split amongst African Americans was a staggering 95% to Obama, and 5% to McCain.

Are African-Americans letting the issues be the issues, or was this a plebiscite of colour? Either way, there's a massive gulf. If the vote was divided by colour, then that tells us that things haven't moved on at all since emancipation. If the vote was divided by other issues, that implies that the socioeconomic makeup of the African-American demographic is vastly different to that of the white and, to a lesser extent, the Hispanic segment. 

We can't pat ourselves on the back just because a black man has won the Presidency. There's still a very long way to go.

For me, this event is important because it starts to close the book on September 11th, an event that made a huge impression on me. I've always felt that Bush squandered the good will of the world and presided over a USA that was a parody of what I'd grown up respecting and admiring. Obama's message and demeanour represent a decision by the American people to return to that ideal of progress, consideration and a rational America. This is why I am deeply moved by what has happened. 

But on the same day that we celebrated a black man winning the election as a big step forward, let's not forget that a big step backwards was taken too. 

Looking back at the 1967 civil rights case of Loving v. Virginia, which ended all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States, it's hard to reconcile the progress that people are heralding with the election of the first black president of the USA, with the vote in California on the very same day, to ban same-sex marriage. Obama's speech acknowledged that, gay or straight is still American, so it was sad to see Proposition 8 passed. If race-based discrimination is unconstitutional, why should discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation be permissable?

Apart from the horrendous physical legacy that eight years of Bush has left him to clean up, Obama has an even bigger task ahead: he need to teach his nation to respect and embrace its diversity again:

E Pluribus Unum

At this time, Barack Obama is now at 338 Electoral College votes. John McCain stands at 158 votes.

This means that Barack Obama will be the 44th President of the USA.

Obama is at least 5 million votes ahead of McCain. This is legendary.

Did McCain take a dive?

Now get to work and don't let us down!

I don't think I've been this excited about an election since, well, since Labour won a landslide in 1997. I've already talked at length about how much I admire Obama. I'm delighted he's President-elect.

I'm not a gambling man, but I was ready to put money on Obama in the first week of January, before he beat Hillary Clinton. The odds were 3-1 at that point.

I wish I had now.

I was a little worried in the final couple of weeks, especially when Obama started to pull ahead. I'd heard about the problems with electronic voting and the series of dirty tricks the Republican Party is said to have played on the electorate.

I was also surprised to see McCain doing so well in the polls leading up to the election. The man appears to me to be quite clearly a careerist power-seeker, not interested in others and driven to sell his very soul for power. This Rolling Stone article is particularly interesting reading.

Next to Obama, McCain appeared inept. Next to Whoopi Goldberg, he was laughable, in public, he was a clown, and clearly just a mouthpiece for some other intelligence. After 8 years of a joke president, who brought war and a broken economy, why would the electorate want another one? Not only that, why would the electorate want someone a hearbeat away from the presidency as thick-headed and vacuous as Sarah Palin?

This was a mind-boggling campaign: Obama went from a standing start 2 years ago, to raising about $700m and organising thousands of volunteers at the grass roots to go knocking on doors for him. He out-spent, out-organised and out-argued his opponent. Arguably, he also had the moral high ground, with McCain and Palin's attacks stooping to embarrassing lows of negativity, fear-mongering, guilt-by-association, misrepresentation and meanness.

Especially mean, and woefully-timed, was yesterday's official complaint by the Republicans to the Federal Electoral Commission that Obama had misused funds to visit his dying grandmother. Obama's grandmother died that very day.

The Republicans played the man, not the ball, and my cynical side is astonished that enough of the herds of American voters out there were clever enough to see through it. Even so, I can't for the life of me understand why 51 million people ended up voting for the McCain/Palin ticket at the end of the campaign.

Called states early on 5th Nov. 2008

Obama appears to have won every swing state in play. It's an incredible and crushing victory.  

The election was McCain's to lose, and he lost it in a willfully ham-fisted way. McCain's advisors aren't stupid. So did they take a dive? If they did, was it because they don't want to have to clean up the mess they've left behind? Or is it really irrelevant who's in the White House, since the same old corporate interests will continue to exercise power through their influence with whomever is President.

Time will tell. I mentioned earlier that I was thrilled about a Blair landslide in 1997. I soon discovered just how disappointing that was. On election day in 1997, I was living in Berlin. Berliners came up to us and congratulated us on finally turning a page and looking forward to a better future, working with Europe and selecting a government to undo the damage of 18 years of Tory rule. Looking back, I realise how naive we all were.

"Yes we can" doesn't sound all too dissimilar from "Things can only get better".

But he's in, now. He's proven that he can pick a campaign up from nothing and go on to win. Now he's going to have to prove that he can pick up the USA from the floor and restore it to glory. The work starts now, and I can only hope this is one politician who turns out to be a statesman.

 More to the point, can you America??

Will we wake up tomorrow with Obama as President-elect?

I hope so, and so does most of the world. Only Algeria, congo and Iraq are counted as leaning towards McCain in the Economist's, admittedly wildly unrepresentative, poll of the world.

But, of course, the world's opinion doesn't affect the outcome of the election. At home, polls point to him winning convincingly, with an 11 point lead in some cases.

I certainly hope Obama takes the Presidency for a multitude of pure policy reasons: his intention to sort out the parlous state of the US healthcare system, his acknowledgement of the environmental disasters we're facing, a nuanced approach to Keynesian and redistributive economic policy and a sensible multilateral approach to international relations.

From my secularist perspective, his keynote speech to the Call to Renewal in June this year more progressive than I imagined this devout churchgoer would be, and more progressive than I thought a presidential candidate could be.

Of course, it's nowhere near everything I could wish for as a secularist, but he recognises the importance of Church-State separation in a way that I can't imagine Bush, McCain or Palin would.

As a leader, Obama also deserves to move into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue because he is, to quote the Republican Colin Powell, a "transformational figure". Regular readers of this blog will recall me saying on various occasions (here) that I have a huge admiration for the USA, but in recent times, I've been very disappointed with the direction America has taken away from its ideals.

I've watched Obama's speeches and followed his campaign closely. I've been filled with hope, and so have millions of other people who would have been otherwise apathetic.

A leader that can transform that for the better has to be the next step for America and, by extension, the world. After spending the largest war-chest of a presidential campaign in history against a party whose incumbent president has rock-bottom approval ratings and during a massive economic crisis, I think I'll be more crushed than I was in 2004 when Bush was re-elected.

Tune in for a post election review tomorrow.

As an atheist, I've still got my share of problems, but I've put one behind me. I've dug myself out of the pit of religious belief and can now work on sorting out my destiny for myself. I keep this blog as a catharsis and a place for people to use as a resource if it helps them (for gardening too!), but I don't go and pester people in the street.

Of course, there are plenty of reasons to oppose the spread of religion: that it isn't logical or reasonable is one; that it allows all sorts of abuse of power and gullibility is another, but reading an article my friend Mark sent me has got me thinking about the future and human progress.

You see - I'm quite the science fiction nut. I'm not talking about ray-gun, technobabble sci-fi; I'm talking about Science Fiction that makes you think about what we are and how we organise ourselves. I'm particularly interested in Transhumanism and Post-Scarcity.

The latter of the two refers to a society where technology and economic organisation have effectively eliminated hunger or other needs and people work only to better themselves and others around them. Quite how it might work is open to discussion, of course. Aren't we all fallible creatures driven by greed and in competition with each other? Or is that just what religion teaches us?

 
So why are you still here?

My friend Mark sent me this article from the Irish Times. In it, an Evangelical Christian insinuates that Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ, ready to usher in the End Times:

"On the one hand, it is exciting for us as conservatives because we can actually see what God prophesied coming about; but on the other hand, it is frustrating to see somebody become president who is a blatant liar."

A simple Google search finds a blog about Obama being the Anti-Christ, and Time Magazine ran an article about a McCain ad insinuating that Obama is evil incarnate:

What I take away from this nonsense is, most obviously, if you're running a political campaign, it can be useful to have a crowd of credulous morons willing to vote for you according to an unsubstantiated fairy story.

But more fundamentally, the whole concept of the Anti-Christ ties into the timeline that the Christian quoted above. The Rapture is part of the Christian belief in the End Times.

Leading up to the Rapture is the Pre-Tribulation, a time when things (in some ways) will look very positive and progressive for the Earth:

1. The nations of the world must unify their currency onto a universal standard.
2. There will be peace in Israel (Ezekiel 38).
3. There will be a one-world government, to correspond to the 7th beast of Revelation, prior to the Antichrist's 8th beast government.
4. The Jewish temple in Jerusalem must be rebuilt in its original place.
5. Observance of Old Testament commandments concerning animal sacrifices must be reinstated.
6. There will be a great falling away and the Antichrist will be revealed. (2 Thessalonians 2)

Of course, I'm not suggesting that I want all of these things to happen, but it would be great to have peace in the Middle East, have a united world and sort out our global economy so that we don't have people starving whilst others fret over whether to get that latest Plasma Screen TV.

It's as if Christians with this crazy belief in the End of Days think that anyone trying to better the world, through politics, voluntary work, science or economics are unwitting agents of the end of the world. It's terrible that, in a very practical way, they are opposing a message of hope (which is how I interpret Obama's message) in favour of a message of fear, divisiveness and war (which is how I interpret McCain's message).

How sad that they view human progress and hope as essentially destructive and evil, but how confusing too, since they seem to long for the Armageddon they think it heralds.