Journyx Project Management Blog

If it wasn’t apparent from my pathetic cry for help the other day, even I — one of your more theoretically productive persons in North America — struggle with what to call things.

Tags, files, and — dear Lord — the innumerable assets associated with making web sites, graphics, audio, and video projects; it’s all a hopeless jumble unless you have some kind of mature system in place for what you call your stuff and its various iterations. Of course, if you’re like me — and I hope that you are not — you still have lots of things on your desktop with names like “thing-2 finalFinal! v3 (with new changes) 05b.psd“.

For prior art, I still treasure this Jurassic thread on What Do I Know where people share their thoughts on this age-old problem, but, frankly I haven’t seen many good resources out there on best practices for naming.

Anyhow, during a recent MacBreak shoot, I noticed that Alex and his team seem to have a pretty fly system for naming the video files that eventually get turned into their big-time IPTV shows. Thus, I turned to Pixel Corps‘ Research Division Lead, Ben Durbin (co-star of Phone Guy #5) for insight and sane help. And, brother, did he ever give it to me…

Read more at: 43 Folders

Some shops develop mobile applications the way a Boy Scout rolls his sleeping bag: fold, press air out, roll, press and repeat until you can stuff it in the nylon sack and tie the pull-string tight. Companies likewise take a desktop app, remove all the white space in forms, rearrange fields to fit tiny screens, shrink the database and jam the package into a mobile device. In this case, though, it’s not a pull-string but a noose they’re pulling tight, damning the application project to a slow, painful death at the hands of its own inflexibility and dearth of usability.

Repeat after us: Mobile applications are not the same as desktop applications. Mobile application deployment cannot be compared with rolling out the latest version of Microsoft Office to PCs on the corporate network. Mobile applications feel different, the hardware is smaller, and connectivity is limited and sporadic. Unfortunately, as we discuss in “Mobile Version of the Valdez”, the mobile-application ecosystem has been thoroughly polluted by the consumer-focused character of wireless carriers. It isn’t easy for an enterprise to completely meet its needs without assembling the parts itself. Never fear: Here’s a 10-step road map to ensure a successful rollout.

Read more at: Dr. Dobb’s Portal

If you’re a regular reader of the Journyx Journal, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve had the following information in every newsletter since June. There’s a reason for that - this is very important and has the potential to keep you from having a really bad day next Monday.

Maybe you’ve seen this info and already done what needs to be done. Good for you. Maybe you saw it and figured you’d wait until the time got closer. Well, now’s the time to get on it. And if you’re a new subscriber, then please keep reading for one of the most important announcements you’ll hear from Journyx.

The change to Standard Time happens this weekend, and that means that the time has arrived where action is absolutely required…

Journyx has identified a potentially serious issue with versions of Timesheet prior to the current releases (i.e., versions older than 7.1 and 5.6m3). This issue is related to scheduled emails & reports in Timesheet and the clock resetting that comes with the switch from Daylight Savings Time back to Standard Time.

Like the good soldiers that we are, we’ve had a fix for you long before you’d be affected by this. So if you haven’t already, please please please follow the link below to learn exactly what you need to do to make sure your Timesheet installation keeps on ticking without burying you under a pile of approvals emails and scheduled reports.

Check the time at: http://journyx.com/rss/support/tsdst.html

It’s pretty rare for a software development project to go perfectly. In fact, although developers tend to have eternal faith that the next project will succeed completely according to plan, I can’t think of a single project that I’ve been involved with over the past 25 years that went off without a hitch. Dealing with bugs, sudden requirements changes, hardware and software that break down mid-project, unexpected personnel turnover, baffling interactions between components, malevolent servers, and incompetent subcontractors seem to be the order of the day. The question is not so much whether you’ll get hit with something unexpected, as how you’ll deal with it - and what you can learn from it for the next project.

The difference between average programmers and excellent developers is not a matter of knowing the latest language or buzzword-laden technique. Rather, it can boil down to something as simple as not making the same mistakes over and over again. Fortunately, there’s a powerful tool that any developer can use to help learn from the past: the project postmortem.

Star in your very own CSI at: http://journyx.com/rss/redir/developer-postmortem.html

November 2nd is International Project Management Day. What’s that you say? You didn’t get the memo? Well here’s a nudge to get you proactive. Consider what the official site has to say:

The international project management day is intended to encourage project based organizations worldwide or organizations who utilize project management methodologies to schedule some type of recognition event within their organizations or coordinated locally with others to truly demonstrate appreciation for the achievements of project managers and their teams.

That sounds like an excuse to have a party to us. What’s that? You’re haven’t already planned yours? Hop to it, mes amis!

Get this party started at: http://journyx.com/rss/redir/ipmday.html

• How can I quickly enter the same time entries with a different comment for each?
• How can I ensure that all employees track time off in a consistent way?

Get these great tips and more at: http://journyx.com/rss/support/tips/

Here’s a special request to all our loyal customers in the Accounting fields. Journyx has been nominated for a Readers’ Choice Award sponsored by CPA Technology Advisor Magazine. The awards include categories for virtually every technology a tax or accounting professional uses, including tax compliance, payroll, practice management/time & billing, document management, website builders, small and midsize business accounting programs, construction/contractor accounting systems, write-up and trial balance, estate and financial planning, fixed asset management, tax research, laptops, PDAs, printers/scanners, office supply store and even your favorite late-night food during tax season.

Of course, we hope you’ll vote for Journyx, but the awards also offer you the opportunity to share your opinions on a broad array of other categories and thereby help spotlight the products and services most valuable to you and your peers. CPA Technology Advisor will print the results of the voting in its January 2007 issue.

Voting - which is anonymous - is open until November 15th. There are numerous things to vote for, but a great place to start is Category 13: Firm Management and Billing Systems. You might recognize you favorite timesheet amongst the candidates.

Vote early and often (as we say here in Texas) at: http://journyx.com/rss/redir/cpatamagrc.html

Portfolio-based project management calls for IT work to be organized into projects and programs and managed collectively, like a portfolio of stocks. In this way, the initiatives that offer the greatest potential benefit to the organization are staffed and funded, while those that don’t are discarded in favor of new ideas that can be added to the portfolio.

If there is one overarching operating principle that every organization interested in project portfolio management should put into place, it is this: All work to be done within the company must be included as a project or program within the corporate strategic plan.

By adopting this principle, a company ensures that all initiatives are fully understood by the management team and that potential organizational conflicts have been considered as part of corporate priority-setting…

Read more at: Computerworld

The Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act of 2002 is a congressional act passed to prevent future scandals of Enron proportion and is considered to be one of the most significant changes to federal securities law in the United States. The Enron scandal and other similar scandals damaged investors’ confidence in the accuracy of all public corporate financial statements. Among the major provisions of the Act are criminal and civil penalties for securities violations, as well as increased disclosure regarding executive compensation, insider trading and financial statements.

In lay terms, the SOX act essentially says that you will go to jail if you are signing off on the veracity of certain documents in a public corporation and they turn out to be incorrect, even if it wasn’t really your fault. It requires certain executives at the top to sign off on the financial statements that stockholders typically examine before buying a stock. This potentially exposes those top executives to the risk of jail time.

As you might expect, the CEOs, CFOs and other executives of publicly traded companies take SOX very seriously. When a CEO takes something seriously, it typically means finding some other person in the company, or several, and requiring them to take the issue even more seriously — and that’s just what CEOs have done with SOX. It’s considered “delegation of responsibility,” “buck-passing” or “things rolling downhill” — depending on one’s point of view.

This is probably where you come in.

Read more at: E-Commerce News

Does your company struggle to brainstorm new products and services? Virtualization tools such as road-mapping software and patent-citation systems offer insight into the pipeline of promising ideas. Here’s how to pick technologies that fit your innovation approach.

Situational awareness is “the perception of elements in the environment … the comprehension of their meaning and the projection of their status in the near future,” according to Dr. Mica Endsley, an expert on systems supporting human decision making.

One business equivalent of situational awareness is “innovation insight,” an emerging area that is helping leading companies stay ahead of ever-faster demand cycles. Innovation insight is about analyzing and understanding your efforts to innovate, including the people involved, the processes used and the outcomes achieved. To gain insight into projects, market positioning and corporate performance, you can view Gantt charts, two-by-two matrices and balanced scorecards, respectively. Like these other forms of business insight, innovation insight depends on visualization to make it easy for managers to see the state of your initiatives and to tweak and tune those efforts.

Innovation is big business. According to a 2005 survey by Booz Allen Hamilton, the world’s top 20 innovators alone invested more than $110 billion on research and development. In this, the first article in a series on innovation, we’ll explore some of the software applications you can use to gain insight into innovation efforts and manage them more effectively. Next month we’ll examine the three approaches to innovation and how they can be turned into predictable business processes.

Read more at: Dr. Dobb’s Portal