The Fractal Method of Project Management

St Louis, United States, wiki 2 Responses »
May 152008

island2005001000bb.jpgSo, we’ve all disparaged Waterfall software development as overly cumbersome and simply undoable in today’s go-go world.  Agile came along and promised to tighten everything up, but in reality most people just say the words ‘agile’ and they really mean ‘cram waterfall methods into 2 week segments’.  (“Manifesto“? Really? The last guys to use that word didn’t do so well.)
Here is my new proposal for software and project management: The Fractal Method.

The Fractal Method will take 3-5 core principles and apply them at all levels.  Just as a fractal equation takes 3-5 variables in some algorithm and applies them at any scale (kilometer or millimeter level), the Fractal Method for project method will take 3-5 core principals and apply them at large application development as well as small tasks.  This seems stupidly simple, but that’s one of my first suggestions for ‘Core Principles’: keep things stupidly simple.

To implement The Fractal Method, make sure of the following:

  1. Get all the business people and developers in a room and tell them that we’re all going to follow the Fractal Method.
  2. Explain that the method means that we’re all signing on to 5 core principles, and we’re going to decide them right now.
  3. Make sure the Core Principles are short and simple enough to be memorized by EVERYONE
  4. Play a game so that everyone begins to memorize them.
  5. Go sing some Karaoke together, because everything will be great from now on

Anything beyond this, in my opinion, is hand-waving and/or bullshit project management fluff.  PMs make decent money, and for some reason it’s all too tempting for a PM to schmooze the bosses with fancy methods and drawings and charts to show that they’re worth all that money, when I would much rather pay them to actually get shit done.

With that, here are my Core Principles (if we were to deploy the Fractal Method):

  1. Keep things stupidly simple. Call bullshit on complex proposals and passive-voice responses
  2. Write everything down in a common area. Wikis are nice.  So are white boards in the hallway
  3. Divide by 3. Divide each task into 3 subtasks until each item is less than 1 day’s worth of work
  4. 20 Minutes. Meetings are never longer than 20 minutes.  If you didn’t decide everything, that’s okay, because you can meet again later, but 20 minutes was enough to give people things to do between now and the next meeting.
  5. Results win. Results are worth more than estimations or plans

There ya go.  I think I’ll start writing a book.

Posted by Dave at 11:51 am Tagged with: , , , , , ,

Wikindex.com with relative rankings

St Louis, wiki 3 Responses »
Apr 092008

wikindex_rank.png

Thanks again to my friend Matt, we now have a consistent basis to rank mediawiki sites on www.wikindex.com. The score is essentially a combined log(10) of the daily updates, number of articles, and user count. The philosophy guiding the score is that a successful wiki is really reflective of an active community, and would need a fair population of users, a critical mass of articles for a base reference, and maintenance/currency from daily updates.

If you have a wiki, please consider adding it to the wikindex. We will continue to work on gathering stats from the dekiwiki crowd and hope to add those rankings in as well. We are open to any suggestions for improvement. One that occurs to me: remove the google ads– maybe not worth it?

Some odd things to note from the rankings: World of Warcraft fanboys write a lot, but not as much as the Star Wars geeks (Triumph could have told you that). Both beat Star Trek. Superman and Batman are bigger than Final Fantasy (as it should be) but smaller that Yu-Gi-Oh (Wha-t3h-fu?). Just outside the top 50, however, is a wiki about furries (*blech**shudder* no link on purpose) and it’s bigger than the Conservapedia: a wiki for right-wing nutters.

Posted by Dave at 6:30 pm

Mint.com is pretty cool

Network, St Louis, United States 1 Response »
Mar 072008

mint_white.jpgThe Average American moves every 7 years. Some people stay in one place their whole lives, which means that some of us move every three or four years or more. Within that group, some of us skip between countries. I admit to that wanderlust. I admit that I get antsy if I am in the same town for more than 4 years. As a result, I’ve got bank accounts in 5 cities across three countries. I’ve got IRA accounts from three different vendors from former employers. Yes– consolidation would probably be a good idea, but it’s nice to have that account ready to go in a foreign country when the shit finally hits the fan here in the Twighlight’s Last Gleaming.

Mint.com was made for this. It has a pretty easy interface and some cool juju on the backend to assure security. It downloads the current transaction records from your bank accounts, credit cards, investment portfolios, and savings all into one online screen. Moreover, it provides the fun Charts-n-Graphs on your spending habits that made Quicken so entertaining. This is no less secure than when Quicken accesses your accounts. In fact, it’s much more secure: the transactional records are only going one way, and between mint.com and your bank. With Quicken, those transactions are going from the bank to your half-assed ISP, to your wifi antenna in your basement, and to your windows-pc, where you’ve likely got a virus, a root-kit, and a keylogger installed by the Russian mob– not to mention the teenage neighbor who sniffed your WEP key last year and uses your network to share bit-torrents of Nelly videos.

Mint.com: thumbs up!

Posted by Dave at 8:55 am

Meta-Meta-Blogging to Paradise or Oblivion

St Louis, wiki 1 Response »
Oct 052007

Okay, I’ve started to sell out, starting with my Technorati Profile, my linkedin profile, wikipedia, and facebook. There’s a myspace page somewhere, and I am getting a lot of invites from sexy college girls who suddenly want to sell me ringtones (to pay for tuition, i guess). I have yet to sign up for kaboodle, twitter, amvona, or style, but don’t worry, I’ll slut out this website there soon enough.

The obvious drive here is for attention, for the narcissistic joy of ego-googling your own name into that top position (over my rivals Dave Jenkins the photographer, the construction company owner, and the guitarist for Pablo Cruise, not to mention the mayor of Salt Lake City back in the 40s and my cousin Dave Jenkins in London). But is there a place for the meta-meta-blog? Would a site that gathers all of these together for someone and allow common updates work? here’s what I see as the base requirements:

  1. The code must be neutral and open, allowing all these other meta-blog sites to adjust into the API
  2. The site would need to provide a one-click-heres-all-your-links functionality
  3. People would want an interface where they could ‘go dark’ with a simple click– erase all their profiles

This last one is the most powerful. Already way too many of us have shared way too much information out there. How nice would it be to be able to comprehensively kill all those profiles out there? The problem is that– with Google Cache, the wayback machine, and others– data never really disappears. So, this meta-meta-blog-eraser would need to go in and jam all these profiles with random information, in the hopes that as the spiders come through again, the newly randomized junk would show up instead. But we all know that won’t work either.

Posted by Dave at 5:46 am

The Dilettante Economy

Korea, Salt Lake City, St Louis, United States 4 Responses »
Sep 082007

I aint no Repo ManWell, the bubble has popped. For the record, this is the third real estate bubble I’ve seen– Tokyo in 1988, Seoul in 2004, and now all of the USA in 2007. Funny thing about bubbles, they’re so apparently obvious in hindsight, or even in the middle of them, but The Fever takes over, and no one wants to hear anything bad. For me, a big sign was the show “Flip This House”, which essentially showed idiots in SoCal who would buy cheesebox shitholes, redo the kitchen, and make $200K in 6 weeks. I say ‘idiots’ because most of them really were that– preoccupied with paint and tile selections rather than improving the structural integrity or usable space of these homes.

Dilettantes. Middle-class schnooks with some disposable money chasing the big payoff but not enough patience nor smarts to really pull it off. They’re not the suckers down at the Cash-n-Go, and they’re not the rational thinkers at Morgan Stanley, they’re in-between. They know someone really rich, and think that they are just as smart (but they’re not). They work, and they probably save, but not enough. They invest, but regret those investments because they didn’t buy Google.

The Dilettantes come in waves. They were multi-level marketers in the 80s, day-traders in the late 90s, and web developers soon after. The Dilettante Economy revolves around, provides the toolsets for, and celebrates the rare winners (just like a Casino billboard on the freeway that promises you Freedom) within this demographic. Shows like “Flip This House” and “Property Ladder” fed on this, just as Countrywide Loans and all those other loose finance companies made real dollars enabling all this poor behaviour. Before this wave, eTrade, Charles Schwab, and Ameritrade made their mark with fees from the day-traders, and NuSkin, Avon, and Amway before then. Hell, I could trace this economy all the way back to Levi Strauss: the California Gold Rush of 1849 brought a lot of dilettantes, but it was ole’ Levi who got rich by selling them blue jeans sewn from the surplus sailing canvas torn from the ships rotting in San Fransisco Bay.

The New York Times picked this up (and actually did some interviews, unlike my cheap rants here):

“That is an income Randy Haddadin would have welcomed. Mr. Haddadin, 38, moved to Miami Beach in December 2003 from Washington, after leaving a job in information technology. He promptly got his real estate license.
[...]
Mr. Haddadin is now weighing his options. He might seek a job in information technology again, or perhaps help a friend open an Italian restaurant in Miami Beach, while selling real estate on the side.”

In other words, this guy jumped on the IT thing when that was hip, burned out when his skillz weren’t enough, then hawked property. I hope his pesto sauce actually has some punch behind it, because he sure sounds like a Dilettante to me.

So, now that the Dilettantes can no longer feed on each other and the suckers below them, now that the interest-only floating-rate NINJA loans are gone, what is the next big thing?

My guess: debt collection and repo men. I am working on my ‘How to Succeed at Finance Recovery’ kit right now. It goes on sale next month for $499.

Posted by Dave at 9:46 pm
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