Checklists in the real world...

This afternoon I understood the real reasons why checklists are important.

I flew a small Cessna-172 Golf Bravo Golf Zulu. Although I have been a believer in checklists - even though their use is challenging in the software world - I realized how critical using them can be and how useful they ought to be when comes time to inspect a plane before to take off.

No, my pilot was not holding a piece of paper and a pen, checking things off a list. He did not even know the exact number of items on the list. He just did the inspection required by this process with our possible death as a consequence of a checklist failure. This was enough for him to do it diligently. Thanks Marc!

We have many occasions to use checklists when creating software products, there are indeed plenty review processes at all phases of the job:

1. Specification
   
2. Estimation
3. Architecture and Design
4. Code
5. QA
6. etc...

I am observing that we sometime fail with checklists. Although we do it correctly most of the time, sometimes we still fail.

After today's experience, I believe that the answer to checklist success lies in a couple factors:

• Professionalism

Understand your role when reviewing and the impact you can have on the overall quality and risk mitigation.

• Agility
  

Assuming professionalism, you do not need to tick things off a list to claim that you have applied a check list. In doubt, go back to it when needed, revisit the checklist to confirm your understanding of the checklist.

Next time you are provided with a checklist, do not necessarily think that you have to print it or tick things off of it to use it, be smart and agile enough so you can perform the review process with diligence.

To help with applying checklist, imagine that you are reviewing a component of a plane that you will fly, I can assure you that you will likely do the right thing!

To get a feel of my flight load this into Google Earth, select it and hit play.

Your customer (or your boss) is using a newer MS Office than you...

Install this Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats

Although the converter is crashing on me more often than not it seems that it converts file properly...

Remember the Milk for the BlackBerry

Motivated by Fred's post this morning, I decided to have a look if the BlackBerry interface to RememberTheMilk was ready. Well, guess what? 2 days ago was released V1.0.6 for BB OS 4.2.

This is not what I was expecting. This is simply a sync between the RTM and the BB tasks application. Although this makes sense in theory, it is very limiting compared to the awesome Web2.0 RTM plugin for Gmail, and I was hoping for a BB app along these lines...

In any case, for now, this is much better than nothing although once the 15 days trial is over I will need to register to RTM Pro edition.

All in all, considering that RTM allows me to be in control of my action items buying the Pro version is just a no brainer to me.

Measuring Project Success

We probably have in general more than 50 projects going on simultaneously. This is a lot of projects. They start, they end, we move on.

How do we know that we have succeeded?

It ultimately comes down to one or two factors, these two questions are asked in our customer satisfaction survey sent out at the end of every projects:

• Would you do business with us again?
• Would you recommend us?

Getting yeses on these two is THE indicator that you have succeeded. Obviously the fact that our customers believe that we have met or even surpassed their expectations does not mean we have built the right product - which is something we greatly care about - but at least we have built what they were asking for.

When our customer are telling us that they would do business with us again and/or that they would recommend us we are happy.

I was reading this article about Measuring the success of a project and although the suggested metrics make sense, they neglected to consider the fundamental questions above and focused on secondary aspects (schedule, scope, budget, market acceptance, customer sat in terms of # of complaints).

In a service company, getting repeat business is what makes you successful even though you could not respect the schedule at 100% or meet the budgetary expectations.

Getting repeat business especially after though times implies trust and this is a warm feeling.

Powerful team collaboration using wikis

We have been using wikis for several years at Macadamian. After looking at a few options we decided to go with Atlassian's Confluence and are quite happy with it. It is not uncommon for customer's to tell us that they are more informed about what is happening within their Macadamian team that they are about their internal team.

What we do and how we do it with Confluence is partly responsible for this.

A recent verison upgrade has brought to my attention two plugins that are key in getting the most out of such a collaboration tools. Here what they are. Maybe your wiki provides similar functionality, if not let me know I can help. Macadamian is an Atlassian's partner.

Most visited page.
{popular:timespan=30d|events=create,view,update|
max=10|space=msp|types=page}

This provides you with the most frequently visited pages. In the context where your project assets are stored in your wiki. These pages are likely hot topics in your project.

Search
{livesearch:spaceKey=MSP}

Unless you are stuck in the 90' chances are that you are not browsing the web but searching it. This simple macro does this nicely for you, allowing to narrow the search to a particular space/project.

Last but not least, a wiki that offers the ability to create RSS feeds is very powerful. If your people do not like to go to your project home page to digg out recent changes, promote the usage of RSS feed.

The idea is that people will converge on your collaboration platform if there is something in it for them. If used properly, any project team member should find important project resources in the project wiki.

Oh, and finaly, do not neglect to train your people!

When an image is worth 1000 words...

Earlier this week Francois (from Cluj - Romania) and I (in Gatineau - Canada) could not use email to solve a situation, it was simply not the right tool.

We quickly got connected on VoIP and still managed to fail at understanding each other.

This is when I remembered http://www.twiddla.com/. Thanks to their guest trial thing, no accounts to create nothing, nada, niets. We were up and running on their online white board in no time.

We managed to resolve the situation in about 5 minutes, this wouldn't have been possible otherwise. When email and voice is not enough, an image might very well be what you need.

Realistically, this image above is not worth more than a couple dozen words to you but it was worth one thousand to us. ;-)