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Dear CIO/IT managers,
This
CPTTM CIO newsletter is to bring useful news to you, CIO/IT managers in
Macau, for references without obligations, so that you can do your jobs
easier and better! Hope you like it. if you'd like to unsubscribe or
recommend your friends to subscribe, just email me at kent@cpttm.org.mo.
Old
issues
are available here.
Topics in this issue:
Highly effective project management process For
managing project execution, I have
ditched traditional task lists to a very simple yet
highly effective process and never looked back. My estimate is that
this new process has increased our team productivity by at least 30%! This new process consists of two activities: weekly planning and daily planning: Weeky planning.
Every Thursday (you can pick your own day), my team
members and I sit together and plan what to do in the next week,
for each currently running project and service (see a sample on the
right). Daily planning.
From then on, each day in the morning, from the weekly plan task list,
I let each team member choose the tasks he commits to
finish in that day and check whether he really finished the work
he committed yesterday.
This provides several significant benefits: - High visibility. What my team members are working on is now highly visible.
- Clear priority. The whole team can reach a consensus on the priority of the work.
- Deadline.
It is very unlikely to miss deadlines (this is the Hercules' heel of
the traditional task list created upfront: Once a task misses
the deadline, it is likely to remain undone).
- Agile.
We don't need to plan too many things upfront which may turn out to be
non-applicable later. For example, we need to decide if we need to
promote a course and how only when there are too few enrollments. This
eliminates a lot of wastes in the process.
- Lightweight.
There is no need to assign arbitrary target completion dates to tasks,
no need for any complex system (read MS Project) for checking the
execution. Everything can be done with a simple spreadsheet or just
pen and paper. There are only those tasks for the current
week/day to manage.
My next step is to do monthly plan for
big items (but no need for details). This will make sure that wel see
the forest in addition to the trees. How did I come up with this? The above process contains the key elements of Scrum, a popular agile project management process (applicable to any complex IT or non-IT projects). Huge saving in datacenter cooling
Most
datacenters are cooled in therange of 21-23 degrees and this is
even in the standard code in mainland China. However, according to
Intel, IBM and HP, our computing equipment can comfortibly be air-conditioned at 27 degrees! If this is true and doesn't violate the warranties you have with vendors, you could save a lot of money in cooling.
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Feedbacks
Any
questions, ideas or experiences to share? Contact me at
28781313 or kent@cpttm.org.mo. We also
have two other newsletters: Network
administrator newsletter and Software
developer newsletter, your staff may like to subscribe.
Until
next time,
Kent
Tong
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