Archive for the ‘consultant’ Category

Fun of the week

Posted: 11. May 2011 in consultant

A man is smoking a cigarette and blowing smoke rings into the air. His girlfriend becomes irritated with the smoke and says, “Can’t you see the warning on the cigarette pack? Smoking is hazardous to your health!”

To which the man replies, “I am a programmer. We don’t worry about warnings; we only worry about errors.”

The article “Moving to Cloud to Gain Agility: 5 Lessons CIO.com” has been commented as follows:

Thanks for sharing.

1.
I’d appreciate an update on the implementation / transformation project for getting CloudSwitch in place and the lessons learned from it.

2.
Being involved in big enterprise provisioning projects some hurdles have to be taken and some prerequisites need to be fulfilled in order to get the desired target state. What is your view on this?

3.
Furthermore, I am very much interessted on the costs and how CloudSwitch is getting paid and what payment model is in place in general (Amazon / CloudSwitch).

4.
Last but not least, I am wondering whether any thoughts were spent on “vendor lock in” and how sustainability is ensured.

“Either you love it or you don’t love it”.
This applies to many situations in our daily life. Here, this could be used for notebooks as well.
Either you love Lenovo notebooks or you don’t.

I do really like Lenovo notebooks, especially the X-Series. They perfectly fit into my usage behaviour.

But there is one thing that really makes me unhappy – The screen’s resolution.
Why is it only 1366 x 768 max on a 13,3 inch!?
Sony can make it FullHD on 13,3 inch and so should Lenovo.

This is probably the most discussed disadvantage of Lenovo notebooks.

Being in a project having more than 50 people working for it, the Sony Z Series is the far most represented model.
And yes, they are fantastic and really well stuffed with up to date parts.

Now, I am comparing Lenovo’s X-Series with Sony’s Z-Series.

Pure facts sheet comparison will make me buy a Sony instead of Lenovo.
My only hope is the announced X1 from Lenovo, which shall be released soon.
(as I could wait another month before buying)

So, this post is to support all the other threads on Lenovo’s bad screen resolution. It is not Sony marketing, although it could be.

Some changes where made to the blog in order to ease maintanence and accessibility.

Now, this blog can be reached either via
http://www.aViewOnIt.com or
http://aViewOnIt.wordpress.com

Comment of the Day

Posted: 24. April 2011 in consultant

I like #Sony‘s sense of #responsibility regarding the hacker attack. Let’s see 4 how long they can keep it & how they’ll communicate.

Following aViewOn the project constraints scope, time and budget and how a prioritization could look like.

The most important point is the right scope.
Without knowing what to do all time and budget makes no real sense.
Scope needs to be approved by all stakeholders and decision makers.

Time should be the second important dimension. It needs to be understood by when a defined scope needs to be realized.
This is where a first check on whether the defined scope roughly fits to the planned timeline or alignment on scope and timeline is necessary.

The third priority is budget.
Only a defined scope and a realistic timeline allow estimations on budget seriously.

After all that the first iteration is done. Multiple iterations are required in order to get a valid project set up.
It is not as waterfall-like as it reads and normally the iterations overlap and complete each other.

Furthermore, all the above can be scaled up and down depending on the size of your initiative.

Sum:
Scope – Prio 1
Time – Prio 2
Budget – Prio 3

Real life most times looks completely different.
You need to deal with the back and forth on scope changes, because some aspects were not considered or other work streams require something different / additional.

Budget: Set to a “misteriouslyl calculated number and hell, if someone doubts that the budget isn’t properly calculated. But normally nobody really cares unless you are close to exceeding it.
In the middle and the second half the project the budget will be recalculated and surprisingly their is less money as expected and the cutting-phase starts, meaning less travel, less paid lunches, less available number of resources.
Unfortunately, all that is required in order to properly align on topics, keep people motivated and get the work done.
That is why while heading towards the end of the project “budget is not an issue”. You’ll get what you need.
The only thing you need to make sure is … “We need that service live on the planned go live date”.

That all makes IT projects interesting, challening and sometimes crazy. But that is why we are in that business, right?

Furthermore, we shouldn’t forget that IT is still in is childhood years and that many things need to be learned still.

Standards and well definded processes can help finishing projects in quality, in budget and in time.

Last but not least: the people.
Do not forget them! In the end it is them bringing success to your project.