Commentary: “Team Releases Tools for Secure Cloud Computing”

I noticed an August 2, 2010 article from the University of Texas at Dallas that should be of interesting to anyone focusing on cloud computing: it describes a collection of recently-released tools to help application developers build more robust and secure cloud applications. The article is titled “Team Releases Tools for Secure Cloud Computing.”
The tools [...]

The IT Project Confessional, part 6 – Types of project-management sins: venal and cardinal

The longer I work in the IT industry, the more amazed I am at the type of mistakes that project managers make, and also the way they react to them — both at the time the mistake is committed, and when they talk about it weeks, months, or even years later.
I have a somewhat [...]

The IT Project Confessional, part 5 – Advice to give *after* a sin has been committed

When a project manager “sinner” sits down to talk with his or her IT “confessor-priest,” one of two situations usually exists: either the sin has already been committed — i.e., the project manager has already made a mistake — or it has not. We’ll discuss these two situations in separate blog postings.
Assuming that the conversation [...]

The IT Project Confessional, part 3 – where do you find the sinners?

What would a priest do if he sat alone in his confessional box all day long, and nobody showed up to confess his sins? Perhaps he would just shrug, and come back again the next day. But eventually, he would … well, I’ll let someone who knows more about the protocol and procedures of organized [...]

The IT Project Confessional, part 2 – History and the basics

Yesterday, I introduced the concept of a “project confessional,” where troubled IT project managers could confess their “sins” and ask for help.
Before we delve into the more subtle issues associated with such a confessional, I want to cover the basics … and before I do that, I want to acknowledge that this is not some [...]

The IT Project Confessional, part 1

Imagine that you’re an IT project manager, and that you’ve just discovered you’ve made a terrible decision. It wasn’t deliberate, and perhaps it wasn’t even conscious; maybe it was a momentary outburst at an uncooperative programmer, caused by all the pressure and exhaustion from overtime. But now your uncooperative programmer has quit in a huff, [...]

Whither IT, part 10 – what if technology improvements only came from software?

The last several postings in this thread about the future of technology have focused on the consequences of hardware advances — e.g., all of the marvelous things we can look forward to in the next 5-10 years as a result of computers/chips that are 10-100 times cheaper, faster, smaller, etc.
But as an intellectual exercise, suppose [...]

Enterprise 2.0 seminar in Rome – May 2010

I just finished presenting a two-day seminar on “Enterprise 2.0” in Rome on May 19-21, 2010. You can download the 57.3-megabyte PDF file by clicking on the link above, or the image below, or by viewing/downloading the presentation from my Slideshare page. A few of the slides may seem rather cryptic and mysterious, but if [...]

Boston SPIN talk: Death March Projects in Today’s Hard Times

I’m giving a one-hour presentation Tues evening (Mar 16th) on “Death March Projects in Today’s Hard Times,” at the regular monthly meeting of Boston’s Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN) chapter. It will take place in one of the buildings of MITRE’s campus in Bedford, MA, somewhere in the vast wilderness north of Route 128. You [...]

Rome presentation: “Strategic Planning for Enterprise 2.0″

I’m here in Rome this week, participating in a conference on “Enterprise 2.0” for Technology Transfer Institute. You should be there so you can hear the presentations from all of the speakers, as well as the comments and questions from the participants. But if you’re stuck in some other part of the world, or you couldn’t [...]