I often have to work with organizations that use PRINCE2 in project management, namely Government in the most part. In 2009 there was a major refresh of PRINCE2 and it has some great changes that simplify and improve the process. For those of you that have never come across it, PRINCE2 is a project management method, which is a tool to assist you run better projects, now I know a lot of people use and prefer the PMI/PMBOK approach and that is fine, just most of Australian government seems to have approached this with PRINCE2, probably because it originated in the UK government. Now I have developed a few PM skills over time and through the various places I have worked I have seen both PMBOK and PRINCE2 in action. Neither is good or bad just different. Many commercial organizations and the US seem to prefer PMBOK. Now back to the resource. Well it is in fact a group of resources and I found them through the PRINCE2 group on LinkedIn. It has a variety of training tools that would be an excellent resource for someone who was either going to do self study or going to do classroom based training to assist you in that training, either by providing a head start or as another supplement to your other training materiel. I think in all probability of you have some experience in projects or are already certified through PMI that you would find this a great resource to add PRINCE2 to your credentials

Here is the link PRINCE2 Group

See ya round

Image via Wikipedia

Peter

Technical Career News Computerworld has determined that General Mills are  one of the best companies in the US to work for. Congratulations General Mills. There is rather a lot from my experience that an organisation such as General Mills need to do to achieve such lofty heights. I worked for an organization back a whiles that suddenly came up with the idea that they were suddenly going to get themselves into the stratospheric heights of at least a top 50 entry. I sort of thought at the time we would be lucky to scrape in the the top 100. Now as I seem to remember it there was a bit of fanfare for a while and then zip, died faster than a Saturn V leaving the atmosphere. Gone and it was never seen again. Now I am sure it seemed like a really good idea at the time and another business which was a neighbouring business had after all been the Number 1 pick a couple of years earlier. They had in fact reached the top 10 a few times, so it shouldn’t be that hard. Funny thing is they clearly had no idea that there methods of managing the company held people in such raptures at times that they had little chance, it was a work force that had been beaten down too many times and they just didn’t have the will to go again for another dead end ride. One of the things was they had to get 50% I think of the staff to do a survey as part of entry. I think the results from the initial survey wasn’t want was that which they expected. Form my experience they would have taken at least two years of decision and follow through with the execution each and every time to show a solid progressive front. I started there amidst some more turbulent times that lead to a plan being hatched to reinvigorate the company and as a new employee against the judgement of the older employees I was working with gave management the benefit of the doubt. Like all before me I was to ultimately be dissapointed. I saw things that didn’t seem right at the time, but hey I was a relative junior in much of that sort of stuff. But I still stuck with them for at least 18 months to try and help make the changes happen. I even enrolled myself as a change evangelist. So what did the company get, well not a lot in the end. A lot was spent and little really changed. Maybe there was a flow on effect and there was probably a few small changes however I think in the end all the major initiatives dropped by the wayside.I look back and think that really the best for that organisation was Kaizen as shown by Toyota Motor Corporation and written about in the Toyota Way an excellent read. Go to work and make small improvements each and every day, try and do a new thing that improves a process or improves a product. This is something that will work if it is institutionalised from the top. jeffrey Liker wrote a great executive breif in this matter from the Toyota perspective

Since Toyota’s founding we have adhered to the core principle of con-tributing to society through the practice of manufacturing high-qualityproducts and services. Our business practices and activities based on thiscore principle created values, beliefs and business methods that over theyears have become a source of competitive advantage.These are themanagerial values and business methods that are known collectively asthe Toyota Way.                                           —Fujio Cho, President Toyota                                (from the Toyota Way document, 2001)Big bang means you are leaving your run to change too long, you need to change bit by bit each day, until there is a notivcable chage to process which needs to improve quaility or time to manufacture, however in the interest of continuous improvement,each employee needs to adress the process of improvement in their area every day. Toyota has seen huge pay back in this process.

So go out and make a little improvement in you, your processes or your product each day, little by little.

See ya round

Peter

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Sun Is Said to Cancel Big Chip Project – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com So I wonder what Larry thinks of this, is it part of his plans or has Sun pulled to pin too early or is it a smokescreen that Oracle is putting about to take attention away and allow the team to do what it needs to do whilst sorting it out. I am not sure Larry would be too happy writing off the effort unless it really is so bad that they cant possibly produce a working reliable unit. Maybe this is what is needed to shake Sun up when Oracle does come on board. If this baby isn’t too bad, I wou

ld say to Larry to make it happen as it would be a major coup and show the Sun hardware business isn’t dead yet. It just needed better funding to light its way.

I am certain this will be one of Oracle biggest hurdles when it finally takes over Sun. It is going to have to fine tune the existing hardware lines and add to the future. If Rock isn’t all bad then maybe it is something Oracle needs to drop a wad of cash into so that Rock gets the life it was to have had. I am sure there is a lot of Oracle customers that would like to see those ships go.

On another note the Niagara based servers CMT  are screamers and perhaps Larry will have them optimize them as Grid is the future and potentially they are the basis of the Grid. A Quad CPU Niagara 2 has enormous thread processing power and if your application is based around short sharp bursts of processing, with very short transactions and the ability to run them in parallel when suitable then they will fly on a low speed CPU, only 1.2GHz. It is the threads that give these boxes there enormous throughput, but from my experience older applications are less likely to show these servers in their best light and bad queries in an application, basically if you serialize things you are shot on performance, else stand back. Another interesting feature of these servers is they seems to have a very flat and stable performance characteristic as you load the system with processing requirements. The overall time for tasks when plotted shows that the time ramps up a little then it is constant event though the usage is increased say tenfold and finally you get to flood it out and the response times rapidly deteriorate, unlike older CPU architectures which exhibit a fairly consistent exponential graph for users to degrading performance.

Anyway it will be interesting what Oracle makes of it all once the deal is done and they have had time to get a real good look at what they bought. I am expecting some interesting stuff,  that is Oracles way.

See ya round

Peter