The recent takeover of Sun by Oracle poses serious questions on how the software database landscape will look in the coming months. Retailers are one of the largest customers of software database products and Retail CIO's ought to be pondering this question. Would Oracle keep MySQL as a low end offering (less than a terrabyte) ? Will it use MySQL to effectively compete against Microsoft's SQL Server ? Or would it take the extreme step of buying and burying one of the most promising products from Opensource? Here is an interesting article that analyzes these questions and more ...
http://www.storefrontbacktalk.com/e-commerce/analysis-oracles-sun-acquisition-may-have-little-retail-impact-initially/
Friday, April 24, 2009
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Effective Task Management using Mylyn
I always see a gap or a failure of connectivity between the planned tasks (after you identified the WBS, Work Breakdown Structure) and the actual execution of it. Though we have good project management tools, it is difficult to track/record the task activities and its contents apart from the name of the task in the project management tool.
In Other words, once the tasks are planned by the project lead or project manager, the task execution will be performed by the developers. Many questions related to developer task management still remain, such as - How effective is it for one to track/record/manage the task activities, contents, effort or time for a given task to developers? Also how frequently do developers reuse the past efforts or remember the tasks performed earlier in the same environment ?
It is necessary for us to glue/gel the gap with the help of an effective tool so that we can keep the connectivity and evidence the task activities. I recently came across the open-source tool called ‘Mylyn’ which claims the importance of effective task management for developers and also the organized way of working for developers with the help of an industry standard IDE (Integrated Development Environment) called ‘Eclipse’. Eclipse and Mylyn are the right combination to make the task management easier for developers. The following are some of the primary advantages that I see with the effective task management using Mylyn and Eclipse:
- Recording the task activity helps us to reuse it whenever needed in future.
- It reduces the reviewer time drastically.
- It also improves the developer productivity.
- It educates the organized way of working to the developer community.
- It reduces the collaboration communication burden.
- It helps the developer to be focused on his/her tasks.
I personally experienced the effective task management in my projects by piloting the Mylyn tool using an Eclipse IDE and monitoring the pros and cons of the tool. Moreover this helps me to convince our clients in terms of the assured productivity improvements. There are two good articles presented through IBM from the Mylyn team explaining the tool features and its usage. The following are the links.
Part#1, http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-mylyn1/
Part#2, http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-mylyn2/
In Other words, once the tasks are planned by the project lead or project manager, the task execution will be performed by the developers. Many questions related to developer task management still remain, such as - How effective is it for one to track/record/manage the task activities, contents, effort or time for a given task to developers? Also how frequently do developers reuse the past efforts or remember the tasks performed earlier in the same environment ?
It is necessary for us to glue/gel the gap with the help of an effective tool so that we can keep the connectivity and evidence the task activities. I recently came across the open-source tool called ‘Mylyn’ which claims the importance of effective task management for developers and also the organized way of working for developers with the help of an industry standard IDE (Integrated Development Environment) called ‘Eclipse’. Eclipse and Mylyn are the right combination to make the task management easier for developers. The following are some of the primary advantages that I see with the effective task management using Mylyn and Eclipse:
- Recording the task activity helps us to reuse it whenever needed in future.
- It reduces the reviewer time drastically.
- It also improves the developer productivity.
- It educates the organized way of working to the developer community.
- It reduces the collaboration communication burden.
- It helps the developer to be focused on his/her tasks.
I personally experienced the effective task management in my projects by piloting the Mylyn tool using an Eclipse IDE and monitoring the pros and cons of the tool. Moreover this helps me to convince our clients in terms of the assured productivity improvements. There are two good articles presented through IBM from the Mylyn team explaining the tool features and its usage. The following are the links.
Part#1, http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-mylyn1/
Part#2, http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-mylyn2/
What is Medical Transcription?
According to US laws, in every Hospital or Health Care Unit, each patient-related activity and procedure must be meticulously documented and then added to the patient's permanent record. In hospitals across US, doctors do not have time to update the medical records of their patients. Verbal dictation is by far the most common method for documenting and reporting the results of examinations and procedures. Physicians use either a cassette based or a digital voice dictation system for recordings. The process of converting this voice dictation to a typewritten format (hard or soft) is called Medical Transcription (MT).
It involves receiving dictation by tape, digital system, or voice file using earphones, a foot pedal for start and stop control and a word processing programme. Here are some of the basic skills needed to become an MT:
- Sound knowledge of English
- Good auditory skills
- Strong editing skills
- An eye for detail
- Typing and basic knowledge of computers
- Life/biological sciences or Pharmacy background (preferred)
PCMM milestone
PCMM journey at SPI has been an interesting one with lots of learning. Being part of this process last year and getting involved in the overall consolidation of ratings definitely helped me in understanding the process better and collating all the required artifacts. March 14th 2009 was indeed a historic day when SPI got PCMM level 3 certifiedI!
Active Sizing
I've been enjoying the discussions that we are having ever since the introduction of the "Active Sizing" concept into the PMT. Thanks to the SQA team who have come up with "Active Sizing" which is only a partial solution in bridging the gap between the "Cost to SPI" versus the "APDR" productivity metric that is tracked in software projects.
Introduction of "Active Sizing" will now expect projects to be reporting all the activities (both Completed and Active) on a monthly basis but the effort towards project management, training and SQA activities and instances where projects are booking time for “no work” (wait-time) is a discussion point of its own.Should see some interesting sessions soon :-)
Introduction of "Active Sizing" will now expect projects to be reporting all the activities (both Completed and Active) on a monthly basis but the effort towards project management, training and SQA activities and instances where projects are booking time for “no work” (wait-time) is a discussion point of its own.Should see some interesting sessions soon :-)
Measuring Utilization
One of the key indicators of the health of any IT organization is how busy the resources are. During the boom times, it was common for several outsourcing companies to maintain a large pool of resources on bench. This was done for multiple reasons - large projects that would materialize within days, uncontrollable attrition, new offices starting, aggressive growth plans, etc. But this is the age of lean companies. And the more utilized the resources are, lesser are your overheads. That poses the question of how utilization needs to be measured. Ofcourse the most simple way would be to take a ratio of resources who are invoiced to total resources on any given project. This means that the utilization (for that project) is a fixed number throughout the year (assuming no change in resource count & no change in invoice amounts). A better way would be to track hours invoiced versus total hours spent by all resources. We could refine it further by adding financial data i.e revenues generated on the project to total overheads of the project. A small project might look really good from an hours based utilization but monetarily, it could be that our overheads are much higher than revenues. Ofcourse financial analysis is only one parameter and projects could be done for strategic reasons (getting into new domains, the upside of winning a large project, etc). Neverthless, utilization measurement is critical in IT outsourcing and vendors ought to focus on improvements year on year to stay in the race.
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