Seven tips for successful management

I regularly find myself reading the thoughts and opinions of experts on management and how I can be a better manager. I’m never actually surprised by what I read – I think most of it is obvious. At the same time it’s easy to agree with what you’ve read, but difficult to put it into...

Simple Scheduling for Your Week

Developers that work with an issue tracking system are torn between two extremes. They often would like to know everything that is happening on their project yet their main focus is on tasks assigned to them. In practice, neither an overly nosey or a hermit-like approach works well, as developers are either overwhelmed by the...

IT Governance – Why Before How

IT Governance often represents a new way of doing business: An IT Governance training strategy must incorporate change management. An initiative as impactful as an IT Governance Solution typically requires an organization to implement new roles, processes and automation. The changes can appear daunting for many employees whose first experience with the new techniques is...

Lean Startup Kanban Boards Examples

In a blog post today on agilefocus.com, William Pietri outlines his approach to tracking experimental work through the value stream of a Lean Startup. Being a “Lean Startup” ourselves (though we don’t really think of ourselves as a “startup”…but close enough), I found this line of thought intriguing. So, I decided to take a crack at modeling...

Project Management’s Five Deadly Sins

70% of all IT projects fail Since the mid-1980s, the Standish Group has published the world’s largest study on IT projects – the Chaos Manifesto (formerly called the Chaos Report). Over the years they have examined over 70,000 projects, and what’s startling is the amount of IT-related projects that fail. In the latest poll for...

Optimize Your Workday with Tasktop and the Atlassian Connector for Eclipse

The new 2.0 release of the Atlassian Connector for Eclipse provides the latest and most complete access to Atlassian’s development and collaboration tools from within the Eclipse IDE. This provides developers with an integrated platform for managing issues, source code, builds, and code reviews. Combining the Atlassian Connector for Eclipse with Tasktop Pro delivers a...

Mylyn Best Practices in Bite-Sized Chunks

Over the past year I’ve been working closely with those in the Tasktop and Mylyn community at large to define best practices for task-focused programming and collaboration. My goal has been to share what I’ve learned about how the leaders in task management use Tasktop and Mylyn to collaborate effectively. To this end, I’ve created...

Where Have the Services Gone?

The Center for Collective Intelligence (http://cci.mit.edu) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is established around the basic research question: “How can people and computers be connected so that-collectively-they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?” I think this is a fantastic opening question to any software (or services) company...

Mylyn Atlassian JIRA Connector Moving

The Mylyn JIRA Connector has been developed as part of the Eclipse Mylyn project since 2006 (Bug 109905), when Wesley Coelho and I met in a Vancouver coffee shop and decided to start collaborating on an idea for a startup that involved extending Mylyn’s open source integrations to commercial tools. A year later Wesley became...

Tracking Time – How Should My Organization Do It?

When a new customer signs up with Innotas and begins working with their Customer Success Manager, one of the first topics centers around Time Management. While most customers want to track time for their IT resources, they don’t always know what types of activities to track, how granular to track, or what the benefits they...