MacPM/

AppleScript – I. Love. Merlin.

Vicky Stamatopoulou on 27. August 2010

I was reading a post of Eric D. Brown by the title I. Love. WordPress. It was a ”wow” effect, I just had to write in our blog here I. Love. WordPress too but I. Love. Merlin. more ;)

We use WordPress for our blog, and have experience from other blogging systems as well. So I am completely with Eric Brown on that. WordPress is great, but…

Merlin has an even better / warmer position in my heart. Merlin is a professional tool, one can see this at one glance


(more…)

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Can I use Merlin for project management on Windows?

Vicky Stamatopoulou on 24. August 2010

A question we receive eventually in support is the following:

We have seen Merlin running on mac and are pretty sure it covers our needs for project management. Where do we find download files for Windows or Linux? We have no Macs in our company.

Our answer:

Merlin is a native Mac OS X application and Merlin Server is implemented as a MAC OS X system preference pane. Following system requirements apply:

  • Mac OS X, version 10.4.9 or newer
  • Mac OS X, version 10.6.4 recommended
  • There is no Windows or Linux version available, sorry.

    (In case you’ve missed the “Get a Mac” ads series of 2008 here is a link on YouTube  ;-))

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    Great ideas

    Vicky Stamatopoulou on 20. August 2010

    The last 3 days we have had our regular team meeting. It was very productive, enlightening and fun for yet again another time. Infrastructure worked, people were willing to share information and did so in a comprensible way, ideas came up, decisions were made and our team culture grew.

    So being back and retrospecting the past few days I am considering the lessons learned from this last trip:

    1. It’s always great when meetings are successful, but it sure takes a certain amount of preparation otherwise you can be sure they will fail. Need some tips about that? That’s fine, just check out this post… (more…)

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    Master planner quotes

    Vicky Stamatopoulou on 17. August 2010

    You can learn more from failure than success. In failure you’re forced to find out what part did not work. But in success you can believe everything you did was great, when in fact some parts may not have worked at all. Failure forces you to face reality.

    Great design does not come from great processes; it comes from great designers.

    The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money

    When I first wrote The Mythical Man-Month in 1975, I counseled programmers to “throw the first version away,” then build a second one. By the 20th-anniversary edition, I realized that constant incremental iteration is a far sounder approach. You build a quick prototype and get it in front of users to see what they do with it. You will always be surprised.

    Fred Brooks, in an Interview by WIRED, July 28, 2010

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    Quote of the day

    Vicky Stamatopoulou on 13. August 2010

    I believe that every project manager is born happy; but it takes years to figure that out.

    Found here

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    The Art of War for Project Managers 1.6 – The Plan is Useless

    Dave Prior on 10. August 2010

    R.L. Wing "The Art of Strategy"At the end of the first chapter of the Art of War, Sun Tzu gives direction that may make the strongest case for project management in the entire text.

    Those who triumph,
    Compute at their headquarters
    A great number of factors prior to a challenge

    He goes on to explain that those who spend less time planning do not succeed. According to Sun Tzu, more planning = greater success, less = greater chance of failure and no planning at all pretty much guarantees you have no shot.

    The first chapter of the Art of War ends with Sun Tzu claiming that by observing the time spent in “computation” he can determine whether or not one will succeed in their efforts.

    From a PM’s standpoint, this has relevance on a number of levels. The most obvious application would be to the idea of actually planning out a project, and if you follow the rest of the lessons of the Art of War, this is going to end up bringing in many of the elements included in a traditional project plan. Things like risk planning and developing a communication strategy are critical aspects of Sun Tzu’s formula for success. (more…)

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    Offshoring and the Technology Gap

    Dave Prior on 5. August 2010

    Agile_2010_Badge_TemplateNext week I’ll be co-presenting at the Agile 2010 conference in Orlando, Florida with Thushara Wijewardena. Our presentation is called “Why you suck at off shoring, even with Agile”. The plan is to discuss and debate some of the issues people run into when they are doing offshore projects. Thushara, who lives in Sri Lanka, will be covering the offshore side and I’ll be handling onshore. We’ve both got a fair bit of experience in the area, but in order to make sure we’d covered all our bases, we interviewed a number of people to get their take on it. Heading into it, I felt pretty confident, based on my experience, that the majority of the difficulties that onshore managers and teams struggle with are brought about by their own approach and an assumption that offshore must learn to adapt to the onshore way of working. My basic argument was that the onshore teams really had to find a better way to adapt how they approached working with an offshore team if they really wanted to get the most out of them. Working with teams spread across the globe, in different time zones, from different cultural and educational backgrounds is never easy, but I do believe that the responsibility for enabling the offshore team falls largely on the onshore team’s shoulders. (more…)

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    Merlin iPhone 1.1 with support for iPad is out!

    Frank Blome on 5. August 2010

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    The new version 1.1 of Merlin iPhone comes with support for iPhone 4 and iPad. The handling of the mobile Merlin does not change, it’s still the same ease of use. The new version is optimized for the Retina Display of the iPhone 4 and the bigger iPad display.

    Merlin iPhone can be downloaded for free from the Apple App Strore. With the new update Merlin iPhone supports all versions of iPhone, iPad touch and iPad. More information about Merlin iPhone can be found on our website in the “Products” section.

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    Merlin 2.7.7 is available

    Frank Blome on 29. July 2010

    Today we published another maintenance update for Merlin and Merlin Server. Here are the changes.

    Resolved Issues in Merlin

    • In combined projects, the utilization view was not refreshing under some circumstances.
    • The resource’s cost accrual setting “at start” did produce the same result as “prorated”.
    • Start dates of linked projects were deletable via the project link inspector.
    • In Merlin Web Sharing, the default time zone was not set to GMT, which resulted in wrong creation dates of elements.
    • Fixed an issue in the licensing system for Merlin iPhone.
    • The status attribute was not selectable from within the predicate editor for elements.
    • The value for “Given Startmode” was not exported properly in CSV export.
    • Some access rights on creating project files did not set correctly.
    • The “Merlin Quick Guide” is now in French language as well.
    • Some translation issues have been fixed.

    Resolved Issues in Merlin Server

    • Merlin Server brought an error message for port 7090 after some time of work.
    • Merlin did hang on saving a master project with aliases on Merlin Server files.
    • A crash could appear when all numbers of a port of a custom server were deleted.

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    The Art of War for Project Managers 1.5 – The Tao of Paradox

    Dave Prior on 28. July 2010

    The next section of Chapter 1 starts by introducing one of the core strategies of Sun Tzu’s teaching. In The Art of Strategy by R.L. Wing, the section is translated as:RLWing - The Art of Strategy

    Heed me by calculating the advantages
    reinforce them by directing outwardly.

    This has a very direct relationship to the strategic work a PM does in that it calls upon the practitioner to measure and understand their true position and then “reinforce” (read as spin or manipulate) the perception of that position by how you represent it.

    As he moves into the next section, Sun Tzu provides more clarity into how the perceived reality can be manipulated:

    Thus, when able, they appear unable.
    When employed, they appear useless. (more…)

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