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…

I remember my impression of the software as I used it for the first time to create my very first project file. In Merlin everything is nice and neat. It is not over filled with features which one cannot tell how to activate or understand how they work. It is very powerful though and absolute modern.

Another thing I love about Merlin is its flexibility and customization options. If you need an example making my point more clear… here you are.

The other day we received an email in Merlin Support proposing a feature for the next version. Merlin should provide some kind of buttons or areas where a user could click to set the actual start or end date at the current time.

This feature request is of course forwarded to the development but the user doesn’t really have to wait for the next version. We have written an AppleScript and sent it to him, setting the current time of the currently selected activities to either its actual start or actual end.

If interested in the script, you will find it here.

So I hope you don’t mind me repeating… I. Love. Merlin.

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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:

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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To place new objects into your library you can use drag & drop. An even quicker way is to right (or ctrl) click your selection and call “Copy to Library”

Easy, isn’t it?

You may want to watch the relevant video on YouTube

Related posts:

• Where do the activities go?
• Merlin: LDAP server
• Merlin: Master resources

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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…
2. You cannot force creativity into a specific time slot. You should encourage thinking at all time, which could help finding great ideas.
3. Group culture is unavoidable, but be careful not to overdue it and exclude new comers  too quickly. Need some tips about that? Check out this post

Taking about great ideas, I found a very interesting video by Ignite Charlotte. Its title is ‘Where Do Ideas Come From‘ and it sure worths watching…

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

Found here

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So I never really knew how late it is, or wether it’s Monday or Tuesday… The things of interest were, have we put watermelon in the fridge (to cool it down), how many times had we a shower this day (to cool us down) and do we have enough water to take another, or are there any of these tasty figs left we’ve peaked up from the tree on our way back home from the beach?

Well, I survived my summer holidays without my i-Device. It wasn’t easy to break with my usual habits, but I somehow managed. How attached and depending are you?  Here are the answers of some healthcare workers to this question. And here is another relevant anecdote

PS. While pressing the ‘publish’ button to post this, my iPhone played the tone of new mail received, I sure am back

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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.

One application that might not be so obvious is how this planning can play out on a smaller scale. Something as simple as a business meeting, offers a great opportunity to prove out some of Sun Tzu’s claims. If you’ve ever been in a meeting where you arrived not knowing what was going to happen, or what you were going to say ahead of time, you are probably already all too familiar with the formula for defeat that is mentioned above. For my own part, this is a lesson that took a long time to learn, but over time I have learned that if I make the time for “computation” before a meeting, things go much better. In terms of preparation, working out things like how the Five Measures fit within the context of the meeting, thinking through what will take place based on who is likely to be present, what objectives or motivators they might have, who might say what, how the others in the room will respond, and especially, how to raise the issues I need addressed as well as how to respond to the questions I’m likely to be asked, seems simple but it is unfortunately something most people don’t take the time to do. It may sound like a lot of work, but my experience has been that once you get into a habit of doing it, this tends to come fairly easily. Whatever your goals in the meeting, even if it is just to get through it with your job intact, putting in the time to prepare before hand is just basic risk management. It will give you the freedom to devote the time and attention necessary to cover the things you were not able to think of before hand.

If success in the meeting equals getting your issues addressed without losing credibility, taking the time necessary to be prepared to participate with confidence and ease is just basic risk management, the same as you’d do on any project. And as for the others around the table, as Sun Tzu says, examining they prepare will give you a lot of insight into their ability to succeed or fail once things get underway.

While it can be fairly simple to see how this applies to Project Management, it has a lot of relevance to an Agile approach as well. If taking an Agile approach is intended to offer the freedom to handle constant change while incrementally working towards a desired goal, The Art of War in right in step. The basics of things like forming the team, having the team determine how they will best work together, what the vision statement is, etc. are all part of the “computation” Sun Tzu is talking about. These practices have even greater application later on in the Art of War. In a later section of the book Sun Tzu talks about the need to be fluid and adaptable, in order to do this successfully, someone leading an Agile project, or an Agile team, still needs to take the time to understand the basic concerns mentioned in this chapter.

The bottom line is, success is determined by your ability to make the time to learn about what you are facing and considering what will happen when things get underway.

Or, as President Eisenhower put it, “The plan is useless; it’s the planning that’s important.”

Quotes in this entry come from The Art of Strategy by R.L. Wing, which was published by Main Street Books in 1988.

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The most interesting interview I had was with a gentleman I know who comes from India and has been in the U.S. since the 70’s. He has years of experience in testing out different ways to make offshore successful. Some of the lessons he has learned seemed to be directly counter to my assertion for the talk, but he had some very solid explanations of how and why he came to those conclusions.

One of the things he said is that there are certain job functions that an onshore team should probably never send offshore. Architect and BA were among these roles. By way of explanation, he offered a story…

The company he ran had been contracted to develop a POS system for use in retail stores in the U.S. He had one of his top leads head over to India to spend time with the team they had formed. The requirements had been fully defined, all the developers were trained and things seemed ready to go. During the discussion of the requirements, the lead asked the team how many of them had ever worked on a POS system before. None of them had. The second question was how many of them had ever seen a POS system before. Only one team member indicated that he had and when he was asked to describe it, he described the back of a cash register. So, while the team was comprised of experienced developers, and they had a full set of requirements, none of them had ever had experience with anything like what they were being asked to develop. Now, while this would not prevent them from actually executing the requirements, without some level of familiarity with what it would be like to interact with such a system, or what the job function of someone who had to use it was like, how likely is it that they’d be successful in their implementation? In this case, they were fortunate that their lead, although born in India, had spend several years in the U.S., knew the client, how they worked, etc. Without his knowledge of how this POS system needed to be used, the team would have been lost no matter how good they were.

What I found most interesting about this was that while I had been focusing on the idea of culture as being a significant stumbling block for onshore teams who are unable or unwilling to adjust how they work to adapt to the offshore teams, I had not considered how the implementation of technology in the day-to-day life of people in one country or another could have such a significant impact on the work. It wasn’t just a matter of the onshore and offshore teams respecting one another, or making sure they all knew how to develop in the same programming language, or that they had well defined requirements. In this case, the fact that none of the team members had ever run across a system of this kind presented a huge challenge and no amount of cultural sensitivity, or training was going to cover the gap created by the varying levels of technology implementation on a day-to-day level.

If you are planning on attending the Agile 2010 Conference in Orlando and would like to hear more of what Thushara and I have learned during our research for the presentation, please join us on Thursday, August 12 at 11 AM in room A-4.

And if you have any feedback on the above, I’d love to hear it.

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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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