I’ve decided to “take on” NFTs and felt it would be best if I dedicated a site relating to Content Management, Licensing, NFTs, and Crypto.
The first post: My NFT Portfolio of Projects and Opportunities Abound
Category Archives: Work
Maison Reserve & Co. launches the world’s first cryptocurrency tethered to the supply and demand of consumer products
Maison Reserve & Co. launches cryptocurrency tied to the supply and demand of their manufactured consumer products. A huge twist on “Cash Back”, where consumers are “gifted” cryptocurrency as their rewards. Flexible / wider margins exist on the wholesale of manufactured goods, and “white label” consumer retail brands. The wider the margins, the more loyalty incentive can be passed onto the customer in the form of % of the purchase, and the rewards in the form of cryptocurrency.
Maison Reserve manufactures products consumers regularly buy such as deodorant, lotion, or shampoo. They then sell their products at competitive market prices and give the customer 50-75% cashback in form of Maison Reserve crypto (MRSV) which can be swapped for USD, BTC, ETH, or used for buying more products on the Maison Reserve & Co. website and partner sites.
Significant opportunity for big-box retail companies, such as Costco with “white label” brands/products. The new business model provides “Cash Back” for purchases in the form of cryptocurrency, % of the retail purchase.
Even the logo is genius. “Made with …”
Great Tips for DevOps Teams Running on Kanban
Highlight WIP Bottlenecks
If the team is constantly dealing with production issues, the Kanban board should reflect both new functionality, User Stories and Production issues side by side. Add a “Production Priority” Swim Lane on top of your Kanban board. Visualizing high-priority production issues may have the team reconsider the priority of issues in contrast to new user stories.
Derive Effort Estimations for Input to WIP Prioritization
Team members should use effort estimations to help them prioritize their “Committed” work items. One of the work items, e.g. User Stories, may “cost” disproportionate to the value add, ROI. Focus team member efforts to provide maximum value proportionate to the time spent on work items.
Customizing States for Broad Granularity
New, In Progress, and Closed may not suffice to express work item states. “New” may represent the backlog of items, a queue not yet committed to by a member of the implementation team. Once a team member commits to implementing a user story, “In Progress” may be too wide a meaning, so adding the following states may keep the team in sync with their business process:
- Committed – team member commits to implementing work item, E.g. User Story, or Task
- Triage – deeper dive into the committed body of work to confirm crisp “Acceptance Criteria” and perform relative, effort estimations
- Dev Complete – could indicate code complete, and dev testing conplete
- Accepted – a “Closed” status indicating the Product Owner has verified the functionality is implemented in line with expectations, I.e. met Acceptance Criteria
Multicolored Cards Enable Teams to Classify at a Glance
Using different colors for Kanban Board cards allows the implementation team to prioritize work; e.g. Infra Task; E.g. User Interface or API stories. On many implementation teams, members might have areas of expertise such as UI or DB. Those members may hone in on items that are more relevant to them.
Tag, Your IT
Applying tags to Kanban board cards is another level of collectively classifying work items on the board, similar to the multicolored card approach but more diverse, not enough stark color contrast to classify.
Get Funding through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
SBIR and STTR Programs
The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs are highly competitive programs that encourage domestic small businesses to engage in Federal Research/Research and Development (R/R&D) with the potential for commercialization. Through a competitive awards-based program, SBIR and STTR enable small businesses to explore their technological potential and provide the incentive to profit from its commercialization. By including qualified small businesses in the nation’s R&D arena, high-tech innovation is stimulated, and the United States gains entrepreneurial spirit as it meets its specific research and development needs.
Central to the STTR program is the partnership between small businesses and nonprofit research institutions. The STTR program requires the small business to formally collaborate with a research institution in Phase I and Phase II. STTR’s most important role is to bridge the gap between performance of basic science and commercialization of resulting innovations.
Leveraging America’s Seed Fund – excellent presentation for the neophytes first looking to work with the US Government.
As of today, there are 343 new/open projects for 2021. For the full list of open projects, go to the SPIR.gov site.
SBIR/STTR Phase I awards are generally $50,000 – $250,000 for 6 months (SBIR) or 1 year (STTR).
SBIR/STTR Phase II awards are generally $750,000 for 2 years.
List of SBIR/STTR Open Opportunities
If interested, I’m happy to partner up on one of these endeavors. Please note all of these opportunities close out on 2/18/2021
N211-002: Just-In-Time Medical Logistics Resupply System for Forward Medical ; Due Date: 02-18-2021
OBJECTIVE: Reduce the workload on medical personnel through the development of a system that can provide automated real-time supply ordering, tracking, and monitoring capabilities to integrate into existing USMC medical logistics systems
Supply Chain Management 101 on the surface. The integration into existing medical logistics systems may be a challenging task.
N211-023: Collaborative Workspace for Next-Generation Navy Mission Planning System; Due Date: 02-18-2021
OBJECTIVE: Develop a collaborative workspace to integrate the disparate locations where mission planning occurs, and to facilitate the mission planning process within the ready room while maintaining operational security.
Sounds like a customized Microsoft SharePoint site can do the trick.
N211-037: Electronic Warfare Operator Workload Organization and Sharing; Due Date: 02-18-2021
OBJECTIVE: Develop a methodology for effective and efficient electronic warfare workload organization and sharing that increases the performance of the Electronic Warfare Operator and Supervisor.
Yet another customized Microsoft SharePoint site to be created.
Please make sure you read the “Eligibility” on their About page. The same page also outlines the “Three Phases of SBIR/STTR”, and “Award Funding Amounts”
Microsoft Raising the Bar on Image Recognition
Microsoft Bing has a feature that allows you to focus on one part of the image, and perform a more granular image search within a cropped portion of the image. The #Bing “Visual Search” feature will indicate within an image if the AI has identified one or more object matches within the selected image.
First, perform an image search in Microsoft Bing, and select one of the images. The below screen appears. Under the image, there is a button that says “Visual Search” as per highlighted by the red arrow. In some cases, there will be a numeric indicator next to the “Visual Search” text indicating possible, object matches within the “parent” image.
Next, select the “Visual Search” hyperlink WITH a numeric indicator next to the text as per above. Now the user may see a list of additional images that MAY appear similar to the “selected/cropped” object in the “Parent” image. The user may also change the cropped/selected section within the “Parent” image. It’s a brilliant idea. It may be of interest to roll back the curtains to see how in a sea of possible images, the feature selects the subset of images/objects.
My Internal IRQ is Broken
Interrupt ReQuest (IRQ) is an hardware interrupt on a PC. There are 16 IRQ lines used to signal the CPU that a peripheral event has started or terminated. Except for PCI devices, two devices cannot use the same line. If a new expansion card is preset to the IRQ used by an existing board, one of them must be changed. This was an enormous headache in earlier machines.
Starting with the Intel 286 CPU in 1982, two 8259A controller chips were cascaded together and bumped the IRQs from 8 to 16. However, IRQ 2 is lost because it is used to connect to the second chip. IRQ 9 may be available for general use as most VGA cards do not require an IRQ.
PCI to the Rescue
The PCI bus solved the limited IRQ problem, as it allowed IRQs to be shared. For example, if there were only one IRQ left after ISA devices were assigned their required IRQs, all PCI devices could share it.
The Power of Collective Consensus for Story Point Effort Estimations
Blind Concurrent Flip
The bartering of effort estimations between a team of 5 or more is really cool to witness and even further awesome to negotiate the consensus process. Not quite the process of the US Congress, but still attempting those on the periphery, extreme right or left of the bell curve of outliers to move toward the consensus. Discuss and draw near the point of consensus under which individuals discover their own need for resolution under grounds of somewhat tangible to their position of an item so complex gives one hope for a grander purpose.
A synonymous flip of the cards leading to the reveal moment is humbling when a team, after several rounds of dissonance, start into a pattern yielding the voting of a collective cohesion. Why do we start voting along a mutual agreement without the need for cohesion?
Can I Convince You to..
What if Chris Wallace facilitated a Planning Poker exercise between the two presidential candidates instead of a debate, driving consensus between the two presidential hopefuls?
Best Kept Secret of Azure DevOps by Microsoft – Feature and Epic Roadmap
One of the first hurdles to get over when working with a manager who is accustomed to working with Waterfall projects:
Show me our milestones for this project, and when are theses project artifacts to be delivered? Is there a timeline that articulates our deliverables? I want to know when I should get engaged in the project, such as when milestone delivery dates’ slip, and we need to revisit or rebaseline our projected delivery timetable.
Going through the agile transformation on the team level, invoking the Agile Values empowers the team to “Respond to Change”, which may deviate from our initially targeted “milestones”. Not only the timetable may shift, but the milestone, and what it represents may significantly change, and that’s OK with an Agile team. Product stakeholders outside the team may not be adaptive to changes in deliverables. “Outside” stakeholders may not be engaged in the cadence of Scrum ceremonies.
When working with Agile toolsets like JIRA, and Azure DevOps, a Gantt chart does not traditionally come to mind. We think of a product backlog and user story commitments to the current, and next sprint(s). Maybe we are targeting several sprints of work transparency, such as leveraged with SAFe, and Planning (IP) Iteration. We’re still not seeing the visuals in the “traditional” style from Waterfall efforts.
Azure DevOps Provides the Necessary Visuals
So, how do we keep our “outside” product Stakeholders engaged in the product life cycle without inviting them to all Scrum ceremonies? We don’t have Gantt charts, but we do have “Feature timeline and Epic Roadmap” as a plugin to Azure DevOps through the Microsoft Marketplace, for FREE by Microsoft DevLabs. To me, this functionality should be “out of the box”, but apparently this was not the case. I had to have the need/pain in order for me to do research to find this plugin and install it in our enterprise environment. Why would Microsoft disassociate itself with this plugin to some small degree? I can only hypothesize, like the man in the grassy knoll. Regardless of why, “It’s in there, ready for you to install
Articulate Epics, Features, and User Stories
1. Populate the Product Backlog with Features and Epics
Using Azure DevOps, during the initial phase of the effort, Sprint 0, work with your Product Owner to catalog the Features you are looking to deliver within your product evolution, i.e. Project. Each of these features should roll up into Epics, also commonly called Themes. Epics are the highest level of articulation of delivery.
2. Define User Stories, and Attribute them to Features
Working with the Product Owner, and the implementation team, create User Stories in the Product backlog which will help the team to implement the Feature set. Make sure to correlate each of the User Stories to the Features defined in your Product Backlog. User Story, effort estimations would also be helpful to determine “how big”, i.e. how many sprints it will take to implement the feature.
3. Plan Feature Delivery Within / Across Sprints
Within Azure DevOps, Boards –> Backlogs, Team Backlog, and select “Feature Timeline”. From there, you are able to drop, drag, and define the periods of Feature delivery.
- All Sprints are displayed as Columns horizontally across the top of the chart. There is an indicator of the current sprint.
- On the left side are Epics, and the rows REPRESENT Features within the Epics.
- Select the box, “Plan Features”, and a column of unplanned Features will appear to the right of the screen.
- Drop and Drag a Feature from the list of unplanned Features into one of the defined Sprints. Deselect “Plan Features”, and then select the “Info” icon on the planned Feature. A Feature dialog box will appear to the user with all of the User Stories associated with the Feature.
- User can drop and drag User Stories from the “Backlog” column to any of the Sprint buckets.
- Finally, the user should define the Start Iteration and End Iteration for each feature, showing how Features span multiple sprints and an estimation of when the Feature work will conclude.
- Note, although Features may span multiple sprints, User Stories cannot within this Feature planning view of Azure DevOps. The approach of a single user story fitting into a single sprint makes sense as implemented in the “Agile Mindset”.
The Final Product – Epic and Feature Roadmap
Drawback
Although this view is immensely valuable to articulate to ALL stakeholders at both a high and low-level, Epic, Feature to the User Story, there is no Print capability, just as annoying as trying to print out Gantt charts.
Alternatives
Microsoft 365 Project offers the capability of building Roadmaps and Timeline (Gantt) views. From Microsoft Project 365, the user connects to the Azure DevOps server in order to import all of the User Stories desired to track. At first glance, the user would be tracking Azure DevOps, User Stories, which, in my opinion, should be done at the Feature level, one layer of abstraction for business communication.
The other aspect of MS 365 Project, is the cost, three tiers, and if you want to use the Roadmap capability, it’s $30 per user/month. Here’s a video blog, 4-minute video that shows how to get started.
