Category Archives: Work

Artificial Intelligence, Mobility, Work

Going Solo – Gig to Gig

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Having the Stamina to Last…

Going the consulting path, on your own, is no small feat. Do you have what it takes to persist, survive, and thrive?

  • Army of One – Not only do you need to perform your CONSULTANCY role, but you also have to be bookkeeper, sales and marketing, looking for new opportunities.
  • The Gap Between Gigs – To all recruiters and hiring managers – it’s not a bad thing to have gaps in a candidate’s resume. Its the way of life in our gig economy. We are constantly hunting for just the right opportunity in a sea of hundreds or thousands of candidates per role.
  • Keeping Up With Market Trends – Online learning platforms such as Pluralsight, keep their content fresh, relevant, and in line with your career path.
  • Networking, Networking, Networking – at every opportunity, build your network of contacts and keep them in the know

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Work

Email Composer: Persona Point of View (POV) Reviews

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First, there was Spell Check, next Thesaurus, Synonyms, contextual grammar suggestions, and now Persona, Point of View Reviews. Between the immensely accurate and omnipresent #Grammarly and #Google’s #Gmail Predictive Text, I starting thinking about the next step in the AI and Human partnership on crafting communications.

Google Gmail Predictive Text

Google gMail predictive text had me thinking about AI possibilities within an email, and it occurred to me, I understand what I’m trying to communicate to my email recipients but do I really know how my message is being interpreted?

Google gMail has this eerily accurate auto suggestive capability, as you type out your email sentence gMail suggests the next word or words that you plan on typing. As you type auto suggestive sentence fragments appear to the right of the cursor. It’s like reading your mind. The most common word or words that are predicted to come next in the composer’s eMail.

Personas

In the software development world, it’s a categorization or grouping of people that may play a similar role, behave in a consistent fashion. For example, we may have a lifecycle of parking meters, where the primary goal is the collection of parking fees. In this case, personas may include “meter attendant”, and “the consumer”. These two personas have different goals, and how they behave can be categorized. There are many such roles within and outside a business context.

In many software development tools that enable people to collect and track user stories or requirements, the tools also allow you to define and correlate personas with user stories.

As in the case of email composition, once the email has been written, the composer may choose to select a category of people they would like to “view from their perspective”. Can the email application define categories of recipients, and then preview these emails from their perspective viewpoints?

What will the selected persona derive from the words arranged in a particular order? What meaning will they attribute to the email?

Use Personas in the formulation of user stories/requirements; understand how Personas will react to “the system”, and changes to the system.

Finally the use of the [email composer] solution based on “actors” or “personas”. What personas’ are “out of the box”? What personas will need to be derived by the email composer’s setup of these categories of people? Wizard-based Persona definitions?

There are already software development tools like Azure DevOps (ADO), which empower teams to manage product backlogs and correlate “User Stories”, or “Product Backlog Items” with Personas. These are static personas, that are completely user-defined, and no intelligence to correlate “user stories” with personas”. Users of ADO must create these links.

Now, technology can assist us to consider the intended audience, a systematic, biased perspective using Artificial Intelligence to inspect your email based on selected “point of view” (a Persons) of the intended email. Maybe your email will be misconstrued as abrasive, and not the intended response.

Agile, Business, Development, Software Development, Technology, Work

Agile’s Watergate

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A relic of the Waterfall model is the construct of a “gate” process. In order for a project to achieve a milestone, the project/solution would need to achieve certain criteria that would allow it to go to the next phase of the project. For example, going from solidifying requirements in a Business Requirements Doc (BRD) to the software implementation phase.

In Agile, we leverage the Product Owner (PO) and the Product Backlog to determine what gets done and when. A Product Backlog item (PBI) may cover the full lifecycle of a Feature, from requirements to implementation. The Product Owner dictates acceptance of the PBI based on the status/transparency of the Backlog, such as the criticality of the Bugs linked to the PBI. Product quality and implemented functionality are transparent to the PO, who will determine the next steps such as release the software, and/or go through another iteration/sprint. Iterations are a defined cadence agreed to by the implementation team and the Product owner, typically, 2-week sprints.

Agile, Hybrid Environments: Opportunities for Synergy

Epics, Features, Product Backlog Items, and Tasks are object types in a Backlog that enable the PO and the team to link objects and plan over multiple sprints. Epics or Themes of Sprints are “high level”, potentially strategic initiatives. Features roll up into Epics as a part of several sprints. Either Epics or Features may be high enough level to link to Psydo Project Milestones for a product roadmap of deliverables, and solicitation outside the team.

Aggregation of Product Backlog Items, Effort Estimations, roll up into Features, and then up into Epics, which roughly equate to milestone timelines.

The “Definition of Done” (DoD) for a Product Backlog Item may require 0 outstanding Bugs with the severity of “Critical” linked to this PBI. The DoD criteria could be analogous to a traditional Quality Assurance gate.

Tasks that are production rollout activities, without a project plan, should be planned for in future sprints, akin to estimating when items may be completed in the proper sequence. Some of the Tasks may be placed conservatively in “early” sprints and may require items to be “pushed forward” after each of the iterations.

Agile, Business, Development, Project Management, Technology, Work

When Stakeholders Collide

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Requirements Expedition

Maybe you’ll meet them during the Project Kickoff. Maybe you’ll first hear from them during a biweekly Steering Committee. Or maybe you will first hear from them three months into the project at a quarterly meeting with the CIO and the rest of his portfolio. Maybe you will never hear from them directly.

The politics of requirements gathering and prioritization is a daunting process. I’m not going to drudge up all the stories and categorize them here because it’s a painful process.

Why are some of your milestones in your project plan:

• the milestone exists within someone’s year end evaluation

• the requirements of a milestone are so bipolar, they are bound to fail. Need a project to bucket the requirements to say “we tried”, and we can pin it to a project.

• backing into established project timelines based on expectations set at the highest levels, e.g. regulatory compliance

Legal and Compliance Stakeholders

Global representation of legal and compliance requirements are a dichotomy of legal precedence between jurisdictions.

Agile Product Owner verse Waterfall Stakeholder Committee(s)

Many a project managed using waterfall kept me balancing the needs and wants of Stakeholders from all walks of life, some exuberantly voicing their opinions regardless of their position of power, or lack therein. The Agile Product Owner (PO) is a relief of burden, a single mouthpiece of the business, which dictates backlog priority.

Does Agile make the requirements gathering and prioritization pain go away? Possibly. There are various implementations of Agile, hybrid situations, and there are lots of tools out there to help manage the Product Backlog (requirements). Another exercise, developing User Journeys, working with your Personas / actors to derive their story, that is telling and lots of fun.

Agile, Business, Development, Help, Motivation, Personal, SDLC, Software Development, Technology, Work

7 Failures I Needed to Succeed

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Here is a list of seven failures from my professional career, how I met those challenges, and in some cases, turned them into opportunities

Underestimate

Eager to please throughout my career, I was burned many times, and in some cases continue to be burned by underestimating the effort required for an activity, or task, which roll up to the delivery of features, or meeting a milestone. In my earlier years, I “shot from the hip” to senior management, and they held me to those commitments. Over the years, I’ve been fortunate enough to document and mitigate risks. In addition I learned additional tools, both process and communication / people skills:

* “Interesting point, let me consider, and get back to you.” You don’t have to provide an answer right away. Consider the scope and impact of the questions you are presented. Unless you are almost certain of the answer, try to defer.

* Planning Poker (Agile) collaborative (blind) estimates make better estimations. Through collaboration, you reach joint commitment. You eliminate the “boss knows best” factor.

Hearing but not Listening

Throughout my personal and professional life, I’ve struggled with this aspect of communication, more so earlier on in my life. Two people have a meeting, and discuss their point of views regarding the same topic. They both leave the room, and have two polar opposite prospectives of what was communicated.

Even in the same language, things get “lost in the translation.“. There are many process tools to better your communications style. You hear what you want to hear. You don’t probe deep enough into another person’s perspective.

Overestimate

Adding too much margin into an estimate, being conservative in your effort estimate at times may not be the best course of action. “Right Sizing” the estimate is typically the desired approach unless otherwise guided by the appropriate stakeholders. There are lots of tools for Effort estimation, poker planning, and fist of five are just two examples.

Army of One – Embrace Opportunity

I was brought into a development team as a Software Quality Assurance manager for a well known Financial Services organization. I was to build a team of QA staff as well as mature their process workflow, e.g. implement software change management.

The department’s QA resources per team dwindled, letting go these resources, and not growing the teams as first advertised during the interviews. I found myself constantly working with the team putting out fires. Best case scenario, I worked “after” hours just to work on the strategic stuff like process improvements, and automation. I stuck to the opportunity to learn as much as possible. Sticking with the job, I built my knowledge and relationships that would wind up propelling my career to later on build and manage a 50 person, global team.

Build it and they will Come…Bull!

I chose to try my own startup at some point in my professional career. I had worked for a startup firm out of college, but that was not the same as my own self startup. There were lots of balls to juggle, decisions to make and prioritize. After a year and a half, I shutdown the company, more money going out than in, and I was also “relatively” self funded.

One of the several ill choices I made was “Build it and They will Come.” At the time it was 2009, and the mobile frenzy was just starting to heat up. Feb 2009, Apple was at 30 USD per share! 30! I built a client/server mobile application for expertise transactions, way ahead of my time. I was almost entirely focused on the development of the solution, I clearly lost sight of the focused requirement of building market share. I did post Press Releases, but I didn’t embrace digital marketing as a core spend and activity for my business.

Needless to say I was “The Best Kept Secret”.

Chasing the Sun

As a software product, startup firm, you need to segment your product to align to a target audience. However, honing in on the target market maybe problematic if the “fish aren’t biting”.

You find yourself reassessing the strategic and tactical goals of your product, pivoting often to eventually find your “pay dirt”. There may be fundamental influences to your ecosystem, such as a shift in a 3rd party product previously seen as complementary now seen as “overlapping”. Sales pitch and marketing approach may need to change along with your product.

Although pivoting often may be the name of the game, you still should recognize the cost in adapting to change. Process flows like being “agile” and Scrum help to smooth the pivot, as these processes revolve around constant development iterations and reflections every few weeks.

Time to Pull the Parachute Cord

I still have trouble with knowing when it’s time to say when. I enjoy troubleshooting problems, business, people, process, and technical. So, how long do you work on problem before you pull the ripcord?

Education, Jobs, Work

Continuing Certification Requirements for Project Management Professional (PMP)

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The years seem to have flown by, and it’s that time again to complete my Continuing Certification Requirements for my PMP cert.

I randomly searched the web for PMP courses, then found myself back at PMI.org “Searching Activities”.  Seems like the easiest way to lookup activities because they define the activities, and the correlated list of Professional Development Units, categorized by:

  • Technical
  • Leadership
  • Strategic & Business

Based on the activities I’ve already completed, my majority of work has been accomplished in the Technical category.  I need to focus on attaining Leadership and Strategic & Business categories.

PMP 2019 Continuing Certification Requirements
PMP 2019 Continuing Certification Requirements

Here are a few activities I thought were interesting, and took each one of these Online or Digital Media courses.  Pluralsight provides an excellent set of courses at a relatively low price.  I highly recommend Pluralsight for your learning needs.  I also took a few of the LinkedIn courses and found it to be an excellent learning platform with a wide array of courses that can be applied as PDU credits.

Customizing Your Team Workflow with the Best of Kanban and Scrum

If you have doubts choosing which methodology to use, this course will give you a comparison of Kanban and Scrum, making your choice easier. By watching this course you will learn how to take the best of both, Scrum and Kanban, and how to make a winning combination for your team and project.

Leadership: 1.25

Crisis Communication and Technology: Communicating with Colleagues

Crisis communication is one of the most challenging communication types an organization or individual can face, bringing together emotional vulnerability, ethical challenges, and high-stakes decisions amplified by informational and persuasive goals. When managed well, this communication can neutralize and calm an evolving crisis. When managed poorly, though, crisis communication makes a situation worse. This course takes viewers through the most important parts of preparing for crisis communication, including understanding crisis types and strategies, preparing foundational documents, and how to create communication in the moment. By the end of the course, viewers will have a concrete understanding of how to manage crisis communication for their own organizations, providing invaluable insight and immediate benefit.

Leadership: 1.50

Scrum Master Fundamentals – Growing Yourself and Your Team

Are you a Scrum Master ready to advance your craft? This course will teach you specific strategies for coaching each member of your team and show you how to build on your experience as a Scrum Master to advance your own career to the next level.

Leadership: 1.25

Product Owner Fundamentals – Foundations of Product Ownership

Did you know that one of the most common reasons Scrum Teams fail is the lack of a skilled Product Owner? If you’ve suddenly found yourself in this role, this course will teach you how you can use the role to help your team deliver a great product.

Technical: 0.75   Strategic & Business: 0.50

PMI-ACP®: Value-driven Delivery and Adaptive Planning (3 of 11)

This course will provide an in-depth understanding of Agile adaptive planning and value-driven delivery practices, requirements definition practices, as well as principles and practices related to stakeholder management. This course is part of the PMI-ACP Agile Project Management series.

Technical:  0.75  Strategic & Business: 1.75

Design Thinking: Lead Change in your Organization

Design thinking is a user-centered way of solving problems. It involves extensive collaboration, using strategies such as mapping customer journeys, concept creation, and prototyping. This course teaches leaders how to help their teams adopt a design thinking mindset, and provides examples from author Turi McKinley’s work at frog, a global design and strategy firm that transforms businesses at scale by creating systems of brand, product, and service.

Leadership: 2.00

Organizational Change Management for the ITIL® Practitioner

Organizational change management is as essential skill for all leaders. This course will teach you how to successfully navigate the people side of change.

Leadership: 1.50

Information Architecture (IA), Technology, Work

Information Architecture: An Afterthought for Content Creation Solutions

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Maximizing Digital Asset Reuse

Many applications that enable users to create their own content from word processing to graphics/image creation have typically relied upon 3rd party Content Management Solutions (CMS) / Digital Asset Management (DAM) platforms to collect metadata describing the assets upon ingestion into their platforms.  Many of these platforms have been “stood up” to support projects/teams either for collaboration on an existing project, or reuse of assets for “other” projects.  As a person constantly creating content, where do you “park” your digital resources for archiving and reuse?  Your local drive, cloud storage, or not archived?

Average “Jane” / “Joe” Digital Authors

If I were asked for all the content I’ve created around a particular topic or group of topics from all my collected/ingested digital assets, it may be a herculean search effort spanning multiple platforms.  As an independent creator of content, I may have digital assets ranging from Microsoft Word documents, Google Sheets spreadsheets, Twitter tweets,  Paint.Net (.pdn) Graphics, Blog Posts, etc.

Capturing Content from Microsoft Office Suite Products

Many of the MS Office content creation products such as Microsoft Word have minimal capacity to capture metadata, and if the ability exists, it’s subdued in the application.  MS Word, for example, if a user selects “Save As”, they will be able to add/insert “Authors”, and Tags.  In Microsoft Excel, latest version,  the author of the Workbook has the ability to add Properties, such as Tags, and Categories.  It’s not clear how this data is utilized outside the application, such as the tag data being searchable after uploaded/ingested by OneDrive?

Blog Posts: High Visibility into Categorization and Tagging

A “blogging platform”, such as WordPress, places the Category and Tagging selection fields right justified to the content being posted.  In this UI/UX, it forces a specific mentality to the creation, categorization, and tagging of content.  This blogging structure constantly reminds the author to identify the content so others may identify and consume the content.  Blog post content is created to be consumed by a wide audience of interested viewers based on those tags and categories selected.

Proactive Categorization and Tagging

Perpetuate content classification through drill-down navigation of a derived Information Architecture Taxonomy.  As a “light weight” example, in WordPress, the Tags field when editing a Post, a user starts typing in a few characters, an auto-complete dropdown list appears to the user to select one or more of these previously used tags.  Excellent starting point for other Content Creation Apps.

Users creating Blog Posts can define a Parent/Child hierarchy of categories, and the author may select one or more of relevant categories to be associated with the Post.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Derived Tags

It wouldn’t be a post without mentioning AI.  Integrated into applications that enable user content creation could be a tool, at a minimum, automatically derives an “Index” of words, or tags.  The way in which this “intelligent index” is derived may be based upon:

  • # of times word occurrence
  • mention of words in a particular context
  • reference of the same word(s) or phrases in other content
    • defined by the same author, and/or across the platform.

This intelligently derived index of data should be made available to any platforms that ingest content from OneDrive, SharePoint, Google Docs, etc.  These DAMs ( or Intelligent Cloud Storage) can leverage this information for any searches across the platforms.

Easy to Retrieve the Desired Content, and Repurpose It

Many Content Creation applications heavily rely on “Recent Accessed Files” within the app.  If the Information Architecture/Taxonomy hierarchy were presented in the “File Open” section, and a user can drill down on select Categories/Subcategories (and/or tags), it might be easier to find the most desired content.

All Eyes on Content Curation: Creation to Archive
  • Content creation products should all focus on the collection of metadata at the time of their creation.
  • Using the Blog Posting methodology, the creation of content should be alongside the metadata tagging
  • Taxonomy (categories, and tags with hierarchy) searches from within the Content Creation applications, and from the Operating System level, the “Original” Digital Asset Management solution (DAM), e.g. MS Windows, Mac

 

Artificial Intelligence, Business, Technology, Work

Smartphone AI Digital Assistant Encroaching on the Virtual Receptionist

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Businesses already exist which have developed and sell Virtual Receptionist, that handle many caller needs (e.g. call routing).

However, AI Digital Assistants such as Alexa, Cortana, Google Now, and Siri have an opportunity to stretch their capabilities even further.  Leveraging technologies such as Natural language processing (NLP) and Speech recognition (SR), as well as APIs into the Smartphone’s OS answer/calling capabilities, functionality can be expanded to include:

  • Call Screening –  The digital executive assistant asks for the name of the caller,  purpose of the call, and if the matter is “Urgent”
    • A generic “purpose” response or a list of caller purpose items can be supplied to the caller, e.g. 1) Schedule an Appointment
    • The smartphone’s user would receive the caller’s name, and the purpose as a message back to the UI from the call, currently in a ‘hold’ state,
    • The smartphone user may decide to accept the call, or reject the call and send the caller to voicemail.
  • Call / Digital Assistant Capabilities
    • The digital executive assistant may schedule a ‘tentative’ appointment within the user’s calendar.  The caller may ask to schedule a meeting, the digital executive assistant would access the user’s calendar to determine availability.  If calendar indicates availability, a ‘tentative’ meeting will be entered.  The smartphone user would have a list of tasks from the assistant, and one of the tasks is to ‘affirm’ availability of the meetings scheduled.
    • Allow recall of ‘generally available’ information.  If a caller would like to know the address of the smartphone user’s office, the Digital Assistant may access a database of generally available information, and provide it.  The Smartphone user may use applications like Google Keep, and any notes tagged with a label “Open Access” may be accessible to any caller.
    • Join the smartphone user’s social network, such as LinkedIn. If the caller knows the phone number of the person but is unable to find the user through the social network directory, an invite may be requested by the caller.
    • Custom business workflows may also be triggered by the smartphone, such as “Pay by Phone”.

Takeaways

The Digital Executive Assistant capabilities:

  • Able to gain control of your Smartphone’s incoming phone calls
  • Able to interact with the 3rd party, dial in caller,  on a set of business dialog workflows defined by you, the executive.