Tag Archives: SharePoint

Agile, Project Management, Technology

Tools of the Trade

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2nd Edition – July 2021

Project Managers, Scrum Masters and Agents of Change

If you’re working on any type of project as a Project Manager, Scrum Master, or are part of any change management process, these tools should be in your technology toolkit. Over the years I’ve adopted the tools listed here. Some of these products were already part of the corporate environment, so I was required to use them, sometimes to my chagrin. In other corporate environments, I had the freedom to identify, select, and adopt one or more of these tools for teams I led. I hope this article introduces you to the next tool in your toolkit.

Project and Product Management Tools

Regardless of project implementation methodologies, as an agent of change, tracking requests for change, and approved changes for implementation should be quantified for effort and costs associated with the changes. Categorizing, classifying, prioritizing changes are all possible if changes are captured, tracked and opportunities compared.

Project and Product Management Tools
Project and Product Management Tools

Automation / Workflow

Project management automation? You bet!

Automation/Workflow
Automation/Workflow

Collaboration

Anyone not interested in a collaborative environment for dynamic projects doesn’t know the statement “Share the Blame, Pass the Credit.”

Collaboration
Collaboration

Communication

“There are no words to express…” so say it in a beautiful, graphical presentation that will get your message across.

Communication
Communication

Documentation

Meeting Minutes, Standard Operating Procedures (SOP), Functional Specifications, random notes, images of error messages, etc.

Documentation
Documentation

Financials / Project Reporting

I once had to track a project “THIS BIG“, and it came with a few accountants in tow.

Financials / Project Reporting
Financials / Project Reporting

Download a PDF of the Project Manager / Scrum Master Toolkit

Products in Use Today, and Additional Tools

This list is to highlight the most recent tools I’ve used “in the field”.  Just because I’ve omitted a product or service, it doesn’t mean I don’t advocate their use.  Please see the archive file below on additional tools I’ve used prior to my most recent engagements.

Last Published PM/SM Toolkit from 2017 ( Archive for Reference)

Want to Have Your Product Evaluated?

If you’re interested in a product review of your software targeting Project Managers or Scrum Masters, please contact me with your product information, and I will follow up.

Agile, Data Management, Project Management, SDLC, Software Development, Technology

Azure DevOps 6 “Most Wanted” Features

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Integration of SharePoint into Azure DevOps and Toss the Current Wiki

JIRA and Confluence a powerful combination. Microsoft should ditch the Wiki integrated into the Overview module, and use SharePoint (lite) instead. Put your best foot forward!

Backlog “Feature Timeline” Filtering

As I’ve mentioned in prior posts, the add on “Feature Timeline” by Microsoft is a fantastic bridge between Agile and Waterfall, displaying a Feature [i.e. Milestone] timeline. Expand upon this module with additional capabilities, such as filtering Features by Tags.

Microsoft Teams Chat mentions in Azure DevOps (ADO) Product Activity Feeds

I like trolling the Activity Feed on my Dashboard as much as the next person. Let’s add some external, yet related data sources, such as Microsoft Team Chats directly correlated ADO Team == Microsoft Team. Is that a setting, linking MS Azure DevOps Team to Microsoft Team? Should be…

Auto-generation of Release Notes After Each Build from Repos into the Azure DevOps Wiki

  • Similar to Java Doc, in line code comments roll up into C# Function doc
  • Commits Required to Specify Correlated Work Item IDs
  • Dynamic Wiki Page creation for each build, including release notes, unit test suite execution results

Ability to Create Azure DevOps Wiki pages from within Power Automate (i.e. MS Flow)

Shared Queries Segregated by Teams within the Project

Teams each have their own view of relevant Team information such as Dashboards per team

Runner Up Features

  1. Need the ability to re-name Azure DevOps Dashboards
  2. Need the ability to Clone Dashboards
  3. Product / Project / Portfolio Level Capacity Planning – 3rd party integration, OnePlan handles this requirement
Business, Economy, Entertainment, Media, Movies, Technology

Streaming Companies Provide their Platform to Content Creators

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Streaming Platforms / Content Creators

Streaming companies enable content creators to use their well known, branded platforms to grow content author followings.  The reciprocal nature of the relationship creates an even broader customer base for streaming content platforms.

  • Direct competition with Google’s YouTube.
  • Microsoft to stretch SharePoint’s abilities re: video streaming, Video on Demand, and Broadcast Live, as well as it’s user licensing model, it could be another tool for entrepreneurs to offer any content creator a “Digital Entertainment Portal”.

Any content provider of digital media entertainment:

  • Broadcast Television Channels – e.g. CBS, NBC, SyFy
  • Independent digital media producers, e.g. currently using channels to reach a large audience, e.g. YouTube

The streaming company can create a portal wizard to build copy a streaming portal template.  The digital media producer uses web app widgets, similar to Microsoft SharePoint sites, to customize their portal to their digital media video/assets.  The Streaming “Portal” provider, as part of their service, handles the monetary transactions for customer subscriptions, or other business models supported.  In addition, the bandwidth load from streaming would be handled by the Streaming “Portal Provider”, a major benefit, leveraging the companies’ Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Anyone could apply for a partnership with the streaming company, and once approved, may use the tools provided by the streaming partner to spawn a new platform site around the customer/producer’s content.

This new revenue stream of streaming companies platforms, such as Netflix and Amazon Instant, may be vastly multiplied using a “Partner Portal” model.

Update 2/5/18

It seems that this path of content providers leveraging existing Portal Streaming companies has already begun:

  • Verizon FiOS embedding Netflix as a “Channel”
  • Amazon Prime (Prime Video) embedding CBS ALL ACCESS, HBO, STARZ, Showtime, Cinemax, etc. branded as “Amazon Channels”
    • Amazon has the capability to leverage their Amazon CloudFront (Highly secure global content delivery network (CDN))

At this juncture, no content on the “Indie” level being embedded in the Portal Streaming companies.  Looks like Google YouTube still monopolizes this space.

Since the original post date, CBS ALL ACCESS has been released, showing content providers, in addition to their own distribution channels direct to clients, will offer their content through 3rd party streaming portals as well…for now.  Maybe just for convenience because these streaming portals require subscriptions to the content provider in order to be served up.

Another post projecting the renaissance of streaming and content creation.

This post was from Dec 2014, but still very relevant today.

Media Companies (and Execs) in the Driver’s Seat for a Prosperous New Year

Business, Development, Entertainment, Media, Mobility, Music, Technology

Cloud Storage and DAM Solutions: Don’t Reign in the Beast

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Are you trying to apply metadata on individual files or en masse, attempting to make the vast  growth of cloud storage usage manageable, meaningful storage?

Best practices leverage a consistent hierarchy, an Information Architecture in which to store and retrieve information, excellent.

Beyond that, capabilities computer science has documented and used time and time again, checksum algorithms. Used frequently after a file transfer to verify the file you requested is the file you received.  Most / All Enterprise DAM solutions use some type of technology to ‘allow’ the enforcement of unique assets [upon upload].  In cloud storage and photo solutions targeted toward the individual, consumer side, the feature does not appear to be up ‘close and personal’ to the user experience, thus building a huge expanse of duplicate data (documents, photos, music, etc.).  Another feature, a database [primary] key has been used for decades to identify that a record of data is unique.

Our family sharing alone has thousands and thousands of photos and music. The names of the files could be different for many of the same digital assets.  Sometimes file names are the same, but the metadata between the same files is not unique, but provides value. Tools for ‘merging’ metadata, DAM tools have value to help manage digital assets.

Cloud storage usage is growing exponentially, and metadata alone won’t help rope in the beast. Maybe ADHOC or periodic indexing of files [e.g. by #checksum algorithm] could take on the task of identifying duplicate assets?  Duplicate  assets could be viewed by the user in an exception report?  Less boring, upon upload, ‘on the fly’ let the user know the asset is already in storage, and show a two column diff. of the metadata.

It’s a pain for me, and quite possibly many cloud storage users.  As more people jump on cloud storage, this feature should be front and center to help users grow into their new virtual warehouse.

The industry of cloud storage most likely believes for the common consumer, storage is ‘cheap’, just provide more.  At some stage, the cloud providers may look to DAM tools as the cost of managing a users’ storage rises.  Tools like:

  • duplicate digital assets, files. Use exception reporting to identify the duplicates, and enable [bulk] corrective action, and/or upon upload, duplicate ‘error/warning’ message.
  • Dynamic metadata tagging upon [bulk] upload using object recognition.  Correlating and cataloging one or more [type] objects in a picture using defined Information Architecture.  In addition, leveraging facial recognition for updates to metadata tagging.
    • e.g. “beach” objects: sand, ocean; [Ian Roseman] surfing;
  • Brief questionnaires may enable the user to ‘smartly’ ingest the digital assets; e.g. ‘themes’ of current upload; e.g. a family, or relationship tree to  extend facial recognition correlations.
    • e.g. themes – summer; party; New Year’s Eve
    • e.g. relationship tree – office / work
  • Pan Information Architecture (IA) spanning multiple cloud storage [silos]. e.g. for Photos, spanning [shared] ‘albums’
  • Publically published / shared components of an IA;  e.g. Legal documents;  standards and reuse
Business, Development, Technology

Project Change Management, Microsoft Solutions

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Project Facilitators, Managers, and Stakeholders, please read on…

If you’ve been charged with managing project changes, there are many Microsoft solutions that may be used by a wide array of users with varying degrees of technical experience.

  1.  Word

When the project team members are not comfortable with “technology”, MS Word may be as adventurous as you can get.

Your stakeholders believe each of your change requests have their own story to tell,  and the story should be told in MS Word.  Each of the Change Requests (CR) contain the ‘story’ of the item as well as an appended comments for each of your meetings’ notes.

The solution is a beast to manage if the product/process is used for more than a month, i.e. in an ongoing basis.  Details of the CRs can easily fall by the wayside, as well as prone to human error for the evolving descriptions and historical audit trail in the comments section.

NOTE: Free form text, excluding organizing data into Word tables.

2. Excel

MS Excel is a step up from Word, but is still susceptible to similar issues.  On the positive side, tables have the ability to be sorted, and filtered.  The content/tables may be exported into an email, MS Word doc, etc.  Both MS Word and MS Excel alone do share an additional issue, Change Requests (CR) are not version controlled at the record level.  Both Excel and Word files can be imported into a document management system, e.g. SharePoint, and the docs will have a check in/out audit.  Adding/Changing text on new/existing CRs becomes problematic, and prone to errors, and inconsistent audit of comments.

3. Project

Send them a PDF of the Project Plan.  Companies have few licenses of MS Project, and sharing a project plan with the team is most likely done by exporting the Project Plan to PDF.   When reviewing / updating the project plan in real time with the team (e.g. SMEs, Stakeholders), they collectively see the effect of adding tasks, updating duration, and dependencies.   Itemizing tasks of the team, and grouped by parent activities will help the team stay ‘on task’. The non-PMs do not need access to the Project Plan for edits; this is performed 1:1 or in a team setting with the PM facilitating.

4.  SharePoint

SharePoint is a document and workflow management system among other things.   ‘Out of the box’ capabilities enable users to track a project, Gantt charts to task management, most everything needed to manage a project, including N number of personalized views of the project data,.  The SharePoint platform, out of the box, seems to cater to the laymen as well as the technical savvy.

5. Team Foundation Server (TFS)

TFS covers the entire application lifecycle, part of which enables the team to track their backlog items.  Backlog items may be correlated to other ‘objects’, such as test cases.  All aspects of the project such as development,  builds, unit test case execution, task tracking, and backlog items reside in TFS.  For the tech laymen, i.e. business sponsor, little knowledge transfer is required for using the solution for backlog management.

6. Office Access

Yes, I’ve seen a UI on top of an Access database to manage change.  Actually, I’ve built one way over a decade ago.  It’s a lot of maintenance, just like any solution built from scratch.  With so many options out there, this would not be my first choice.

Click here for an extensive list of project management solutions.