US Subprime bath set to dampen global outsourcing market

Indian outsourcing firms nervously hope the US loan crisis does not deteriorate as the business of processing mortgages in their biggest market dries up and some clients keel over. Firms such as iGate Global Solutions and WNS that serviced American mortgage lenders are already feeling the impact of the crisis, which a US survey this week called the biggest short-term threat to the world's largest economy.

Read the full article

EDS ahead of IBM in UK S/ITS market, CSC 8th

"Electronic Data Systems (EDS), the giant American corporation founded by Ross "The Boss" Perot, has regained its top spot on Ovum's UK software and IT services (S/ITS) industry rankings, overtaking IBM.
...EDS had a UK turnover of £2.7bn, which put it ahead of IBM (£2.6bn) and Japan's Fujitsu (£1.6bn)... The rest of the top 10 is made up of France's Capgemini (£1.5bn), Capita (£1.3bn), BT (£1.3bn), Accenture (£1.2bn), CSC (£1.2bn), HP (£1.0bn) and Microsoft (£887m). Both Oracle (£668m) and SAP (£344m) were in the top 20."

Read the full story Guardian Blog August 17, 2007

Humbling homecoming for NZ Victoria Cross recipient

The Queen has been pleased to approve the following New Zealand Gallantry Awards:

VICTORIA CROSS FOR NEW ZEALAND (VC)

To receive the Victoria Cross for New Zealand:

Corporal Bill Henry APIATA (M181550)

1st New Zealand Special Air Service Group

Citation

Lance Corporal (now Corporal) Apiata was, in 2004, part of a New Zealand Special Air Service (NZSAS) Troop on patrol in Afghanistan, which laid up in defensive formation for the night. At approximately 0315 hours, the Troop was attacked by a group of about twenty enemy fighters, who had approached by stealth using the cover of undulating ground in pitch darkness. Rocket-propelled grenades struck two of the Troop’s vehicles, destroying one and immobilising the other. The opening strike was followed by dense and persistent machine gun and automatic rifle fire from close range. The attack then continued using further rocket-propelled grenades and machine gun and rifle fire. The initial attack was directed at the vehicle where Lance Corporal Apiata was stationed. He was blown off the bonnet by the impact of rocket propelled grenades striking the vehicle. He was dazed, but was not physically injured. The two other vehicle crew members had been wounded by shrapnel; one of them; Corporal A, was in a serious condition. Illuminated by the burning vehicle, and under sustained and accurate enemy fire directed at and around their position, the three soldiers immediately took what little cover was available. Corporal A was discovered to have sustained life-threatening wounds. The other two soldiers immediately began applying basic first aid. Lance Corporal Apiata assumed command of the situation, as he could see that his superior’s condition was deteriorating rapidly.

By this time, however, Lance Corporal Apiata’s exposed position, some seventy metres in front of the rest of the Troop, was coming under increasingly intense enemy fire. Corporal A was now suffering serious arterial bleeding and was lapsing in and out of consciousness.

Lance Corporal Apiata concluded that his comrade urgently required medical attention, or he would likely die. Pinned down by the enemy, in the direct line of fire between friend and foe, he also judged that there was almost no chance of such help reaching their position. As the enemy pressed its attack towards Lance Corporal Apiata’s position, and without thought of abandoning his colleague to save himself, he took a decision in the highest order of personal courage under fire. Knowing the risks involved in moving to open ground, Lance Corporal Apiata decided to carry Corporal A single-handedly to the relative safety of the main Troop position, which afforded better cover and where medical treatment could be given. He ordered his other colleague, Trooper T to make his own way back to the rear.

In total disregard of his own safety, Lance Corporal Apiata stood up and lifted his comrade bodily. He then carried him across the seventy metres of broken, rocky and fire swept ground, fully exposed in the glare of battle to heavy enemy fire and into the face of returning fire from the main Troop position. That neither he nor his colleague were hit is scarcely possible. Having delivered his wounded companion to relative shelter with the remainder of the patrol, Lance Corporal Apiata re-armed himself and rejoined the fight in counter-attack. By his actions, he removed the tactical complications of Corporal A's predicament from considerations of rescue.

The Troop could now concentrate entirely on prevailing in the battle itself. After an engagement lasting approximately twenty minutes, the assault was broken up and the numerically superior attackers were routed with significant casualties, with the Troop in pursuit. Lance Corporal Apiata had thereby contributed materially to the operational success of the engagement. A subsequent medical assessment confirmed that Corporal A would probably have died of blood loss and shock, had it not been for Lance Corporal Apiata’s selflessly courageous act in carrying him back to the main Troop lines, to receive the immediate treatment that he needed.

Please look at this slide show to try and understand what New Zealand soldiering/Ngati Tumatauenga is all about.

Estimating the proportions of a networks project - have a go!

Survey time!
How would you spread the labour effort across a typical, generic, vanilla-flavoured Networks project?
Now I know I know... no two networks projects are the same and there is a big difference between installing one firewall and deploying a whole global MPLS network. But I want people to generalise here and spread 100% of effort across the following project headings:

[Assume what you need to for the project headings]

1) Initiation

2) Discovery

3) Design

4) Development

5) Deployment

6) Handover to Ops

7) Closedown

8) Project Management [separate out the PM time here]
=100%

I plan to collate and let people know the results, so please have a go by leaving your estimate in the comments below.

Cheers
Rob

The Sh*tty First Draft

One of the best things I try to do to help me solve problems and be a creative thinker - is to give myself permission to screw up the first time I have a go at something.

Coherence and Brilliance come from Revision
Anne LaMott calls this her "Shitty First Draft", identifying that tight final versions come from really poor first and second drafts. She gives herself permission to take a hack at the first paragraph she needs to write and is happy to accept that its not going to be a masterpiece the first time round.

I think its really helpful to bear this in mind and not feel forced to have a perfect solution from the outset. So often I find people stalled, coming to me with project problems because the solution isn't there in front of them from the outset. Because they don't have the perfect solution, they are wielded to the spot, unwilling to just see where things take them.

My advice:
Just start walking and see where you end up.
Chances are it's probably a better place than where you were standing when you realised you first had the problem.

Is this just an OMG concept website or what?

Have you seen lulu.com?

Here's how it works

1. You write a book's-worth of something
2. You go to lulu.com and upload it
3. It converts it into a .pdf file and asks you whether you want hardback or paperback etc. You choose/make a cover design
4. You are now a published author - you can order one copy or 5,000!

I was speechless once I'd been taken through the concept.
My next thought was to pay $15 a time for a book shelf of empty books with my name and photo on the back cover just to try and impress the pants off people.

So no longer do you have to try and convince an editor of the merits of your dissertation on Peruvian Tree Slugs - just go forth and be published! Now the more astute will also see a warning sign starting to flicker on and off. Yes, you have now dispensed with the services of an Editor - those difficult people that actually help turn your book into something other people might find worth reading. They also ensure it has been properly proof read by someone other than Bill Gates III.

That aside I still love the concept and it also covers music CD's and DVD's too.

So whats the best Project Management software package?

This is an all too familiar questions I often see asked. In fact it popped up on LinkedIn Q&A the other day and I couldn't resist diving in with two feet, especially when I saw all these people running off and naming this and that.

Here's how it went:

Question: What is the best project management software out there for a novice and considering that financial/budgeting tracking is not important?

My Answer:
To be honest I often find that I can do all the basics of Project Management by just using MSExcel.

Please bear in mind that 'back in the day' our forefathers built dams, skyscrapers, railways, managing these projects using... paper!

So I have upgraded from Paper 1.0 to MSExcel and find that for the sake of putting a simple schedule down and ensuring that a small number of resources are correctly allocated; it does it all nicely. I have can and do use MSProject to a relatively advanced level quite regularly and have also used Primavera as well.

But to be honest, by the time you set up all the parameters, unpick the things that the software wants to do automatically for you and then find that not everyone on the project has the right software to read it - you could have actually spent all that time working on delivering the project. This type of software is a classic time waster for a novice and my advice if you do go down the specialist software route, is to start out whiteboarding/writing down the project plan before you enter it into the software.

I have only really witnessed the power of PM software come into its own on typically multi-million dollar programmes running over 12 months with teams of over 70 personnel. What I also observed with these types of programmes is that there are few people who need that powerful overview and computational capabilities, so everyone else breaks the programme down into little manageable chunks that can be easily run on... a Excel spreadsheet!

Hope this helps.

They liked my answer and rated it the best *blush*, arguably against a bunch of people wanting to recommend OTT packages that would befuddle a novice, or even seasoned PM!
Now don't get me wrong, Project Management is an evolving technical skill and needs to be treated as such. I am certainly an advocate of adopting a rigorous technical approach to Project Reporting (such as metrics and Earned Value etc), as well as an analytical approach to Risk Management
- but PM's really need to grasp the first principles of these disciplines before they engage software to do it for them.

I am often reminded of the Officer in charge of Logistics for the entire British Land Forces during the Gulf War - this man needed to ensure that every soldier got his bullets, beans and bayonet. He ran the entire Logistics Battle successfully from the back of just four Landrovers.

Now if he can do that, I think we can get by with a few simple Project Management tools, can't we?.

Lessons Learned - great idea, but its in the wrong place!

Why do we teach project managers to include the Lessons Learned (LL) review in the Close Down phase of their project?
and
Why do PM's then seldom conduct LL reviews?

Simply; its in the wrong place.

Yes, semantically we can only learn the lessons of history once they have happened, but I argue we should be teaching PM's to include the Lessons Learned review in the Initiation phase of their project, AT THE START.

The reasons for this approach are two-fold:
(1) The raison d'etre of LL reviews is that the lessons can be applied to future projects, but do we ever formally capture this in our project methodologies? Yeah its there somewhere, but is often only given lip-service. But ask any PM "When do you conduct your LL review on a project?" and they'll fire back "during the Close Down phase!". The emphasis is in the wrong place. So simply put, if we put the LL review in the initiation phase of the project, the whole point of doing them will be realised. OK, so the format probably needs to change and we need to consider that project teams quickly disband after a project finishes, so we need to capture their experiences when they are fresh. However in todays Web 2.0 environment, call-it-what-you-will, the ability to contact people and extract information from them has never been easier. However, in fairness I still see the LL review being conducted at the end of the project too, but I foresee that they will be conducted more readily, if we change the emphasis of when we do them.
(2) To enlarge on this point; if the PM's actively conduct LL reviews at the start of their projects, they will vividly see the benefits of this activity. Ergo, they will also see the benefit in providing the Lessons Learned after their own project finishes and the whole process will become more self-sustaining. Let's face it, any who has ever conducted a Delivery/Quality Assurance review, or sat on a Governance Board, will know that happy projects that have run successfully and dire failures are they only two where LL reviews are typically mandated. All the projects in the middle ground that struggle and take up most of people's bandwidth, often get closed in a hurry as people run for the door into another similar project to repeat the cycle.

Challenge everything, accept nothing, improve something.