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  • Complex Release Vehicle Management

    - by Sharon
    I'm looking into improving our build and release system. We are a .Net/Windows shop, and I don't see any really good tools for Windows for generating the files that are to be dropped in patch or hotfix. We are currently using TFSBuild 2010 with Windows Workflows for our continuous integration builds as well as our daily full build which includes an Installshield package for deployment. What is a good way of generating the list of files to be included in a "patch" style release, where one does not redistribute all the files, but only those necessary to accomplish the necessary changes? Are there any open source tools that work well for this, or do teams usually roll their own? I have considered using Beyond Compare but I would prefer something open source. The file "patch" creation must be 100% automatable. Which release vehicles really ought to be patch style? And which releases should replace all system files related to our application? Assume we have a very large amount of resources necessary to maintain. Is there any established material that is trusted within the industry for strategies about this? I realize it is different for "enterprise" rather than with typical websites. I am looking more for "enterprise" strategies due to our product distribution style. tl;dr Looking for info on how to ship more reliable packages?

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  • State / Screen management in Entity Component Systems

    - by David Lively
    My entity/component system is happily humming along and, despite some performance concerns I initially had, everything is working fine. However, I've realized that I missed a crucial point when starting this thing: how do you handle different screens? At the moment, I have a GameManager class which owns a component manager and entity manager. When I create an entity, the entity manager assigns it an ID and makes sure it's tracked. When I modify the components that are assigned to an entity. an UpdateEntity method is called, which alerts each of the systems that they may need to add or remove the entity from their respective entity lists. A problem with this is that the collection of entities operated on by each system is determined solely by the individual Systems, typically based on a "required component" filter. (An entity has to have a Renderable component to be rendered, for instance.) In this situation, I can't just keep collections of entities per screen and only Update/Draw those collections. They'd have to either be added and removed depending on their applicability to the current screen, which would cause their associated components to be removed, or enable/disable entities in a group per screen to hide what's not supposed to be visible. These approaches seem like really, really crappy kludges. What's a good way to handle this? A pretty straightforward way that comes to mind is to create a separate GameManager (which in my implementation owns all of the systems, entities, etc.) per screen, which means that everything outside of the device context would be duplicated. That's bothersome because some things are always visible, or I might want to continue to display the game under a translucent menu window. Another option would be to add a "layer" key to the GameManager class, which could be checked against a displayable layer stack held by the game manager. *System.Draw() would be called for each active layer, in the required order as determined by the stack. When the systems request an iterator for their respective entity collections, it would be pre-filtered to a (cached) set of those entities that participate in the active layer. Those collections could be updated from the same UpdateEntity event that's already used to maintain each system's entity collections. Still, kinda feels like a hack. If I've coded myself into a corner, feel free to throw tomatoes as long as they're labeled with a helpful suggestion. Hooray for learning curves.

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  • New study shows supply chain cost management increased from 6.0% to 6.9%

    - by John Murphy
    A global survey of supply chain managers indicates that aggressively managing costs and creating a flexible supply chain are major factors for businesses in successfully growing market share as the economy rebounds. Results also show supply chain managers are investing in systems and developing partnerships that enable greater visibility with their supply chain partners. http://www.mhia.org/news/industry/11429/flexible-supply-chains-drive-growth-in-revenue-and-profit

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  • C++ and SDL resource management for 2D game

    - by KuruptedMagi
    My first question is about stateManagers. I do not use the singleton pattern (read many random posts with various reasons not to use it), I have gameStateManager which runs the pointer cCurrentGameState-render(), etc. I want to make a transitioning game, this engine should ideally cover both a platformer and a bird's eye RPG (with some recoding, I just mean the base engine), both of which will load different levels and events, such as world map, dungeon, shops, etc. So I then thought, rather then having to store all this data within all the states, I would break the engine into gameStates, and playStates... when gameState reaches gameStatePlay(), gameStatePlay simply runs the usual handleInput, logic, and render for the playStates, just as the low level gameStateManager does. This lets me store all the player data within the base playstate class without storing useless data in the gameStates. Now I have added a seperate mapEditor, which uses editorStates from gameStateEditor. Is this too much usage of the gameState concept? It seems to work pretty well for me, so I was wondering if I am too far off a common implementation of this. My second question is on image resources. I have my sprite class with nothing but static members, mainly loadImage, applySurface, and my screen pointer. I also have a map pairing imageName enums with actual SDL_Surface pointers, and one pairing clipNumber enums with a wrapper class for a vector of clips, so that each reference in the map can have different amounts of clips with different sizes. I thought it would be better to store all these images, and screen within one static body, since 20 different goblins all use the same sprite sheet, and all need to print to the same screen, and of course, this way I do not need to pass my screen reference to every little entity. The imageMap seems to work very well, I can even add the ability to search through the map at creation of entity type to see if a particular image at creation, creating if it doesnt exist, and destroying the image if the last entity that needs it was just destroyed. The vectored clip map however, seems to take too long to initialize, so if i run past the state that initializes them to fast, the game crashes <. Plus, the clip map call is half of this line =P SPRITE::applySurface( cEditorMap.cTiles[x][y].iX, cEditorMap.cTiles[x][y].iY, SPRITE::mImages[ IMAGE_TILEMAP ], SPRITE::screen, SPRITE::mImageClips[IMAGE_TILEMAP]->clips.at( cEditorMap.cTiles[x][y].iTileType ) ); Again, do I have the right idea? I like the imageMap, but am I better off with each entity storing its own clips? My last question is about collision detection. I only grasp the basics, will look at per-pixel and circular soon, but how can I determine which side the collision comes from with just the basic square collision detection, I tried breaking each entity into 4 collision zones, but that just gave me problems with walking through walls and the like <. Also, is per-pixel color collision a good way to decide what collision just occured, or is checking multiple colors for multiple entities too taxing each cycle?

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  • Project Management Techniques (high level)

    - by Sam J
    Our software dev team is currently using kanban for our development lifecycles, and, from the reasonably short experience of a few months, I think it's going quite well (certainly compared to a few months ago when we didn't really have a methodology). Our team, however, is directed to do work defined by project managers (not software project managers, just general business), and they're using the PMBOK methodology. Question is, how does a traditional methodology like PMBOK, Prince2 etc fit with a lean software development methodology like kanban or scrum? Is it just wasting everyone's time as all the requirements are effectively drawn up to start with (although inevitably changed along the way)?

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  • Master Data Management

    - by Logicalj
    I am looking for a very flexible, easy to integrate and dynamic application with as many features as possible for Master Data Management. As Master Data Management is used to Manage Operational Data, Analytical Data and Master Data so, I want guidance about "What is exactly expected from Master Data Management and What are the Basic and Challenging Scenarios to be covered or resolved in Master Data Management". Please guide me with all the possible aspects of Master Data Management like Data Cleansing, Data Management and Start Data Analyzing, etc.

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  • PayPal - Account management

    - by Tom
    I'm running an app that gets small donations (Micro payments up to ~11 USD) and also I'm doing some freelancing where I get some higher payments over PayPal too. (~900 USD a month) Is it possible to have 2 accounts on PayPal? (I'm asking because if someone send me money for my freelancing, they get the contact information from the app - Like [email protected] instead of [email protected] ) Thanks.

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  • Power Management - Sleep / Wake up Server when accessed

    - by KP65
    I have a headless HP Proliant Microserver with ubuntu installed. This machine has samba shares on it serving media and I usually rdp or ssh into it. Now my issue is I want the machine to go into sleep mode(so the state is saved from ram to the harddrive) and it will seem like it is turned off after an hour of idling. If there is any attempt to access the samba share through LAN I would like it to wake up. Now my motherboard supports this function, can anyone point me in the right direction for achieving this easily? Thanks

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  • Game Asset Management

    - by user964123
    I am making my first small mobile game in C# XNA. Lets say I have 3 screens, the main menu, options and game screen. A single game session usually lasts for 1 min, so the user will alternate frequently between the main menu and game screen. Therefore, once I load the textures for either screen, I want to keep them in memory to avoid frequent reloading. Both screens share some assets like their background textures, but differ in others. The first solution I came up with is making 2 texture factory classes, MainScreenAssetFactory and GameScreenAssetFactory, each with their own content manager, and ill store them in a globally accessible point so that they persist after either screen is destroyed. There is also a OptionsScreenAssetFactory, but that I dont want to cache it since the options screen is rarely visited. A typical Factory would look something like this public class MainScreenAssetFactory { private readonly ContentManager contentManager; public MainScreenAssetFactory(IServiceProvider serviceProvider, string rootDirectory) { contentManager = new ContentManager(serviceProvider) { RootDirectory = rootDirectory }; } public Texture2D ListElementBackground { get { return return contentManager.Load<Texture2D>("UserTab"); } } public Texture2D ListElementBulletPoint { get { return return contentManager.Load<Texture2D>("TabIcon"); } } public Texture2D LoggedOutUser { get { return return contentManager.Load<Texture2D>("LoggedOutUser"); } } } Since both Main, Options and Game Screen share some common resources, instead of loading them more than once, I created another class CommonAssetTexFactory which holds the common stuff and stays in-memory during the app lifetime. For example, this class gets passed to the options screen when it is created. However, given my small game with its few assets, I am already finding this solution cumbersome and inflexible. Changing anything would require looking to see if its already in the common factory, and if not, modifying existing factories and so on. And this is just considering textures currently, i didnt add sound files yet. I cant imagine bigger games with thousands of resources using this approach. A better idea must exist. Would someone please enlighten me?

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  • Oracle is Proud Sponsor of Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit 2011

    - by Troy Kitch
    Oracle will have a very strong presence at this year’s Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit 2011 in Washington D.C., June 20-23. If you plan on being there, please be sure to stop by Oracle booth D and say “hi” to the Security Solution Experts. Please join us for the: Oracle Solution Provider Session Oracle Solution Showcase Receptions Oracle Face to Face Meetings We have some powerful database security demonstrations that we’re showing off. If you haven’t had an opportunity to check out the new Oracle Database Firewall, now’s your chance to learn why it’s the first line of defense in a database security defense in depth strategy. Additionally, Mark Morrison, director of intelligence community information assurance, and Pat Sack, VP of the Oracle national security group, will discuss U.S. government cross-domain secure information sharing. This case study session will explain how Oracle helped the U.S. government consolidate its mission-critical intelligence database infrastructure securely, and the underlying Oracle Database security solutions that can benefit any organization looking to increase business agility and drive down IT costs through database consolidation. Potomac Ballroom B Find out more about the event here. Twitter #GartnerSecurity to join the conversation.

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  • Best practice for designing a risk-style board game

    - by jyanks
    I'm just trying to figure out how to set up the code for a game like risk... I would like it to be extensible, so that I can have multiple maps (ie- World, North America, Eurasia, Africa) so hardcoding in the map doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense I'm a bit confused on how/where items should be stored/accessed. Here are the objects I see the game theoretically using: -Countries/Territories -Cities (Can be contained within territories) -Capitols -Connections -Continents -Map -Troops At the moment, I feel like: -A map should have a list of continents and countries. The continents would be more of a 'logical' thing where the continents would just be lists of countries that are checked for bonuses at the start of turns -Countries should have a list of countries that they're connected to for the connections What I can't figure out is: Where do I store the troops? Do I have an object for every single troop or do I just store the number of troops on a country object as an integer? What about capitols and cities? Do those just have a reference to the country they reside in? Is there anything I'm not seeing here that's going to screw me over in the long run with the way that I'm thinking about things now? Any advice would be appreciated.

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  • Approaches for a clickable map of nations (such as a Risk game) with Spritekit

    - by Vukovitch
    I would like to create a political map where each country is clickable by tapping but I'm not sure the best way to determine which nation was selected. Imagine Risk where each country can be individually clicked to bring up additional information. My current approach is to make a sprite for each nation where every image is the size of the screen The images are mostly transparent except for the country, that way when all of the images are displayed the countries are in the correct place relative to one another. To determine if a click occurs on an individual country I look to see if the tapped location is a non transparent pixel and check that the sprite's name is one of the countries. Additionally the nation needs to glow or something when tapped as an indicator, however my current solution is yet another sprite that is displayed. This seems like a terrible approach and I was wondering what other solutions might achieve the same results. I'm pretty new to SpriteKit so I'm not entirely sure. The other idea I had was creating a single texture where each country is a different shade of gray, then when I get the tap location I do a lookup on the color at that location and get the corresponding country. However, I'm not sure how to create a hilight or glowing country effect with that method.

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  • your AdSense account poses a risk of generating invalid activity

    - by Karington
    i received a mail from the adsense team saying: I am not an adsense expert, im actually quite new to it. I spent a lot of time on my site http://www.media1.rs, its a news aggregator with tons of options. In the meantime i discovered the double click service that had a good option to turn on google ads when you don't have any other running so i joined up for google adsense with my company account. Everything went smooth until one day (21.Jul.2011) i got an email... Hello, After reviewing our records, we've determined that your AdSense account poses a risk of generating invalid activity. Because we have a responsibility to protect our AdWords advertisers from inflated costs due to invalid activity, we've found it necessary to disable your AdSense account. Your outstanding balance and Google's share of the revenue will both be fully refunded back to the affected advertisers. Please understand that we need to take such steps to maintain the effectiveness of Google's advertising system, particularly the advertiser-publisher relationship. We understand the inconvenience that this may cause you, and we thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperation. If you have any questions or concerns about the actions we've taken, how you can appeal this decision, or invalid activity in general, you can find more information by visiting http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153. Sincerely, The Google AdSense Team At first i didn't have any idea why... but then it came to me that it was maybe the auto refresh script we had because we publish news very very often and it would be useful for visitors... but i removed it immediately after i got the mail... Then i thought it might be my friends clicking thinking that that will help me (i didn't tell them to do it and don't know if they did) or something like that but than it couldn't be that because everyone can organize 10 people and get anyone who is a start-up banned? right? Anyway i filled out the form that was on the answers page with the previously removed script and got this from them: Hello, Thank you for your appeal. We appreciate the additional information you've provided, as well as your continued interest in the AdSense program. However, after thoroughly re-reviewing your account data and taking your feedback into consideration, our specialists have confirmed that we're unable to reinstate your AdSense account. As a reminder, if you have any questions or concerns about your account, the actions we've taken, or invalid activity in general, you can find more information by visiting http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153. I do understand them that they have to keep things secret in a way but i don't know what I'm supposed to do now? Is there a check list that i can go through and re-apply? Where do i re-apply on the same form? Please help as we are a small company and cant really have a budget for hiring a specialist + don't know any also... p.s. the current ads on the site are my own through doubleclick... Thanks in advance! Best, Karington

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  • Comprehensive solution for managing patches, event viewing, change management, inventory, etc

    - by Holocryptic
    I'm looking for a solution that incorporates most or all of the following: Patch Management, Server event viewing/tracking, AD change management, ticketing and internal/external kb, remote access - ability to shadow user sessions or create new ones, imaging, and inventory. Our environments contains Windows Servers and ESXi Hosts (We're not completely virtual, but we're moving that direction). Various Cisco and Linksys switches and firewalls. This is a tall order, and I don't know if it can be done on a reasonable budget. I've looked and found some questions on SF that deal with some of this: http://serverfault.com/questions/72015/active-directory-management-tools-for-medium-sized-forest-less-than-1000-users http://serverfault.com/questions/4021/are-there-any-tools-to-do-change-management-with-active-directory-group-policy http://serverfault.com/questions/21752/what-is-a-good-patch-update-management-server What I'm ideally looking for is a reasonably cheap solution that integrates the features into a central interface. We're a non-profit, so money is a limiting factor (the cheaper, the better; but we have a max of $15k). What we are trying to avoid is having to deal with multiple vendors, while maintaining scalability (we're creating more sites that we'll have to manage). Is this possible, or will we have to cobble together something to make it work for us?

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  • Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio not working after installing .Net Framework 4

    - by smith watson
    Yesterday I installed .Net Framework 4 as it was required by Liquid XML Studio, but just after installing it, My SQL Server Management Studio stopped working. As soon as open the IDE I get package microsoft sql management studio package failed to load I tried pretty much all the solution posted on the internet but could not get it working, today when I removed the .Net Framework 4, SQL server management studio started working again. Then just to test, I installed the .Net Framework 4 back ... and I started getting the same problem in management studio. I want both on my machine ! how can i do it ? PS : OS is Windows 7

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  • Windows 7 Computer Management Not Accessible

    - by David
    I am having issues trying to access Computer Management from the start menu. The following is a screenshot of exactly how I want to go to computer management. I know that there are other ways to get to computer management, but I would like to go the easier way through the start menu. I tried restarting the computer and I tried patching the computer. No error message comes up or anything. There is no response from the computer.

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  • Exalytics Increases Customer Revenue, and Saves Time, Risk & Cost

    - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM
    We are getting some great proof point stories now from our customers who are succeeding with the Exalytics in-memory system for OBI and Essbase.  See below for some recent testimony: San Diego Unified School District Harnesses Attendance, Procurement, and Operational Data with Oracle Exalytics, Generating $4.4 Million in Savings: according to independent assessment by Mainstay Salire, the district is on track to achieve substantial benefits from the Oracle Exalytics solution, including an $8.25 million increase in attendance revenue, $75,000 a year savings in operational efficiencies, and $1 million in hardware cost avoidance. NilsonGroup chooses Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine as their solution to access critical data to keep its stores competitive with real-time Mobile BI: it took only “3 days to get up and running” with Exalytics.  Video Nykredit, in the Danish Financial Sector, describes their experiences from testing the Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine: “it was up and running within 4 days” with “more intuitive dashboards” and “up to 70x better performance” and “cheaper maintenance and lower total cost of ownership”. Video Sodexo chose Oracle Exalytics as their business analytics platform; accelerating Essbase “more than 8x” performance for more than 2,000 Excel-addin users, “significantly changing how people in information management now deal with data”.  Video Polk, Savvis, Nykredit, and Key Energy describe testing of the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine: to “reach more users than we ever have before”, “to fly through the data without impeding the analytic process”, “drive our enterprise groups into this tool instead of having departmental solutions”, and the “advanced visualisation this product enables”.  Video

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  • Case Management API by Koen van Dijk

    - by JuergenKress
    Case Management is a new addition to Oracle BPM in release 11.1.1.1.7 (PS6). This new release contains the Case Management engine, see blog Léon at  http://leonsmiers.blogspot.nl/ for more details.  However, currently this release does not contain a case portal. The case management API's, just like the already existing Oracle BPM API's, help in developing a portal page with relative ease. This blog will use some real life examples from the EURent casemanagement application and portal application developed by Oracle. The Oracle BPM Case Management API is a Java Based API that enables developers to programmatically access the new Case Management functionalities. It is an elaborate API that can access all the functionalities of Oracle Case Management. I will describe two of those functionalities in this blog: retrieving case data as DOM (http://www.w3.org/DOM/) and attaching a document to a case. Libraries First of all when creating a Case Management project you will need to attach the following libraries: These contain all the classes that are in the Case Management API. Service client To do anything with the BPM CaseManagement API in general it is necessary to create a CaseManagementServiceClient Object. The Case Management service client is the central piece of the Case Management API. It can be used to retrieve two different types of services. The first is the case stream service and the case service. The case stream service contains functionality to upload and download documents to and from a case. The second one is the CaseService. This service contains all the other functionality acting upon a case including but not limited to: Read the complete article here. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Technorati Tags: ACM API,adaptive Case Management,BPM,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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  • Oracle Leader in Transportation Management

    - by John Murphy
    Oracle Named a Leader in the Transportation Management Systems Market by Leading Analyst Firm Redwood Shores, Calif. – October 15, 2012 News Facts Gartner, Inc. has placed Oracle Transportation Management in the Leaders Quadrant of its 2012 report, “Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems (TMS).” (1) Gartner Magic Quadrants position vendors within a particular market segment based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute on that vision. According to the report, “Multiple subcomponents make up a comprehensive TMS across planning (for example, load consolidation, routing, mode selection and carrier selection) and execution (for example, tendering loads to carriers, shipment track and trace, and freight audit and payment).” Built on modern, flexible, Internet based architecture, Oracle Transportation Management is a global transportation and logistics operations system that allows companies to minimize cost, optimize service levels, support sustainability initiatives, and create flexible business process automation within their transportation and logistics networks. With a share of 26% of worldwide software revenue for 2011, Oracle is also number one in TMS vendor share according to Gartner’s report, “Market Trends: A Golden Opportunity in the Transportation Management System Market, 2012 – 2016.” (2) Supporting Quote “Shippers and logistics service providers face increasingly complex challenges as they try to reduce costs, secure capacity and improve overall freight efficiency,” said Derek Gittoes, vice president, logistics product strategy, Oracle. “We believe our high standing in both Gartner reports is a reflection of Oracle’s commitment to addressing these challenges by delivering the industry’s broadest and deepest transportation management platform. With a flexible and modern platform, we are able to support customers with both basic transportation needs, as well as those with highly complex logistics requirements.” Supporting Resources Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems Market Trends: A Golden Opportunity in the Transportation Management System Market, 2012 – 2016 Oracle Transportation Management (1) Gartner, Inc., “Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems,” by C. Dwight Klappich, August 23, 2012 (2) Gartner, Inc., “Market Trends: A Golden Opportunity in the Transportation Management System Market, 2012 – 2016,” by Chad Eschinger and C. Dwight Klappich, September 24, 2012. About Oracle Applications Over 65,000 customers worldwide rely on Oracle's complete, open and integrated enterprise applications to achieve superior results. Oracle provides a secure path for customers to benefit from the latest technology advances that improve the customer software experience and drive better business performance. Oracle Applications Unlimited is Oracle's commitment to customer choice through continuous investment and innovation in current applications offerings. Oracle's next-generation Fusion Applications build upon that commitment, and are designed to work with and evolve Oracle's Applications Unlimited offerings. Oracle's lifetime support policy helps ensure customers will continue to have a choice in upgrade paths, based on their enterprise needs. For more information on the latest Oracle Applications releases go towww.oracle.com/applications About Oracle Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com. Trademarks Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. ###   Karen [email protected] Simon JonesBlanc & [email protected]

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  • How to deal with project managers who micromanage?

    - by entens
    Perhaps I'm just naive, but when I try to decipher the wall of tasks I'm targeted to do over the course of a week, I just can't help but think whoever builds the project schedule needs to get some remedial training on basic project management. For example, I am assigned 13 tasks today, the shortest lasting .13 days (default time metric in Microsoft Project), and the longest lasting .75 days. I can't help but think that it is blatant micromanagement scheduling projects in sub 10 minute intervals. The effects of management are becoming evident in slipped tasks, resource assignment exceeding capacity by a factor of two at some points in time, and spending more time clearing tasks and figuring out what comes next than actually doing work. How can I convince the project manager to create tasks with larger duration and to see the larger picture?

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  • How to do the transition from project manager to product manager? [on hold]

    - by E. Topp
    I'm working as project manager / head of software for a small software company and was working on my own previously to this position. I want to however make the transition to product manager from my current position. You could ask about position differences, pitfalls of using project management processes and decision making as a product manager. What skill sets you need for the product manager job What are the position differences? What are the pitfalls of using project management processes and decision making as a product manager? What skill set is required for the product manager job? Is the transition easier for a project manager?

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  • How can we unify business goals and technical goals?

    - by BAM
    Some background I work at a small startup: 4 devs, 1 designer, and 2 non-technical co-founders, one who provides funding, and the other who handles day-to-day management and sales. Our company produces mobile apps for target industries, and we've gotten a lot of lucky breaks lately. The outlook is good, and we're confident we can make this thing work. One reason is our product development team. Everyone on the team is passionate, driven, and has a great sense of what makes an awesome product. As a result, we've built some beautiful applications that we're all proud of. The other reason is the co-founders. Both have a brilliant business sense (one actually founded a multi-million dollar company already), and they have close ties in many of the industries we're trying to penetrate. Consequently, they've brought in some great business and continue to keep jobs in the pipeline. The problem The problem we can't seem to shake is how to bring these two awesome advantages together. On the business side, there is a huge pressure to deliver as fast as possible as much as possible, whereas on the development side there is pressure to take your time, come up with the right solution, and pay attention to all the details. Lately these two sides have been butting heads a lot. Developers are demanding quality while managers are demanding quantity. How can we handle this? Both sides are correct. We can't survive as a company if we build terrible applications, but we also can't survive if we don't sell enough. So how should we go about making compromises? Things we've done with little or no success: Work more (well, it did result in better quality and faster delivery, but the dev team has never been more stressed out before) Charge more (as a startup, we don't yet have the credibility to justify higher prices, so no one is willing to pay) Extend deadlines (if we charge the same, but take longer, we'll end up losing money) Things we've done with some success: Sacrifice pay to cut costs (everyone, from devs to management, is paid less than they could be making elsewhere. In return, however, we all have creative input and more flexibility and freedom, a typical startup trade off) Standardize project management (we recently started adhering to agile/scrum principles so we can base deadlines on actual velocity, not just arbitrary guesses) Hire more people (we used to have 2 developers and no designers, which really limited our bandwidth. However, as a startup we can only afford to hire a few extra people.) Is there anything we're missing or doing wrong? How is this handled at successful companies? Thanks in advance for any feedback :)

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  • Company wants to write custom project management tool, rather then use third party product.

    - by Jason Evans
    At the company I work, we are really wanting to get into the agile methodology for developing software. One thing that I'm not excited about is the fact that management wants us to build a custom project management feature inside the company's Intranet. I think this is a total waste of time. There are many great third party tools available (e.g. Axosoft OnTime) that can do everything we need, and more. For how much development time it would cost us to build our own project management module, we could buy numerous licences for a third party product. One concern is that, whilst we are writing code for a client, and using our custom Intranet project management module, we find bugs in the module that need fixing ASAP. That means having to stop work on the client code to fix the Intranet. That just puts shivers down my spine. Another worry I have is lack of functionality. This custom module is going to be so basic, that it will just feel really crap to use. That might sound a bit snooty, but for goodness sake, many third party tools are so feature rich, that the idea of having to write our own tool makes feel very uneasy. In fact, I can't be bothered. What do you guys think? I'm going to raise this issue with my boss, since I feel it's such an important topic to talk about. EDIT: Thanks for the great responses, much appreciated. To summarize some of them: Money Naturally my boss does want to save money, by not forking out a few hundred £'s for licences. However, for us to write a custom tool, it will take x number of days, multiplied by approx £500, which is our costs. I don't see the business value in this. Management have mentioned that they want to sell the Intranet as a product in the future, but it's so custom to our needs (and downright basic), that in order to give it to another client, I can see us having to fork a version of the code and rebuild the majority of it anyway. So it's not like we're gaining anything there in reuse. Features Having our own custom module means not feature bloat - only the functionality we require will be in the product. My issue is that there are plenty of free, open-source project management tools out there with minimal features already. So even if cost is an issue, we could look into open-source. Again it all boils down to the fact that I don't see the point in writing a project management tool in this day and age. It's a bit like writing your own web browser - why?, what's the point? Although management are asking for this tool, just because they are, it does not mean I'm going to please them and do it just because they asked for it. If something does not make sense, then I will raise it as a concern. At the end of the day, it's the developers who write the code, it's the developers who make money for a business. Thus, as far I'm concerned, the devs have a very big role in deciding how a company should manage projects and what tools are used. "I am Spartan, argh!" :) Hmm, I've not been able to make this question a wiki for some reason, thus I'm going to have to pick an answer to accept. Cheers. Jas.

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  • Register for a free webcast presented by ISC2: Identity Auditing Techniques for Reducing Operational Risk and Internal Delays

    - by Darin Pendergraft
    Join us tomorrow, June 26 @ 10:00 am PST for Part 1 of a 3 part security series co-presented by ISC2 Part 1 will deal focus on Identity Auditing techniques and will be delivered by Neil Gandhi, Principal Product Manager at Oracle and Brandon Dunlap, Managing Director at Brightfly Register for Part 1: Identity Auditing Techniques for Reducing Operational Risk and Internal Delays ... Part 2 will focus on how mobile device access is changing the performance and workloads of IDM directory systems and will be delivered by Etienne Remillon, Senior Principal Product Manager at Oracle, and Brandon Dunlap, Managing Director at Brightfly Register for Part 2: Optimizing Directory Architecture for Mobile Devices and Applications ... Finally, Part 3 will focus on what you need to do to support native mobile communications and security protocols and will be presented by Sid Mishra, Senior Principal Product Manager at Oracle, and Brandon Dunlap, Managing Director at Brightfly. Register for Part 3: Using New Design Patterns to Improve Mobile Access Control Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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