25-11-2009 - HRUG meeting in Best (NL)

Eric Lopes Cardozo, co-leader HRUG, opened the Holland Rational User Group (HRUG) meeting held at the Philips Healthcare premises.

Roger Nutt, IBM Rational Technical Leader South West Europe, announced that a new IBM manager Rational for Benelux will be appointed today (26-11-2009). Next to the usual high level promotion of IBM’s slogan ‘innovation for a smarter planet’ he also announced that IBM will change their policy towards Business Partners in a more friendly way. IBM wants to make more use of the business partners because they now acknowledge that they have the real specialists, knowledge and capacity available to serve IBM’s customers. (Personally I see it as a kind of spreading of risk policy) Another example of change is the new close relationship with SAP. MCIF, IBM’s software development philosophy, was of course a theme for the day.

Ling Chen of CSC presented a head egg project which, due to hard labor, still became a success. Despite the need of continuous synchronization between Rose and RequisitePro related to the requirements, CSC was able to work successfully with the requirements and relations between requirements using a requirements traceability matrix (ReqPro). The use of SoDA is/was definitely not a success in this project!

Jos Jennekens (IBM) presented and demonstrated Rational Insight which is based on Cognos Technology and tailored for the Rational environment. The dashboards and reports generated are adjustable to the customers need. Next to that it will also support in the near future HP Quality Center and other ALM supporting non-IBM products. Rational Insight cannot be used outside of the ALM area and its not the idea that you use the Cognos features (available within Insight) yourself. Maybe Decision Centric a nice alternative here? Nice feature of the dashboard functions of Insight is that you can drill down by clicking on bars and tables.

Julian Holmes (UPMentors) gave a good presentation about Agile, how to go there, and the link to IBM’s MCIF and supporting tools. Besides the traditional arguments in favor for a change to Agile, Julian presented an important habit of people that definitely helps to sell Agile in your organization. Ikiwisi ….I know it when I see it. This typical human habit is very disturbing in a traditional (Waterfall) development process and very handy in an iterative development process!
From Julian’s perspective is that MCIF is in line with OpenUP which is a mix of SCRUM, DSDM, RUP, XP, and Agile modeling, which is not a bad idea. IBM’s Jazz and RTC (Rational Team Concert) platforms fully support this and other development models.

For me as director of Avelyn it was an inspiring day, but I missed the user stories and specific Rational related Tips and Tricks. I will certainly attend next time again!
If you are interested to join look here for joining HRUG.

IBM Rational Conference 2009 (NL)

2009-10-13 IBM Rational Conference 13-10-2009 in kaatsheuvel NL, a peronal review.

Complete day organized by IBM and dedicated to the Rational Development suite and philosphy 'Rational'.

The conference had 4 tracks.

The keynote by Martin Nally (CTO IBM Rational) was very interesting, he presented the complete suite from a management perspective and stressed that with Rational you have a complete infrastructure available from requirements to end of application lifecycle.

Alan Brown (CTO IBM Rational Europe) talked about Agility and how it fits with the Rational suite. Very good overview, but forgot to mention the price of agility for the users. They have to pay as much as 4 times more (source Leen van Toor, Avelyn) time to spent on development projects in comparison to waterfall projects.

Alex van den Akker explained the 'new' Accelerate Value Program, the different levels of support offered by IBM.

Mark van Lint used the sheets of Amarican colleagues to give a quick overview of Rational Quality Management (RQM), especially the animations of the real products gave a nice feeling of the interactions between different products. The use of Cognos to collect statistical data and generate reports is integrated in RQM. If you pay a bigger price Cognos can be made available to collect and report as central datawarehouse in the complete Rational suite (Rational Insight).

Ralph Moonen as independend consultant working at TLS explained the benefits of Rational AppScan. This product generates different levels of warning signals for security leaks or weak spots, retrieved from inspection of the source code. Ralph stated that after own manual investigation of every signal the external development team was informed and asked to fix the problem. His work is made easy using Rational Appscan.

Remco Kwinkelenberg explained the model based testing approach in a Rational Quality Management environment. Using the tool 'Test designer' of Smartesting you are able to generate (!) testcases for manual or testscripts for automated testing by Rational Functional Tester. Interesting stuff.

Topic 'Total Test Quality' presented by Erik Jansen of IBM Global Services presented an interesting story about the changes in the test-market. Related to that he presented 2 additional Services which can be provided by IBM Global Services if you are using the rational Suite. (one of them: Test Process Otimized Workbench)

John Straathof of Zyntax Consulting demonstrated the use of Rational in a SAP environment, but it could be any other application environment. message was that the rational suite does its work also for SAP environments.

Oce presented the model driven development approach for development of their industrial automation chellenges for the inside of their complex top range printers (to 250 pages per minute (!)) by reusing lots of software components thex could bring down the development effort per printer to 25% of the normal time required!

Next to the persentations I met several intersting people which makes it possible for me personaly to grow and for Avelyn to spread the knowledge of Flye which is a perfect add-on for Rational Functional Tester www.avelyn.nl . Flye will be released in 1Q 2010.

The accomodation and especially the food was perfect. Droomvlucht was as usual very nice....

What is managing?

Managing is what managers ought to do. But the question is 'what is managing?'.
Best to describe it as:
"enabling people to do the work in the most efficient way"

Enabling means that you need to provide means, knowledge and motivation.
people means that you need to respect employees and pay attention to them in a honest way
the work means that the result you want need to be specified and clear for you(!) and the person who works on it. Communicate your expectations and listen to the response and remarks of the person.
efficient means from the companies point of view the most efficient way, that is the best price - time - result. But take care, this doesn't mean as cheap and fast as possible only, there is also a social responsibility and commercial aspect of the company, that needs to be taken into account too.

The stars

We are groping in the dark while it's light.
Life is unpredictable and we think everything is under control. The society feels superior and we, the human mankind, feels superior on this planet. And maybe we are. But all is relative. At the end we die and we do not control that. Neither we control the extreme behavior of nature, tsunami’s, earthquakes, water flood, eruptions, ice age, ... all can happen all of a sudden.
If we should look more often, on a bright and dark evening, to the stars, we all should feel very tiny and very grateful of what life brings to us every day.
The stars 'live' in a perfect order and balance between an uncountable number of colleagues. I wish we could say the same for the balance between human and nature and humans amongst each other. Sometimes I see the office as a small solar system.....without a balance...

Vacation is over

Vacation is over and the work starts again.
During my 3 weeks holiday in Italy I evaluated my professional career.
It can be enhanced if I improve myself and execute more ideas. Normally you think 'I should do this or that' and then you leave it. Main excuse for that is 'I have many other obligations and have no time for it'.
Well,.. manage these 'other obligations' in a proper way, organise it, and give yourself time to do things you think are good.
See what happens.

Have fun!

Friday I had a baseball training together with several other 40+ people. I realized that my condition was not that bad and that I really liked the game.
I enjoyed it very much and thinking of making it my second sport activity next to badminton.
When having fun and meeting new people, it stimulates the mind and gives you more than you expect.
Fun in a project at your work is also very important. Sometimes when things are evolving not the way you want it is good to make a joke out of the situation (take into extreme) or/and involve complete new people in the project (for a short term).
The latter is a famous management trick, but it works to keep people alert.
Have fun!

Justin Verlander

Justin Verlander seems to be a famous baseball player.
I will try to play this game on Friday.
As kid I always liked the game and now I'm 46 I will try to play the game for fun.
I'm looking forward to it, and hope to become a relatively good player.
I realize that I will never be as good as Justin Verlander.
A shame.
When I should follow my feeling earlier and started to play the game when I was 18, maybe I was now (stil) playing in the USA????
We should follow our dreams and interests immediately.
It would change our lives.

Managers, managers, who's doing the job?

In lots of organizations a lot of people are afraid of doing the job.
There are many excuses for not doing the job. You can imagine yourself.
But, in some circumstances it is efficient and good for your leadership to do a job yourself. Especially when nobody wants to do the job.
In those cases you give an example to the rest.
And that's what managers need to do!

Ask questions

Always ask questions!
When a project is not progressing or an employee does not perform....,
ask questions, direct questions.
We (the Dutch people at least) have the habit to find out through others and trough circumstances to identify what the problem is.
But it is much easier just to ask the person or the project leader what the problem is. If you get an unsatisfactory answer, appeal to the higher goal, and demand that you want to know.
If you got further resistance appeal to your function and responsibilities and his function and responsibilities. Do not threat but push a bit and give it a day to react. Do not come to a situation that you say 'if you do not deliver it, then....'. That is only a very last solution. In that case you can say goodbye to the loyalty of the employee.

Lou Knickerbocker died

Lou Knickerbocker seems to be a famous person in USA.
On the 24 of April he died.
It seems strange, but also for famous and rich people counts that simple things really matter. Especially when you die just the immaterial things passes by in a few seconds as a complete film of what was important to you.
During our professional life we do not take any time for valuable moments, we are only focused on results and production.
What should it cost to spend some time on valuable moments in our professional environment. Say that you appreciate that someone is there and does a job for you. Ask from your hart about how someone feels (in his/her life) etc.
Remarkable things can happen, expect the unexpected...
Curious to know what really mattered to Lou.
God bles.

When someone dies

The mother of a friend died a few days ago and the funeral is today at 14.00 hrs in Paris. Unfortunately I can not go there, but maybe more honest, I do not know the women. Still I had an idea to go there, only to comfort my friend. Because of the costs and time involved I decided not to go. Then, as a moment like now (when it's too late) I realize the following.
'What is more important, friendship or time and money?????'

We live in a very selfish community where an excuse of distance, time and money is an acceptable excuse.
I think that the only person who can answer the question if it is a valid excuse or not, is you yourself.
Feel your own answer and act accordingly.

Then you are yourself.

You can feel your answers on every question, if you act accordingly you shall enjoy it, you receive positive responses and you shall feel much better!
Try it!

For me it's too late to go to the funeral, but I did send a warming e-mail.
That felt relatively good!

Development process models

To create a perfect development process model you need to collect the requirements, study the environment and look at the available means and people. Using that as bases for design of new development process models is the best way to go. If you are not restricted many more development process models can be created. Lots of time will be spilled then.
At this moment I start with the collection of requirements by interviewing different key-stakeholders.

back to business

Today is back to business, and is dedicated to work on the open source project.

Day off ?

Normally this Friday after Ascension Day is a day off.
Not for me, I enjoy to work in a quiet environment and take the opportunity to do things which always were set aside. I use these days also for restructuring and cleaning. I love these days..

Searching for a new assignment

I'm searching for a new assignment at this moment due to the fact that this job ends at the end of June. My job is taken over by internal staff and this makes myself redundant.
Now I'm searching for a new job and I'm thinking of what I want.

I spent a long time thinking of that and came with 3 possibilities:

- new freelance assignment as programme manager or project manager.
- permanent job as a country manager or managing a large project or department.
- work on one of my visions, but get paid by the government or an investor.

Time management

Time management is as good as the user's decipline.
When you have not enough time for your family or you spend to much time on your work you can think of using Time management.
For some people it will help but for the bigger part it won't.
Reason is: if you mess up without Time management, you also mess up with time management.
It's your own bright mind and your will who plans the agenda and executes cf the agenda.

Just do what you like

Just do what you like,
do non let you be influenced by your environment
or opinions of others.
When it comes to your private activities.
Partly this is also true for the business time.
When you are happy in your work, ie you can do what you want to achieve the targets, then this is good for the business, your boss and the clients.
But keep in mind that this is not private time.
You have to think from a business perspective.
When you do that, You are good!

Motivation

When a person in a project is motivated, more can be achieved.
How do you motivate people?

Pay attention to the subject,
Emphasis the positive things
Explain what it means for the organization (the big picture)
What does it deliver to the company, department, team and to the person
Give metaphors (examples)
What if we do not do this.....negative results, negative spiral... etc
Repeat this in different ways

But most important is 'be enthusiastic and motivated' yourself!

Is anybody out there?

I'm writing this blog for my self, but I share it with the internet community for the reason that someone can react on it, advise me, can learn from it, have fun out of it, spent time on it etc.
I expected to receive now and then some reactions.
But nothing yet.
Wonder if it starts today when we have a reunion of 'The New Managers' (De Nieuwe Managers) this evening.
Have fun

Ready to go

The 2 projects I started are ready to go. Waiting for the project board to approve the PID. In the meantime I concentrate on Open Source Change management Tool selection.