Management Bits and Tips

There is something similar, at least metaphorically, between computer system crashes and hangs and software project failures. Software projects deliver software that crashes and these software failures via negative feedback loop either slow projects down or simply lead to their abandonment. The structure of a software development team resembles that of a running application (called a process) with team members acting in parallel (threads) and the structure of operating system with multiple running processes competing for resources resembles a software company struggling to stay alive. When projects fail there is something left as artifacts available for study and the same is true for crashed processes or operating systems leaving crash memory dumps behind for postmortem analysis.  

In some future posts I’m going to map Crash Dump Analysis patterns to Project Failure Analysis patterns and see what comes out of this attempt.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

People feel uncomfortable if not irritated or alienated when they see their misspelled names (bit). Don’t rely on your native language patterns or automatic spell checking. Verify names manually before hitting “Send” button (tip).

For example, in English it is rare when a name starts with both consonants and it is not easy to pronounce Dmitry or Dmitri (both are English and French spelling of the same Russian name) than Dimitry. Therefore people tend to write the latter. Once I got an email starting with “Dear Dirty”. At that time that was the default suggestion from Microsoft Word spell checker.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -