This Focused Performance Weblog started life as a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective, but is in the process of evolving towards primary content on interactive and mobile marketing. Think of it as about Focusing marketing messages for enhanced Performance. If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
My Tumblr site will get you stuff that would have ended up on Focused Performance, plus other stuff of just personal interest. There are tags on posts there to help you focus on particular topics if you don't like my politics, taste in music, or sense of humor.
If you're interested in topics related to interactive or mobile marketing, social media, SMS text, web design and development, I'm also one of the contributors to my employer's Twitter presence at http://twitter.com/us_again. You won't get only me there, but also a bunch of really smart interactive marketing professionals.
(As of May 1, Google is turning off ftp upload support for Blogger blogs, so reminders like this will end then.)
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Saturday, March 13, 2010
All good things must come to an end...
If you still read or subscribe to this blog, you haven't seen much in the past few months, and this will be the last post you see from here. My last previous post from back in September 2009 was a fitting final ironic link post.
Having originally set up Focused Performance to support my 1996-2004 consulting practice, my energy and time for writing meaningful pieces has dissipated and almost disappeared. Three jobs after my consulting days, I've become immersed in the world of social media, and have gotten into the worlds of Twitter (for primarily links to topics previously covered in Focused Performance), Facebook (for connecting with people I really know), LinkedIn (for business contacts and networking with folks with whom I have more tenuous connections), Flickr (photos), and Tumblr (for "micro-blogging" a mix of Focused Performance topics, personal fun stuff, and social commentary). And I'm still trying to figure out Google Buzz and Foursquare.
As a result of this spreading of my online life, I've been thinking of retiring the Focused Performance blog after 9 years. And this last month, Google's Blogger team (whose platform I've used since the beginning) announced the end of ftp publishing which I depend on to integrate the blog in the old FP site. It will be easier to just let this live on as is with no posts, and start a new blog, but I think I'll stick with my current collection of outlets for now. Maybe I'll revisit some of the best of this old blog in my new haunts. Maybe I'll launch another blog down the line. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?
It's been a good run. I've "met" a bunch of great people online through this blog. And I hope that you'll find it worthwhile to follow me through my other touch points in the interweb.
My Tumblr site will get you stuff that would have ended up on Focused Performance, plus other stuff of just personal interest. There are tags on posts there to help you focus on particular topics if you don't like my politics, taste in music, or sense of humor.
- There's also a bunch of people in the list of people I follow that you'll recognize from my FP posts...Clarke, Joe, Jack, Jim, Johanna, Esther, Steve, and others. (To these folks, thanks for all the insights. I often counted on you for ideas to riff on here on FP.)
If you're interested in topics related to interactive or mobile marketing, social media, SMS text, web design and development, I'm also one of the contributors to my employer's Twitter presence at http://twitter.com/us_again. You won't get only me there, but also a bunch of really smart interactive marketing professionals.
...but only if we already have an offline relationship, please. I'm trying to keep my Facebook limited to family and friends (in the traditional sense of the word).
Again, I'll be more likely to accept a LinkedIn request if we have more than just a blogger/reader relationship, but unlike Facebook, I'm a bit more flexible with my LinkedIn connections.
At one point, euphemistically referring to troops as "resources," McChrystal writes, "Resources will not win the war, but under-resourcing could lose it." Another way to reads this sentence is: Under-resourcing could lose the war, but more resources won't necessarily win it, either.
Nothing to see here. Keep moving.
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Saturday, September 19, 2009
Calling Bullshit on Project Management 2.0 -- OK. I've got your attention with my over the top title. Sorry about that.
Actually, over at Glen Alleman's Herding Cats: Top Down / Bottom Up = Project Management 2.0? Not with this approach, he doesn't so much call bullshit on PM 2.0 but rather on an unconvincing setup and payoff of someone else's promotion of the idea that purports to blend the best parts of "traditional" (for want of a better word) and "agile" PM.
I can't stand it when the presentation of good ideas are ruined by poorly developed logic and arguments promoting them.
Magic Numbers - Project Management -- From Scott Berkun, The magic numbers of project management, an exploration of some of the games played with estimates.
One of the things he doesn't mention in the "what to do instead" section is to make the estimation process a conversation and the open use of range estimates (buffers) for the project as a whole. This takes the pressure off of everybody to come up with [the impossible] accurate estimate.
MS Project 2010 Unveiled -- ComputerWorld reports that MicroSoft has opened up on the next version of MS Project, the application we all love to hate. It's apparently picking up the "ribbon" interface that has me still re-learning how to do things in Office 2007.
Brian Kennemer at Projectified is highlighting some of the features, including a Team Planner and a Timeline view. I'm sure he'll be coming out with more.
My big questions are whether they're fixing the print function so it's more intuitive about what'll show up on a page without going through multiple iterations of Print Preview, and, more important, if the scheduling engine will let you level resources BEFORE identifying a critical path.
Beijing Flea Market Slide Show -- kkfung at Lenscape.org mashes together videos and photos from a range of sources, including Flickr accounts. He asked my permission to use about a half dozen or so of my pictures from the Panjiayuan "dirt market" in Beijing. Here's the result...