March 31, 2008

I’ve been out of commission for awhile but happy to be back.  I feel like writing about getting medical treatment in China but that’s a different story.  Well, we are now pretty much past the annual planning season for Chinese companies which revolves around the Chinese New Year.  I’ve been on a two year quest (since I joined the Chinese company that I work for) to transform our organization into a more customer focused, project and program oriented organization.  Seems easy enough.

With the economy struggling and companies tightening their belts we are starting to see more and more resumes of good project managers on the street.

Having been in the project management web-based SaaS software field for 10 years this seems like the 2nd time we have been through these challenging economic times.  The good news for our company is in down times our software sales actually increase as companies invest in systems to automate and replace people.  The sad part is knowing that is taking place and good people will be looking for work.

Well since we have no control over the Federal Reserve the one thing I can offer is a way to decipher the job postings they find so they know the "truth in advertising" behind some of these companies.

NOTE:  I literally lifted these off of the bathroom wall were many people post funny quotes and stories and am unable to attribute the original author.&n ...

Happy Chinese New Year!

There have been lots of stories recently about the bad weather in China and its impact on people and the economy during the Spring Festival.  It’s billed as the biggest mass movement of people in the world in which 100’s of millions of people take to the roads, rails, and airways.  It’s the center of the annual cycle for people and businesses.  Our company’s all hands annual meeting is the 1^st day after the holiday and culminates with a dinner and live performances.  The perfo ...

I was asked recently in a networking event to talk about the hardest and the easiest challenges we faced starting VCSonline.com 10 years ago this summer.  The question caught me a little off guard and I starting thinking back to those early days (queue stereotypical harp music soap operas use!).

Back in 1998 I had a lot more hair up top and lot less wrinkles around my eyes.  What we lacked in startup funding, customers, and employees we more then made up in hope, desire, and pure potential.  There was no doubt we would set the world on fire.  It was a magical time of creative ingenuity.  The web-based software was an embarrassment by today's standards but back then anything data driven over the web that helped teams manage projects and report to management got 'ooos' and 'ahhhs'.

Fast forward 3 kids, 10 pounds, and 30,000 clients later to today.  Finally (thank you God) things are really tak ...

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a relatively new concept in software delivery and one poised to change project management delivery in the immediate future. Instead of buying a server, buying server software, configuring said software, and keeping up with maintenance you simply pay a software service provider a monthly fee to deliver the benefit of the software over the Internet.

The advantages of this approach are:

• No large capital outlay (servers, enterprise software)
  
• No resource management issues (training staff to install and support software)
  
• No footprint on existing hardware (no software to install on desktops and no storage issues)
  
• Pay as you go and only ...

It’s the holiday season and I’m in the USA for a couple of weeks enjoying a rest.  The Western year in China ended with a rush.  More than one years effort, at the Chinese software company at which I work, in preparing for an SEI CMMI certification culminated with a one week long formal assessment which ended the day of our Christmas party on December 23rd, and the result of which was presented to the team on the day after on Christmas Eve. 

Well, from the general attitude at the Christmas party, you would not have guessed that such an important event was scheduled for the next day.

I met with a Global 100 company CIO last week and I think his comments were right on track with what other CIOs I have met with in 2007. 

He said "I did the math and IT spent 1,000,000 hours on projects last year.  The #1 thing we can do is to improve project productivity and insure consistency in our delivery".