learn.5tein.com » management

IP&T 682 Wrap-Up

Jared Stein — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 20:38:22 +0000

From the class wiki, here are the assignments for IP&T 682:

Assignment: Review a successful grant application (worked example) Completed
Assignment: Personal interview with instructor Completed
Assignment: List your blog address by logging in and clicking “Edit” above. Completed
Assignment: Blog your passion and current question Completed
Assignment: Help compile a list of IP&T-related funding agencies on the Wiki Completed
Assignment: Find and blog an appropriate RFP for your passion / question Incomplete
Assignment: Highlight your RFP and pull out keywords. Complete
Assignment: Blog (1) your one page summary, and (2) a description of the funnel shape and cadence of the summary Completed
Assignment: Outline your proposal and complete your timeline, and post these to your blog Completed
Assignment: Draft your budget and post to your blog Completed
Assignment: As per Dr. Mott Incomplete (Missing instructions)
Assignment: Find and blog about one online resource in each of these areas Completed
Assignment: Interview a project manager or faculty member about a grant / project that went bad and blog the story in as much detail as you can. Completed
Assignment: Blog your final draft proposal Completed
Assignment: Present your proposal in class for a mini-defense. Completed
Assignment: Final interview with instructor and grade determination Pending

Attitudes Survey Proposal 2 Pager

Jared Stein — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:15:35 +0000

Available from Google Docs: http://docs.google.com/View?id=dczd9vkv_158gb3kf8cm

[iframe http://docs.google.com/View?id=dczd9vkv_158gb3kf8cm 540 500]

Interview with Anne Arendt, Web Resource Manager at UVU

Jared Stein — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:47:35 +0000

I sat down with Anne Arendt, Web Resource Manager at UVU to ask a few questions about her experience managing projects. Here’s an audio recording of that interview (13 minutes):

Jared’s interview with Web Resource Manager Anne Arendt (MP3) CC By

“Outworld” Social Media Services

Jared Stein — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:06:43 +0000

I don’t know if Carlos Santos coined the use of “outworld” to mean non-institutional social media services in his presentation on SAPO Campus’s institutionally-supported systems, but it is a very apt and suggestive description of a certain perception of or mindset about non-institutional social media that exists amongst educators and administrators. I’ll be mixing this term in (and referencing Carlos’s work) in my survey of attitudes project proposal.

Project Concern Resources

Jared Stein — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:48:19 +0000

David Wiley listed the following areas of concern for managing a project (specifically a grant project):

Communicating with Customers
Controlling Scope Creep
Changes in the Environment
Staying on Schedule

One of my favorite we-based resources for talk on web projects–and project management in general–is A List Apart. Indeed, A List Apart has over 50 articles related to project management. There are many other good project management blogs and online magazines, though the ones I’m most familiar with relate to web projects, such as Smashing Magazine (they’re also the ones I recommend to students).

Communicating with ~~Customers~~ Stakeholders
- How To Effectively Communicate With Developers… which is almost as hard as communicating with clients (or subject matter experts).
- 8 Strategies for Successful Client Relations
- The Problem, the Balloon, and the Four Bedroom House by Joe Di Stefano. Great commentary and strategy on the importance of defining a project. This is famous in my Web Design class.
- Getting to ‘No’. Communicate firmly and effectively; prevent and stop scope creep.
Controlling Scope Creep
- Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia (or Build a Website for No Reason) by Greg Storey Another famous article in my Web Design class.
- In Defense of Scope Creep by Hal Helms I admit I’ve found some strong value in certain instances of scope creep, if it ultimately supports the project’s true goals or objectives.
- Use Cases Part II: Taming Scope by Norm Carr, Tim Meehan
Changes in the Environment
- Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
Staying on Schedule

…and here are a couple more general project management sources:

Reconsidering dotProject

Jared Stein — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:07:54 +0000

(This is a copy of a post made earlier at http://jaredstein.org)
We’ve used dotProject in my Instructional Design Services unit for almost two years. dP is an open source project management and task tracking tool that has benefited our unit organizationally, and has helped us follow-through on projects in a more efficient manner. It has also helped me manage staff resources and understand time-to-delivery of common project types.

However, dP is not without its flaws; indeed, I became so frustrated that late last week I asked my lead developer Ken Woodward to send me some examples of competitive systems that did not include BaseCamp. While BaseCamp is a great system, and probably amongst the top few project management tools out there, it’s not cheap, and we have a lot of projects running simultaneously. Plus, I am a constant advocate of OSS solutions, and in this situation, where many of my staff are student developers, having a locally-owned OSS platform that can be modified by my staff as they learn their trade is very attractive.

Let me note that I always feel guilty critiquing an OSS project, especially when I myself haven’t made any significant contributions to the code. At the same time, with increasing competition in OSS solutions, one has more liberty to leave behind that which doesn’t suit one’s needs. Further, reasonable explication of the features and failures of any system is valuable to developers who are committed to building and maintaining a quality system. So here’s a quick review of dotProject with some particular attention to the broken bits. My next post will introduce the alternatives that we are considering.

Here’s a list of dP’s strengths or notable features:

user-based and password protected
email integrated
distinction between projects and tasks (you’d be surprised how many “project management” tools omit this!)
robust data at the project level, with good hierarchical layout of tasks
project tasks may be imported into other projects, thus “templates”
calendaring
task dependency
good, flexible task logging and time tracking
decent gant charts
written in PHP
themes

Now, a list of complaints:

No RSS. For my unit, RSS or Atom feeds are taken for granted. If I can’t put my task list on my Google home page, I’m not happy. RSS is easy to script, however, so we could add this feature to our To Do list.

Inconsistent task/to do list. I haven’t quite figured this out, but one’s “tasks” list is different from the “to do” list that dP presents. This appears to just be a bug, as the To Do list–which is actually harder to get to–is more accurate.

Some weird PHP scripting. For instance, project categories: one can create categories for projects, like “in planning” or “in progress” or “pilot” or “complete”. The problem seems to be that dP attaches a simple numeric id to each of these category names. It attaches the same numeric id to the projects in the category. Makes sense, right? Wrong. The category ids correspond to the order in which they appear as tabs in the dP interface; if you change the order, the numeric ids of the categories change, and thus no longer match the project categories. I’ve actually found several examples of similarly breakable scripting in the system (including a stubborn “masking” of certain projects related to this) but this was the most frustrating one.

Calendar/date entry is inadequate. In order to set a task due date to, say, December 2010, you can’t type 12/01/2010, you have to open the calendar GUI, then click, click, click, click through the months until you get to December 2010.

Little data available outside of gant charts. And the gant charts fail to react intelligently to clearly “inactive” projects, instead extending them perpetually as if someone were still working on it (even though no hours were logged). But really the main complaint here is that there is no simple, easy way to access data on staff or projects. For example, I can’t click a user’s name and determine how many hours they logged in dP this week. I can’t look at all projects of a type and get an average of hours spent to completion. I can get clear, individual project data from individual projects

Not embeddable, widgetizeable. Several project management systems have scripts, or embeddable widgets, or even desktop apps that help you monitor your tasks. dP does not yet. If they only had RSS, we’d be able to get somewhere. XML RPC? That’d be cool.

Average GUI. The graphical user interface in dP is average at best. It’s not horrible; it’s not elegant. It could be adjusted with a new CSS, but my experimentation with theming in dP is that too much can go wrong, and I’ve tried several themes that actually break basic features of the system! OK, so maybe I just need to spend more time on this, but compared to theming in Drupal or WordPress, dP theming is no fun.

Small community support. Though the quality of people involved in dP is great, the number of people developing, contributing, and using the system is a lot smaller than I’d hoped for. The last date of a major upgrade or bug fix was July 2008. I really want to add some of my staff to that community, but right now may not be the best time in the history of our organization.

So, we’re looking at other options–and I’ll review some of those next time–but I recognize that in the end we may stick with dP. If we do, it will have to be with a greater commitment to participate in the dP community, because several of these complaints I’ve listed simply can’t be allowed to stand, and its true we haven’t given much back.

Web 2.0 attitudes survey budget

Jared Stein — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 05:48:10 +0000

The following draft budget covers human resources for conducting a survey of campus attitudes toward institutional vs informal social media systems.

[iframe http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=t-HwKIGvwsTtX3a1q_s_V1Q&single=true&gid=1&output=html&widget=true 550 375]

Budget drafted as a Google Spreadsheet, inserted using the Embed iframe plugin for WordPress.

Proposal outline: survey of attitudes toward social media systems

Jared Stein — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 01:34:04 +0000

About half-way through the semester I decided to switch tracks to a project that is small (but very challenging for me), relevant to my work, and may have an impact beyond the immediate project, here is an initial outline of my proposal for a survey of UVU educational community attitudes toward an institutionally controlled social media system vs. similar “public” system(s). The specific system project targeted here is a blogging platform, but I think that may be irrelevant, or at least may be one of many systems targeted by the survey.

Note: having never done real surveying before, I recognize that my proposal outline my be missing critical pieces:

Intro

Prior to adopting a locally hosted social media platform for higher ed, the institution should weigh benefits of localized control against potential loss of authenticity and user appeal that may be inherent in institutional systems, and assess user attitudes towards competing institutional and public systems.
Question

How do attitudes of prospective users in an educational community differ toward institutionally controlled learning and communication systems versus informal or independent learning and communication systems?
Description of survey instrument (type, size)
Survey questions
Data collection methods (electronic, database system used)
Disseminating the survey (e-mail to faculty, students, staff; hyperlinks from campus portal)
Timeline (December 2009 – February 2010)
Budget and resources (instrument development, staff time)

Moving forward…with a new project

Jared Stein — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:18:41 +0000

I’ve let myself fall behind on assignments for IP&T 682, in part from indecision on a topic, but mostly from diverting my time to other work and personal projects. Throw in WCET09 and a bout of the flu, and it’s Really Time to Get On Track. The class wiki reminds me that I still need to post the following:

One-page summary, and description of the funnel shape and cadence of the summary
Outline of proposal and timeline
Draft of budget

I’ve already switched gears in terms of the project to align with a UVU project I’m working on. Here’s an initial 200 word intro with question:

Web-based social media applications are alluring to educators seeking to revitalize learning, maintain relevance, engage learners, and realize potential benefits of “Web 2.0″ memes. Educational institutions may seek to provide social media or Web 2.0-like systems to their campus through locally hosted solutions. While locally hosted and managed solutions offer advantages to the community (especially in satisfying perceived needs for institutional control of information and activities), they risk losing authenticity and genuine Web 2.0 corollaries such as network effects.

Such consequences may not even be realized, however, if the community rejects institutionally controlled social media in favor of existing authentic and non-institutional services. Institutions considering locally hosted social media systems may predict certain measures of success by first comparing prospective user attitudes toward public versus institutional social media. A survey aimed at measuring prospective user attitudes could also reveal general trends and attitudes toward digital culture, informal learning, and the prevalence of social media use amongst community populations. It might also suggest educational community attitudes toward institutional systems in general.

Q: How do attitudes of prospective users in an educational community differ toward institutionally controlled ~~social media~~ learning and communication systems versus ~~authentic social media~~ informal or independent learning and communication systems?

Updating the CV

Jared Stein — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:53:04 +0000

I try to update my CV once a year or so, just to keep myself from forgetting things I’ve done (usually conference presentations) and to lighten the load of updating it the next year. I spent a couple hours on this today as part of an assignment for David Wiley’s IPT 682 course. As usual, the task is both satisfying and loathsome.

Satisfying, because everyone likes talking (or writing) about themselves. This is why psychotherapy feels so good, and why everyone wants to write a memoir or autobiography, even though they may not admit it.

As a “course of life” a CV is akin to journaling, a reflective act that encourages one to recognize accomplishments as well as weaknesses and gaps in one’s professional performance. For instance, I once again had to confront the vacuous hole where publications should be. (Maybe next year, right?)

Loathsome, because not only must one lament one’s shortcomings, writing a CV is by definition an autoerotic, narcissistic episode where one must prop up a largely positive image of one’s self against a sea of more qualified (or equally artificial, if you see it that way) competitors. Yet there is also a difficult honesty in a CV, for one can only list accomplishments–the things one has actually done in the past–obviating current or future prospects.

A classmate stated that one must decide how to construct a CV based on what story one wants to tell about one’s self. I can see that in a resume, but a CV is like a catalogue, a full listing of anything minutely significant. It can be pared, true, but most choose to be comprehensive, and in doing so must sacrifice elaboration in favor of listing, if only to preserve some (admittedly tepid) resemblance to readability.