Why I am interested in emacs and org mode

One of my interests over the last few months is using the emacs editor and the org mode to change my work flow, keep my projects and todo lists sorted out and as the centre for all of my various writing projects : blogs, technical, fiction and emails. It felt difficult to work with but I have persevered, thanks to a few good blogs, I know use it everyday for more and more use cases and I have only scratched the surface of what it can do for me.

I intend to make my productiveplaybook.com blog a centre for getting started and developing the use of emacs but I will leave here a couple of links that helped me greatly. Check them out and maybe dip your toe in, the water is lovely.

http://emacslife.com/baby-steps-org.html

http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html

Why I Became a BA/PM

 

Why I became a BA/PM is very much linked to two other questions: how I got started in computing and What I didn’t like about developing systems.

Which sound like good subjects for other blog posts. Sticking to WHY I became a BA/PM… I think the business analysis part it is because I simply found an affinity with doing the research and explaining it to others. The Project Management was probably from hating the way ideas and analysis was being turned into mediocre projects that ended up not dealing with the original aim or worse still being hijacked by vested interests and bearing no relevance to the business and the users.

So I became a project manager to take care of a project I had created as a business analyst. This then became a habit, enter an organisation as b.a. and as the analysis phase finishes morph into a p.m. in order to execute the plan and get it done.
Before I was a B.A. I was developing small scale systems using combinations of VB, SQL Server, Access, Foxpro and Excel. So although I wouldn’t ever describe myself as a programmer, I did develop business systems that worked and achieved something useful for someone.

I think my success was that I was never in love with the idea of programming and was much more interested in making a good user experience that provided real value. This wasn’t always appreciated. I remember one system I came up with, a real hybrid of many technologies that scrapped data from six different sources, consolidated it around the customer id and a set of prioritisation rules and then spat out a weekly report. So I spent ages on this system adding and changing as the business worked out what it really wanted and then when it was running well it was handed over to the user department and they complained. Yes, they complained. It did exactly what they asked for but they didn’t like that the weekly report took slightly over an hour to run, tieing up the p.c. for that time.

What is wrong with that I asked. Well they thought that because it was on a computer now it would be really quick. They asked whether it would help if they replaced the 386 p.c. with a 486 (did I say that this was a long time ago?) but I told them that wasn’t the real problem here. The program in turn went and collected data from other systems. It then extracted data according to a set of rules and built new tables, it then had to compile a report in 15 sections from those tables.

I asked them how long it would take to do that without the system. One said 15 man hours but then the other one pointed out that was a conservative estimate as writing the final report in the format required would probably take another 3-5 hours. At this pointed I compared their 18-20 hour estimate of real people time with one hour of a p.c. chugging away. We came to an agreement that they would kick off the process at midday on Friday and go to lunch. One hour later as they return the process would be just about completing. They were happy. I was happy and I got my first experience of setting user expectations and then matching them to the real world.

The Checklist Manifesto (How To Get Things Right) by Atul Gawande

The Checklist Manifesto (How To Get Things Right) by Atul Gawande

This is a wonderful book. Very quick and easy to read and full of examples of not only HOW checklists can help your life, but WHY they will help.

Atul’s examples range from industries like Construction and Aviation to his main concern – Medicine – specifically surgery. He shows how using lists to remind oneself of processes and steps is not a WEAKNESS but contributes to a greater strength than can be imagined.

He has **proof** that it aids bringing group of people into a team of people and he does all of this in a very readable style. Get this book. If you are a compulsive **listmaker** (like me) it will help justify why you do what you do, if you hate lists it may show you why others find them useful and how you too can benefit from them.

The Routemap For This Blog

Part of considering a blog and its purpose a few weeks after launch is to decide on what is working, what doesn’t work and whether a course correction or greater/less focus is needed.

I have had good reaction and feedback to the serious articles, links to other articles, the humour and the retro Hi Fi series.

This leaves me not knowing what you really want to see other than maybe more of the same. So here are my plans for delivering more of the same here…

I will finish my Retro Hi Fi series as I bring my equipment history up to date: only four more items to add actually as I confess I haven’t added or changed my hi fi since getting married back in 1999 – I don’t think I would be allowed to as there are always much more pressing things to spend money on!

Soon I intend to start a new series of posts on Retro Productivity Gadgets : you know the kind of thing – any battery powered, mobile, organisation aid or PDA… I have used quite a few over the years from companies such as Psion, Casio, Sharp, HP, Apple and then there were the phones! Each device was useful for a while but then fell out of favour and was replaced or did it fall out of favour because of the shinier, faster, geekier possibilities offered by its replacement? We will look at that and how my viewpoint on gadgets has changed.

I want to start a software series concentrating on productivity, writing and collaboration.

I need to go into some depth about writing technical and project orientated documents – so that might be a series if I can think up a good way to collect them logically. Maybe Project Lifecycle documentation?

I want to start answering questions from people on Business Analysis and Project Management topics – so please feel free to send in questions and I will make a blog post out of the answer.

An example of this would be the topic I published last month on Business Rules versus Business Requirements.

Although I dread questions like – How much analysis do I need to do? What should be in a functional specification? Where does analysis stop and system design start? How do I manage a project? – I hate this one as I don’t think in all of the projects I have completed I have ever managed two in exactly the same way.

However I am up to the challenge so ask away and I will endeavour to do my best to answer you.

I am happy to keep you anonymous if you want. This would be about sharing best practice and coming up with great ideas and NOT about pointing out any lack of knowledge in anyone participating in the discussion – I do hope we can get some discussions going.

What do you think about me introducing buddypress into this blog so that we can get some forums going on aspects of BA and PM technique and methods? Is that something you would contribute towards?

So thank you for reading, I hope that sounds interesting, but please comment on the posts (all comments that aren’t abusive or flames will be shown and answered) and also comment on this one if there is something you want to see or read about.

TK and How It Can Help The Flow Of Your Writing

This is not my original idea. I saw it on problogger recently but as someone who is writing documwnts all the time in my day job as well as three blogs and sometimes fiction I appreciate the idea that we shouldn’t stop writing and disrupt our own flow when we write. This concept is to write with a placeholder of TK or tk wherever we find we need a fact or need to finish a sentence.

It works like this. I may be writing and need to put a fact into this sentence but I don’t know how many people TK live in China so I write TK at that point in the sentence. I may also find I am missing the end of my TK. That was hard to write! But it was easy to type TK. I will then come back to all the instances of TK in my work and go through them replacing them with the real words.

So why TK… well it stands for “to come” ….oh no it doesn’t, to come would be TC…. yes but TK is a letter combination that never occurs in normal English writing and so it is easy to pickup with the find/replace function in your word processor of choice.

I haven’t used it much in blogging, I use it a lot at work in writing business analysis documents and reports. TK has allowed me to get and write most of a report without having to stop and get a statistic or a fact or a reference at the time of an initial draft of a document.

Try it…it works.

Business Analyst Resource

Interesting resource here  http://stlouis.iiba.org/download/ESIBACOMP%20.pdf

Eight Things Your Business Analysts Need to Know

A Practical Approach to Recognizing and Improving Competencies

My Ever Changing To Do List Methods

My to do list process changes frequently. Sometimes as i find a new tool or method and sometimes just because i want a clean start. A few months ago i started a new job and decided that this was the opportunity for a new start. I had been keeping my to do list in evernote but found it annoying to manage. So my new start was to go to an old tried and trusted method…index cards. 
So the index card continued for about two months but became unwieldy as my duties and responsibilities increased at work and i found myself rewriting my card pack too often. The limitations of cards are obvious, no backup, limited space, no formatting, few opportunities to sort the work, constant rewriting. 
My next move was to use a text file. Plain text edited in notepad++. One line per entry, top priority at the top of the list. Complpeted entries at the bottom. Then i started synchronising it using dropbox. Then i started to format the lines more using the python language in notepad++ as it uses indenting as the key to outlining.

This grew until it got unwieldly (took about four weeks) and I started looking for another method. So about a week ago I went back to my long abandoned todo.txt method originally developed by Gina Trapani.  It is still based around a plain txt file that is stored on dropbox and accessed on whatever system I am using. That means the excellent todo.txt android application on my phone and tablet but what to do on my office desktop and home laptop?

Currently I am trying sublime text editor on the home laptop and still using notepad++ on the office desktop.

I have tried the CLI (command line interface) applications and some of the more visual Windows front ends for todo.txt but they do not allow me either the visibility or the flexibility of a text editor.

The search continues but I am relatively happy at the moment with my setup. A future post will look at the differences and benefits of sublime text versus notepad++. Another post will look at using index cards and another one will discuss prioritising work

Links to:

todo.txt  http://todotxt.com/

notepad++   http://notepad-plus-plus.org/

sublime text   http://www.sublimetext.com/

Swimlanes and BPMN

 

Swimlane – a definition –   A swimlane is part of a process flow diagram to indicate where a process crosses a boundary. A boundary is defined as the intersection in a process where an action crosses from one entity to another entity. Process boundaries can indicate where a transition occurs from one system to another, from one person to another, or from one department to another. Swimlanes are a useful tool when more than an actor and step are needed to understand a complex process and to highlight gaps or duplications in a process.

BPMN – a definition- Business Process Modeling Notation BPMN is a graphical representation for specifying business processes in a business process model.

Here are some good articles on creating swimlanes:

http://blog.goodelearning.com/bpmn/common-bpmn-modeling-mistakes-swimlanes/

and

http://www.modernanalyst.com/Careers/InterviewQuestions/tabid/128/ID/1804/What-is-a-Swimlane-Diagram.aspx

 

 

 

Business Rules v Business Requirements

Part of my mission to explain why I am doing what I am doing at work… I have had to explain the difference between Business Rules and Business Requirements.

If you find yourself in the same situation these websites may be of some assistance with practical examples.

They also have the advantage that they show that it is not just ‘you’ being picky about the difference. THERE ARE solid differences between the two concepts.

http://www.brcommunity.com/b290.php

http://www.wordtipsandtricks.com/business-writing/business-rules-vs-business-requirements/1327/

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/documenting-your-business-rules-where-to-begin/

I think this one is the best:

http://www.allaboutrequirements.com/business-rules/

Now, should I document this using Use Cases or some other way?