Executing SOA is intended for business consultants and enterprise architects. This is not a book on implementing web services using a particular technology stack; it instead provides a view of SOA as it applies to an enterpise. The authors begin with a discussion of the business and technical forces within an enterprise that give rise to the need for a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

This is an IBM press book, so the focus is on tools from IBM. References to online articles from IBM’s developerworks site for further reading; topics in the book on which further material can be obtained online are conveniently at here

Qualities of a great speaker:

* Fear is a habit. The simple task of walking through your fear is doing what you fear, then doing it again transforms your fear into courage. Never telling the audience you’re nervous, or that you haven’t had time to think about what you’re planning to say.

* One of the most useful strategies is to focus on the audience’s needs rather than on yourself. Figure out how you can deliver your message in a way your audience will hear. Channel your fear into passion and energy for your subject. Focus on your passion and energy, not on yourself.

* Reinforce your connection with audience members by seeking a positive response as quickly as possible. Ask for comments or raised hands. Initiate a group activity. The sooner you can get a positive response, the quicker your anxiety level will drop.

* Be vulnerable. You let people see who you really are, and you put yourself on the line for something you believe in passionately. Vulnerability can be a cornerstone of your power.

* Stop trying to be perfect. Make your goal to be the best you can be at this moment. Don’t confuse excellence with perfection.

* The primary reason why speakers fail is lack of preparation. Practice may not make perfect, but it does make one better. Enough practice makes one great.

* It isn’t enough to have a message. It must be YOUR message. What is it about your topic that is important to you? When you discover your message, you also release your passion.

* At the beginning of every speech, your primary challenge is to break preoccupation. Each audience member is preoccupied with their own thoughts and concerns. A powerful, attention-grabbing beginning is critical.

* People don’t remember your points, they remember your illustrations. If they can remember the story, then they will be able to remember the point or lesson that the story teaches.

* End with a call to action. Make it clear what you would like your audience to do as a result of your presentation. Be clear on what they should do, not just what they should think.

More presentation articles are available here

Planning An E-Mail Message

To plan a clear, concise e-mail that gets the results you want, answer these questions:
Why are you writing this e-mail? What’s your primary purpose?
Who’s your audience? What’s your reader’s point of view? How will the reader use this information?
What’s the main point? If you had only 15 seconds to get the most important message across, what would you say?
What information should you include? What are your reader’s most likely questions?
What’s the best way to organize the information?

Deciding When To Use E-Mail
Is your primary reason for writing to pass on information or ask a question? If so, use e-mail.
Do you need to convey the same message efficiently to a group? Use e-mail.
Do you need a written record to document the exchange of information? If so, use e-mail.
Do you have a quick question that you need answered right away? Is the other person nearby or easily reached by phone? Take a walk down the hall or make a phone call.
Is the content of your message personal? Deliver the message in person or on the phone.
Do you need to convey confidential information? Communicate the information in person, on the phone
Do you want to discuss an issue or get support for an idea? Hold a meeting or make a conference call.
Have you already tried to work on this issue by e-mail without success? Meet in person or on the phone.
Do you need to send a detailed report, statistics or budget figures, or other complex information? Send the information as an attachment, with a cover e-mail that describes it and summarizes the key points.

Clarifying Your Most Important Message?

Are you sending someone a document? What are you sending and why?
Do you want to get support for an idea or a course of action? What is the idea or course of action? The key benefit?
Do you want to make your opinion known? What is your opinion?

When you have trouble organizing the content of an e-mail
Did you jump right into the writing without thinking carefully about your purpose, audience, main point, and the reader’s most likely questions? If so, go back to the planning process.
Are you writing to multiple readers who have widely different needs? Consider writing separate messages to each group.
Do you have several unrelated messages to convey? Consider sending separate messages on each topic. Otherwise, break down the e-mail into sections, one for each topic, with an introductory paragraph that lists them all.
Do you have more than one purpose? Do you want to inform and to influence? Try to focus on one primary purpose.
Did you add any information that is not clearly related to the main point? Did you begin on one topic, then shift to another? If you did, go back to the planning process.
Are you trying to say too much? Make sure you’ve thought carefully about your reader’s most likely questions and what information your reader needs.

Checking Your E-Mail Before Sending
Does the message make sense? Is the main point clear and at the beginning? Is the content organized logically and clearly related to the main point? Have you answered your reader’s most likely questions?
Is there any unnecessary information? Is any information missing?
Is the tone appropriate?
Does the e-mail present a professional image of you and your organization? Is the language active, concise and specific? Is the message written in plain English? Have you used jargon or technical terms that the reader might not understand? Are there any grammar, punctuation, or spelling errors?
Does the subject line accurately describe the content? Does it include any words or phrases that could land the message in a spam folder?
Have you addressed the e-mail to everyone who needs the information? To anyone who doesn’t need it?

Using Lists In E-Mail Messages

Keep lists short
Introduce the list
Keep the list parallel in form
Use blank space to separate items that are more than one line long
Be consistent with initial capitalization and end punctuation

Identifying The Right Recipients

Do they have the answers to the questions you’re asking?
Have they asked for the information you’re sending?
Do they need to know that you want or need something done?
Will they make a decision or take action, based on the information you’re sending?
Is there a valid reason to keep them “in the loop”— informed about what’s going on?

Controlling Your E-Mail Habit

Unless you’re expecting something important, check your e-mail only at certain times
If you need to concentrate on something, remove yourself from temptation by working away from your computer or working off line

Use these strategies for reducing the volume of mail that lands in your inbox
Direct e-mail newsletters and similar messages to a separate folder
Set up a separate mailbox when you expect a lot of mail on a specific topic

Managing Your Saved E-Mail

Set up folders that reflect the work you do and label the folders so you can tell at a glance what’s in them
Review your saved-messages folders periodically to delete messages you no longer need and archive those you can’t delete but no longer need at hand
Edit messages before saving them to delete unnecessary content

Learning More About Communicating In Writing

Assess your writing. Schedule time every few weeks to reread some of your recent e-mail messages and other documents you’ve written, using the checklists in this book as a guide for assessing your writing.

It can also be helpful to read your writing aloud to get a sense of the tone and see whether the sentences and paragraphs flow smoothly.

Look at what you’ve written from the reader’s point of view to make sure that you’ve used the right tone, gotten the main point across clearly, answered all the reader’s questions, organized the information logically, and presented the information so it is easy to read.

Be observant. You can learn a lot from paying attention to other people’s writing. When you read something that seems very easy to understand or very difficult to follow, ask yourself what the writer did that made the writing work or what the writer should have done differently.

Overview

Agile borrows the concept of Empirical Process Control (visibility, inspection, adaptation) for managing complex activities.

Visibility : Aspects of the process that affect the outcome must be visible
Inspection: The various aspects of the process must be inspected frequently enough by experts
Adaptation: The adjustment must be made as quickly as possible to minimize further deviation.

There are only three Scrum roles: the Product Owner, the Team, and the ScrumMaster. All management responsibilities in a project are divided among these three roles.

The Product Owner achieves initial and ongoing funding for the project by creating the project’s initial overall requirements, return on investment (ROI) objectives, and release plans. The list of requirements is called the Product Backlog. The Product Owner is responsible for using the Product Backlog to ensure that the most valuable functionality is produced first and built upon; this is achieved by frequently prioritizing the Product Backlog to queue up the most valuable requirements for the next iteration.

The Team is responsible for developing functionality. Teams are self-managing, self-organizing, and cross-functional, and they are responsible for figuring out how to turn Product Backlog into an increment of functionality within an iteration.

The ScrumMaster is responsible for making sure that all the pieces of the Scrum process come together and work as a whole. The responsibilities of the ScrumMasters can be summarized as follows:

- Remove the barriers between development and the Product Owner so that the Product Owner directly drives development.
- Improve the productivity of the development team in any way possible.
- Improve the engineering practices and tools so that each increment of functionality is potentially shippable.
- Keep information about the team’s progress up-to-date and visible to all parties.

The Product Owner had learned to talk in terms of business requirements and objectives, whereas the Team had learned to speak in terms of technology. Because the Product Owner is unlikely to learn the technology, one of the main jobs of the ScrumMaster is to teach the Team to talk in terms of business needs and objectives. The common denominator between the Team and the Product Owner is the Product Backlog.
The product backlog helps meet customers’ needs by periodically re-adjusting requirements based on customers’ feedback from using the software produced at the end of iteration.

Agile relies on Scrum development model. Scrum contains iteration which are called sprint. Sprint is time-boxed and the output of each sprint is an increment of product. Scrum is structured to regularly make the state of the project visible to the Product Owner, the ScrumMaster, and the Team—so that they can rapidly adjust the project to best meet its goals.

How Agile reduces complexity

- Ask team to focus on just the next 30 calendar days. Take one piece of functionality and figure out how to make it work. Forget the rest of the release and to focus on a few concrete steps

- Staff the teams so that all the expertise necessary to develop a piece of functionality was included within each team.

How to present ROI

Use financial data to offer options that the product owner can understand. With the financial data in hand, various alternatives could be posited and a rational decision made.

Keep things visible
Scrum works only if everything is kept visible for frequent inspection and adaptation. To be empirical, everyone must know that about which they are inspecting. Practices such as the Sprint review meeting, the Daily Scrum, the Sprint Backlog, and the Product Backlog keep everything visible for inspection.

The ScrumMaster must keep everything visible at a meaningful level of detail. A ScrumMaster must be vigilant. If the ScrumMaster is unclear about what’s going on, so is everyone else. Make sure everything is visible. Find a way to make Scrum understandable to everyone in his or her vocabulary.enter

Article from Forbes which outlines the recommendation by Thomas Flexner of Citigroup (a company loaded with toxic assets) for the government to provide long-term, secure (and low interest rate I assume) financing to investors for purchasing various “toxic assets”. Currently the value of these “toxic assets” are frozen on the bank’s balance sheets since there is simply no market for them.

If government provides the secure financing, then it gives investors the confidence to make bets using their own equity and get their desired return on investing on these toxic assets which have been driven to absurdly low levels.

Check out this article on how gas price is calculated

Formula of gas price =

(Wholesale “rack” prices, based on the prices of gasoline futures and crude oil on New York markets, in Canadian dollar +

Ontario gasoline tax (14.7 cents) +

Federal gasoline tax (10 cents) +

7 to 9 cents profit margin)

x 5 % GST

“There’s no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit”

quoted by Ronald Reagan, motto of Prem Watsa, Fairfax Financial’s CEO

Chapter 2
Consider Six Sources of Influence Acting on People

Cell 1: Self, Motivate (Pleasure or Pain)

People base their actions on their individual motivation or disposition. Does the action motivate? Does the person enjoy the action independent of how others think or feel? Does it bring pleasure or pain?

Cell 2: Self, Enable (Strength or Weakness)

“Are others motivated to do what they promised?” and “Are they enabled?”

Cell 3: Others, Motivate (Praise or Pressure)

Is the other person being influenced by peers, the boss, customers, family?

Cell 4: Others, Enable (Help or Hindrance)

In addition to motivating you to do things, other people or things can enable or disable you.

Cell 5: Things, Motivate (Carrot or Stick)

Money motivates people

Cell 6: Things, Enable (Bridge or Barrier)
proximity (location between people) has a powerful influence on people behavior.
Gadgets have a more significant impact than people might imagine.
Are people acutely aware of the problem (i.e. are they presented with the data)

Chapter 4
Motivation, it turns out, is about expectations, information, and communication. If you want people to act in another way, you have to let them know how a different behavior would yield a better consequence bundle.

How to motivate people?
Explain a natural consequences of people’s actions until you hit a one where they care about. Help others see consequences they aren’t seeing, by linking to existing values, connect short term gain to long term pain, place the long-term benefit, describe the unintended and often invisible effects

Chapter 5
When facing ability barriers, make it easy.

Jointly explore root causes. Take care to avoid jumping in with your own solutions. Ask others for their ideas. Remember the all-important question: “What do you think it’ll take?”

Chapter 7
To end well, create a specific plan than includes who will do what by when. Make sure each person is clearly identified with a responsibility and the timeline. Make sure everything is clearly understood.

Ensure that your plan contains the right and agreed-upon method of following up. The less skilled the person, the spottier his or her history, and the higher the risk, the more frequently you’ll follow up.

第一次填詞, Idea 同 原版差不多, 當然加入了很多廣東歌曲元素。

Love Song 廣東話版

曲: 方大同
詞: myself

我寫這一首歌
去說出我心聲 很想這真心真意你會聽得到
我寫不到像 林夕那樣好的字句
也永沒唱得 比學友更動人情深

仍然地我將 心底的愛與誠編寫這歌給你
仍期望你細聽著 我所寫的每句
我終於開了口此刻讓你知這

歌 簡簡單單唱著這
歌 很辛苦寫這首
歌 這歌我送給你
普通卻有誠意
願你感覺到 明白這首

歌 簡簡單單唱著這
歌 很辛苦寫這首
即使我沒六呎般高
但我會很努力 代你好
在我心裡 最想說這一句 可否一起

期望你肯給機會我
讓你我心與手變了一線
能共你分享 一切心樂透

從這一天與你一起過
心只想你有我
讓你每一刻快樂與精彩

又若是你感到弧單 我為你共憂
因你永遠有我這一個好友
願你可以將你手給我牽
讓我心中奢想可以變真

歌 簡單唱一首
歌 這歌我送給你
普通卻有誠意
願你感覺到 明白這首

歌 簡簡單單唱著這
歌 很辛苦寫這首
歌 Oh o… 我倆可否一起
在我心裡 最想說這一句

I recently finished the book “The Art of Project Management” by Scott Berkun. It’s almost 500 pages long, but it is certainly a worthwhile book to read for people working in the software industry. Scott Berkun was a veteran program manager at Microsoft. He used this book to share his lessons learned over a decade, and to offer some practical advices for novice project managers.

The following summarizes the main points of his book. Hey, that’s why words are invented, to write things down and remember it in the future.

Chapter 2: Schedule

- Schedule allows commitments to be made, encourage everyone to see their contributions as a whole, and allows progress to be tracked.

- Estimating is tough, especially at the beginning, but a rough plan is better than no plan.

- Common oversights in scheduling include: not including sick days and vacation time, progress is not reported regularly, having leaders who add more features without a reasonable philosophy to say no, bad specs and bad estimates.

- The more challenging the project, the shorter the milestone should be. Also, short review period should be built into the master schedule.

Chapter 3: Gathering requirements

- He made many references to the G & W book, which I read last year for my grad course.

- 3 equal perspectives should be used to gather requirements: business, technology and customer.

- Establishing problem statements is a simple method for gathering customers’ requirements. A 1 or 2 sentence description of specific end user issues help identify a need from the customer perspective. Later these problem statements need to be converted to scenarios/use cases.

Chapter 4: Vision

- Vision document is a single high level plan that reflect project goals. It help people make project decisions.

- Vision should be concise and can be easily visualize, and volume does not mean quality.

Chapter 5: Idea generation

- The real craft of problem solving is knowing which constraints can be ignored or bented, and which ones need to be followed. You need to know how to think in and out of the box.

- The most powerful question in creative thinking is “What problem are you trying to solve?” This is an example of focusing question, where you’re narrowing down an essential element of the problem. Another example is “Are we sure this new design means the updated list of requirements?”

- Creative questions ask people what things should be explored, i.e. “What else can this be used for”. It helps set creative people to the right direction.

- Creativity is just like connecting things, like connecting your experiences to synthesize new things. If you have more thoughts about your experiences, then you can also become creative.

Chapter 6: Selecting Ideas

- Prototype, prototype, prototype. A prototype help people investigate and build off/reject ideas.

- Group similar ideas visually to reduce the number of ideas.

- Iterations, or periodic refinement, can be used to ask questions and evaluate progress on ideas.

Chapter 7: Spec

- Spec describes functionality of the software to be built, forcing designer to be specific, and is a useful point of reference for all people.

- Requirements, Feature description, Technical specs, work item list and exit criteria are 5 major topics that should be included in a spec.

- One person should write the spec to keep things coherent

- List of questions to ask on the spec:
– Does the programmer’s work item match the spec?
– How is the design most likely to break?
– Right level of quality? Test estimates realistic?
– What dependencies does this design have?
– Any concerns from PM/programmer/tester?

Chapter 8: How to make decision

- Having a Pros/Cons list, getting the key people involved, and review past decisions are all helpful methods for making decision.

Chapter 9: Communication

- Project management is done through communication and relationships.

- One of the best question for a PM to ask other is: “What can I do to help you do your best work?”.

- This is because you have establish the possibility that the person is capable of doing his best, and you are avoiding any criticism towards the person. Getting the best out of the team is the responsibility of a PM. Ways to do this include listening, clear the roadblocks, and remind them of goals

- A great way for moving the project forward is ad-hoc face-to-face conversation to discuss about project status and answer questions for other people. This contributes to the project as much as writing code and finding bugs.

Chapter 10: Process, Emails and Meetings

- Creating good process requires the understanding of 2 things: what generally makes projects and teams effective, and what makes the current project and team different from others. You also have to take into account of team culture and the personality.

- A good process should accelerate progress, prevent problems, and make important actions visible and measurable.

- The cost of the process includes time to design, time for team to learn, and actual time to do work with the process. The benefits of the process is the cost of the failures it prevents.

- To roll out a process, work as a small group to generate proposals, then identify a low risk part of the project to pilot this new process. Pick individuals who are interested and receptive to this process change. Then roll out this process to a small group and set an evaluation period. Revise the process based on what you learned, and finally roll it out to a larger group.

- Email should be concise, simple, and direct. It should offer an action and a deadline. Don’t assume people will read everything, and avoid giving a play-by-play.

- Good meetings happen when people know how to facilitate, or make things easier. PM should know how direct questions to the right issue and clarify the agenda.

- If someone says something that’s not really complete, try reflecting their idea by saying “What I think you’re saying is …. . Do you agree?”. If the conversation is heading to a different direction, end the conversation by asking people to resume offline. More importantly, document the meeting to keep track of important points and email to those who attended the meeting.

- Make sure the right people are in the meeting, be on time, and always be prepare. Try to send the meeting agenda the day before, and think about the list of questions or open issues for the meeting. Make sure meetings end with clear steps and owners.

Chapter 11: What to do when things go wrong

- When reality deviates from the current plan, or confusion exists about project goals, or it’s unclear how resources should be applied to fix the difference between planned and actual project status, then you need to recognize the project is in a bad situation.

- Typical bad situations are: under-estimation (change the requirement, cut the next lowest priority feature), resource shortage (cut feature, add time to schedule), low quality (sacrifice feature or time, check the process and development practices, etc.

- If things have gone chaotic, you need to apply damage control. Methods include calling an all-hands meeting, isolate the problem, and apply additional resources if possible. Also, you always need to know who is the final decision maker.

- Negotiation is in essence a special form of discussion. Get the right people in the room, set the agenda, then work to find possible alternatives.

- Conflict resolution: First you want to start with a positive momentum by finding a common unification ground or mutual interests. Always focus on how the project can be benefited by resolving the issue, not on the personality/ego. Know where you need to be firm and where you can be flexible. Know the cost of you or other walking away from the table.

Chapter 13: How to make things happen

- Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize. Understand what’s really critical and what’s optional, so that you know when to agree and when to reject.

Chapter 14: Middle game

- Ask these questions to keep yourself ahead of the project:
– What are our goals/commitments? Are these accurate?
– What we’re doing today contributing to our goals?
– Are work items completed and satisfy the requirements and scenario?
– What are the biggest risks and our contingencies?

- Ask these questions when considering adjustment to the project:
– What problem are we solving? Do we need to solve for the milestone?
– How’s the action going to impact the project? What are the risks?
– The cost of adjustment (time to understand the code/test the code, getting support for the decision)

Chapter 15: End-game

- Daily builds, bug management and activity chart are useful ways to measure the project. You should measure things like fix rate, incoming rate, bugs/developer

Chapter 16: Politics

- To solve a political problem, you need to be very clear of what it is you need, then develop a plan to get it. Typically things you need are resources, authority to make a decision, adjustment of other’s goal, etc.

- If your influence is weak, enlist the support of several people, especially people who have influence on the counterpart. You can also try asking questions and makes points that lead them towards the outcome you want.