Advertisements in magazines, newspapers and newsletters keep telling us that there are new Apps for iphone users. The variety is vast and ranges from an app “report an accident to your car insurance” to an app “book a ticket in your local cinema”. Do you need a taxi in half an hour? Then let the iphone app get you a cab in time.

The rage about smart phone apps is not just happening within social networks and young people but also going deep into companies and service providers. You could book a train ticket or keep in touch other sales staff. Get reports from projects or make an appointment to get your car serviced. (more…)

Experience being the best teacher, a few things I have learnt to be the basic ingredients of a perfect project:

Get your recipe right :

If you are blessed with a crisp and detailed project requirement , do not take it for granted. Read through it twice , thrice , until you have each requirement etched in your mind.

A single word you miss might be a very important feature of the project.

Take time to understand what your client really needs.  And of course ,  the golden words –“When in doubt – Ask” .

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Before his untimely death in 1973, Bruce Lee managed to shake up the martial arts world with his theories of combat and training. Why? Because he felt – much to the chagrin of his peers – that the traditional martial arts were too rigid and formalistic to be practical when applied in an actual fight.

Lee referred to this rigidity in the martial arts as a “classical mess” that wasted time and energy. His real concern was that concentrating on a specific style as the only way of fighting prevented someone from becoming a truly capable fighter. This is because focusing solely on any one style of fighting restricts your options. (more…)

The Challenge in Defining True Success
Let’s examine the question of the classic definition of on time, on budget, of high quality, with the expected features as a traditional measure of success. Is it possible for a project to meet this traditional measure of success and still be regarded as a failure? I’ll answer that question with a question: What if the project ultimately fails to provide the anticipated business value?

Conversely, what if a project fails on the traditional criteria, yet delivers greaterbusiness value than anticipated? It happens; in fact, CIO Magazine reported on this very phenomenon in an article called Applied Insight – Tracks in the Snow, by R. Ryan Nelson.

In the article, Nelson cites an example of a financial services company that developed a new system to improve collections performance that was six months late and cost twice the original estimate – failing in the classic sense. However, once in production, the system provided a 50% increase in the number of concurrent collection strategy tests in production. On that basis, the project was judged to be a great success!             (more…)