Double Loop

Capacity Optimisation

2011-04-13T15:58:00.003+01:00

A brief rant on my other blog about trains, hence Capacity Optimisation.

As cycling swells in popularity, some decisions and assumptions made about 10 years ago on the design of train carriages now have noticeable effects. This sort of effect happens all the time, and it's frustratingly hard to see emergent properties like this, let alone model them.

Birth of a System - London Cycle Hire

2010-09-14T18:02:00.001+01:00

People in London can't have failed to notice the introduction of a new transport system lately - the Cycle Hire scheme. At the time of writing it's roughly a month into operations. For the uninitiated, there are roughly 400 docking stations around town, each housing up to 20-30 bikes. Registered users present their dongles, unhook a bike and pedal off. At the other end, the bike is re-docked, and, in a database somewhere, a small charge is incurred. (More intro, Guardian, July 2010)

Some things I've noticed, and some questions.:

It's obviously a multi-element system: Bikes, Docks, Terminals, Back End Data, Billing, Logistics. It's additionally part of TfL's great big system-of-systems. It's got the Mayor's Office paw prints on it, but clearly has been in the works for years. It couldn't have happened, without Paris and a few other prototypes. Expect to see more in big and small cities round the world soon.

There are sprawling requirements everywhere, not completely understood. Here, for example, is a story about an odd feature of the database that caused the owners to back-pedal on a particular function, the multi-key account. Is the development cycle capable of adapting to new, or recently clarified, requirements? My guess is that, oops, the database contract has been and gone, and this feature will sink, rather than be implemented properly.

The initial users are enthusiastic, communicative, and alive to the possibilities it offers. Has this resource been tapped into? The forumites all want to talk to TfL and Serco (for it is they) but I suspect the drawbridge is up.

Data! There are plenty of feeds that allow the growth of applications (and, of course, Apps) to entertain and inform the users. Here, for example, is Oliver O'Brien's visualisation of real-time Dock status. (Oliver is a GIS nerd at UCL, but I don't otherwise know him). Here's another of his, showing daily stats, for example. Note how system availalbility is about capacity of both Bikes and Docks at each end of the prospective journey. Unlike a little French town (Lyon? Paris?), London's scheme is being used a lot, in two daily peaks, by edge-to-centre commuters. Machines and Holes are both at a premium at critical times. Has all this been modelled?

The contractors and operators aren't saying much for now, other than "we are working on the best way to do things". Do they mean us?

Originally Posted at Systems Engineering on KTN _connect.

Issues and Risks : philosophy of Present and Future

2010-07-20T13:02:00.004+01:00

In Project Management, the concept of a Risk is fairly well established.

"An event, which, if it occurs, will have an effect on the Project's Objectives".

So if it's a harmful future event, we would note its likelihood, impact, and causes, and seek to manage it. By doing so, we reach into the future and handle it so that it does not impact the present in a way we would not wish.

Whereas an Issue is defined, at least in the APMP syllabus (PRINCE2 and PMI may differ on this definition) as

"a threat to the project objectives that cannot be resolved by the project manager. ... issues have already occurred and are therefore not uncertain".

APM Body of Knowledge, 5th Edition.

In teaching this, we fall into a sideline. Students ask: what about future events that are nearly certain. Aren't they also Issues? or Risks with very high probability? or just issues? Since escalation at the proper time is a key result of the Issue Management process, we should have a clear answer. We can reply by saying that the cause of the event was in the past, whereas the manifestation of the problem could be in the future. That satisfies some people, but not entirely. Then I saw this:

"Modern Western culture has absorbed the threefold Greco-Roman concept of time as "past" (that which has gone before), "present" (that which is), and "future" (that which will be). It is easy to associate these concepts with the three Norns Urdhr, Verdhandi, and Skuld. It is also incorrect. The Germanic time-sense is not threefold, but twofold: time is divided into "that-which-is," a concept encompassing everything that has ever happened - not as a linear progression, but as a unity of interwoven layers; and, "that-which-is-becoming," the active changing of the present as it grows from the patterns set in that-which-is. That-which-is is the Germanic "world," a word literally cognate to the Norse ver-öld, "age of a man." One will notice that even in modern English, there is no true future tense; the future can only be formed through the use of modal auxiliaries. For the Teutonic mind, all that has been is still immediate and alive; the present only exists as it has been shaped by the great mass of what is, and the future only as the patterns of that which is becoming now should shape in turn."
- By Kveldulf Gundarsson, Tuetonic Magic, p. 24.

Seen in Cloud Hands, Mike Garofolo's blog about TaiJi.

I can see the same dichotomy of viewing the future/potential in the way Risks ("that which is becoming") and Issues ("that which is") are treated. To put them in the Graeco-Roman mould of Future and Present seems to create difficulties which are avoided, to my mind, if we instead follow the Teutonic pattern. Ja?

July Roundup

2010-07-19T13:46:00.003+01:00

Organising for Work, by Henry Gantt

PMIBOK is NOT a Methodology

Education vs Training

Silicon Beach Training

Trading off Cost, Schedule, and Technical Performance is a Ponzi Scheme

The Lazy Project Manager

Ranking Risks: Rare to Certain, Negligible to Catastrophic

How To Estimate Better

Misison statements and all that

2009-04-25T10:55:00.004+01:00

I quite liked this post from Signal v Noise about crappy mission statements. Are they a US disease?

Some of my colleagues seem to think so. Furthermore, such drivel causes as much distress for the inmates of such organisations as for their supposed customers.

Invention by Design, Petroski

2008-12-04T12:36:00.002Z

Henry Petroski, Invention by Design
Harvard,1996

Henry Petroski has written a number of books that cluster around the craft and process of engineering. This one sets out to illustrate the inventive process of engineering design. I picked it up hoping to know more about innovation in other fields than my own.

In the ten or so case studies presented, the theme of the problem-as-impetus clearly emerges. Engineers, as critics of existing products, are driven to devise further inventive steps to reach toward a more excellent product. With some exceptions (the Boeing 777 case, which although probably the most contemporary, seemed to be lacking an undefinable quality of fidelity: does he really get what's going on there?), the cases revolve around the thoughts and craft of individuals. In some cases (the drinks can) their identities are obscure, whilst in others (the bridges of San Francisco) they spring from the pages dramatically. Exhibitions of patent documentation provides the bare bones, Henry P re-constructs the whole animal.

It's also clear that teams of engineers, or even distant collaborations, don't simply progress by cutting through an underlying bedrock of physical properties to get to the solution they seek. Rather, at each inventive stage, a higher order product, an improvement from the last, emerges from a mist. Thus we step from toggles to buttons, thence to what must have a been a nightmare of "automatic" clothes-tieing devices, to the zip as we know it. A series of hops then to the Ziplok bag, and yet another string of manoeuvres to Velcro.

But perversely, despite each invention begetting more invention, at the same time each enlargement of the scope and scale of the products seems to make it harder to analyse the next-generation design. Boeing's exponentially growing development budgets attests to this. Not all of the added complexity comes from within the product though, as there are network effects and social or legal changes concerning the use of the products that add further layers of requirement to each iteration.

The idea of resources as enablers, such as materials or tools, for certain types of design activity is also strongly exposed. He exemplifies this all through the book, pointing to CAD as a key technology for Boeing, standardisation for the Crystal Palace among many others. He seems to be too early to notice much use of computing in architecture though.

The chapter on buildings as systems shows how the problem complexity rises with each generation. Perhaps there is an inherent bias in these works, forgetting the industrialisation of innovation in mundane structures. The wonder of the local supermarket, reproduced thousands of times, as opposed to the award-seeking skyscrapers of the capital.

He uses terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center as an example of resilience of design. He refers of course to the 1993 bombs in the basement. What would he make of the later total failure of the designs in 2001, and was this indeed a failure of that particular building as a system, but a failure of a wider, un-designed system?

New Technology Disaster

2008-06-17T14:49:00.003+01:00

Here's a story about waste from the streets of England. Generally speaking, the streets of the Kingdom are not strewn with rubbish, by international standards. The systems and infrastructure to support the removal of our wastes might not be the best possible, but they are pretty good.

It wasn't always. Go back a century or two, and you really would be looking at serious daily health hazards, not only in piles of discarded household waste, but also human wastes. Remember the Great Stink? Not many do, that's why I'm glad to plug UCL's Stinkfest.

But I digress. What happens when technologists look at systems for economically collecting waste, with the added requirement of wanting to incentivise waste reduction. This is a new requirement by the way. Back when you could throw everything away, you could run waste as a reactive service. Nowadays there is no "away", and the economist's response is to put a price on waste. From a local council's point of view, this makes sense. Bin-men cost money.

Enter technologists. Let's weigh the bins as we collect, and send you the bill for massive wastefulness. Sounds good, except even if it works in Germany or Shangri-La, it will need installing here. By "it" we mean weighing arms, identifiable bins or houses, recording systems, billing systems, training and all the rest of it. Not a light bulb then, but a complex system. You can expect databases to grind, for people to be standing in the wrong place, and for the odd bit of hardware to get broken. Worse than Terminal 5 on a good day, just like all perfectly normal field tests of things which looked fine in the lab.

Two stories from the press, following a halted trial, (not even a "pilot") in Norfolk:

Daily Mail (hates the government for messing with the bins, and god knows what else) "disaster, devastating blow for the scheme"

Guardian : "Schemes to go ahead"

Partly, these trials got media attention because of the RFID angle "they are spying on our bins, haven't they heard of the Magna Carta?". What most irritates me, aside from the axe-grinding of the Mail, is the complete lack of technological nous. It's obvious to me, admittedly now after years of exposure to the field, that the newer and bigger the tech the more carefully it will have to be prototyped and worked out locally before going live. So it's a "disaster" then? The local Tory MP cheerfully jumps on and pronounces left, right and centre, and tries to shake of the "government-imposed scheme" (the local council would have creamed off a good wodge of the Government grant for trying this out on their patch, and would have been in the front line for savings from a live scheme).

The Grauniad's report on the other hand isn't really looking at the technical risks at all, but sells it as political battle, showing the government's deafness to its critics. It's just as blind to the systems development issues.

The Mail could still be right, there could be serious system-level difficulties with this system, and they could be unique to the UK, or indeed South Norfolk. We just don't know reading these reports.

Girls guiding cats in herds

2008-02-04T14:40:00.001Z

Here are two more PM/systems blogs.

A Girl's Guide to Managing Projects
Herding Cats

Very observant readers may also note that I've migrated my blogroll from Bloglines to Google reader. It was fairly easy. It's slightly less neat, but it's actually the reader that I use and update now.

SEM surveys

2007-06-28T13:11:00.001+01:00

In the UCLse MSc in Systems Engineering Management, of which I am the course tutor, many of the students wish to gather current data about Systems Engineering practices as an integral part of their dissertation research. Here are links to their online surveys, and results where available. Your participation in these surveys is welcomed and valued.

Why should you participate in these surveys?

You will help advance knowledge in systems engineering.
The topics are interesting facets of engineering or scientific work. There will normally be a link to the summary results of the research or an opportunity to be contacted about the research topic in due course.
Surveys should only take between 10 and 15 minutes of your time.

29 June 07 : Lawrence Latif is looking at the use of tools and their selection processes. Please take the survey. [SURVEY CLOSED]

All UCLse surveys and research methods conform to relevant ethical practices, including anonymity and confidentiality, and associated data use is governed by the the (UK) Data Protection Act 1998. The use to which data will be put will be described in the introductory text of the survey.

This posting will be updated as more surveys become available. Thank you.

Philosophy of Engineering Design

2007-03-27T15:09:00.000+01:00

To the Royal Academy of Engineering for a mini-conference on the Philosophy of Engineering Design.

You what?

Well, apart from the great, good and grey nodding sagely at society's lack of wisdom in taking more notice of engineers, it was a nice little exploration into the essence of design. Creativity came up a lot, but since this is engineering and not art or science, so did usefulness.

What's the use of a philosophy of design? Well, for me, it's as a step ladder off the flatland of business as usual, where we waste energy by using yesterday's processes against today's problems. The activity of philosophy is hard work, but real life should be easy by comparison. Philosophical, or let's just call them abstract, investigations into the nature of engineering processes should tell us why they are working and allow us to guess (it will only be a guess) what the better processes, for tomorrow's problems might look like.

Maarten Franssen showed us, as his comedy slot, the 16th century musket drill (take your fuse...). Taylorism in the military. Not for the first time I bet, it reminded my of Chinese martial arts forms. And Nelson had a gun drill too. The point of this training is to allow the actual work to go more quickly, without thought. The modern military strategist uses drills too, to close the OODA loop and to tailor processes rapidly.

ISS safety/threat analysis

2007-03-02T13:54:00.000Z

A small wobbly hut 200 miles from anywhere, with a hazardous environment behind every door, wouldn't be my favourite place for a lab. But you know, those in the BAS or in submarines just have to put up with it. Technical strategies and management plans to deal with risks and hazards have emerged in these fields over time.

Here's another wobbly hut, far from anywhere, which sometimes acts a research station but is these days probably best regarded as a demonstrator for plans to go and set up huts even further away, like on Mars.
The owners have just released a summary of a safety investigation and risk analysis for the station. Very interesting reading - 4 MB PDF. For the impatient, they are worried about what we worry about: dust and bugs.

Scanning the horizon

2006-07-31T09:49:00.000+01:00

Back from a short break in not-quite-as-hot Cornwall, after a blazing week in which there was a substantial UCL/MSSL stand at the sweaty Farnborough Air Show. Some of this featured the newly established Photonics Knowledge Transfer Network, some of it the activities of MSSL in general, and some of it the activities of our Technology Management Group and the UCL Centre for Systems Engineering. Here's the UCLse poster on the left (I'm quite proud of the background photo):

The value of this activity to us comes from being visible to the community (we were placed in the International Space Pavilion), and at the same time as being in a good position to look closely at other activities and possible partners for future collaborations. To catch fish, you have to go fishing.

On my routine trawl through news items, I saw that Sarah Bell's MSc in Environmental Systems Engineering made it to UCL News. Disclosure: this MSc is linked to our MSc in Systems Engineering Management. The second photo above is from the launch event for the MSc.

The spin this time was the association with tribewanted, and how students on the MSc would get involved in studying enviromental problems on this island community. Sounds like a set of extreme projects as well. It would be good to see how groups of people – presumably untrained in PM skills – organise themselves in that situation, and to write about it from a formal PM perspective.

Sarah also admits to having a blog, Cyborg Engineers, which despite being rather dormant looking, brings us the zeitgeisty concept of "Dilbertian frustration with management". She doesn't specify whether as subject or object of the verb!

When do you use a proper diagram?

2006-07-18T12:18:00.000+01:00

It's like I keep saying, it depends. If you want to tell people about something, and don't want no argument, you should probably draw it up neatly in a language they understand.

Visual grammars are somewhat mysterious though, as the following example will I hope show.

If you want to work something out visually, a modeller is going to want to use a live, computer-based representation of their problem. The richer the better as far as a modeller is concerned. They are happy to learn the details and spend days playing with the configuration of the diagram. Being a proud sort, they will bring it to the meeting and say look at this, play with it. I've seen instances of this where the above-average-intelligence audience have been interested in the problem, wanting to contribute, but have been struck dumb by the strangeness of the notation. Uh dunno, you do it mate report back when it's finished. Next Agenda item please.

Tragic. The investment in learning visual language is never made properly.

That's why I like stealthy visual grammars, that emulate the anything goes world of the flip chart and sticky note. They are much more amenable to debate and contribution.

If you want to involve people in a group, you need a visual language that's approachable by them. You can't just say "oh it's UML, get with it", you have to make allowances.

Take a look at Nick Duffill's these two diagrams from the Beyond Crayons blog (also refers to Patrick Mayfield's little article on visual mapping in Systems Thinking).

See how in Nick's comparison, the second diagram looks more rigid, and less likely to be argued with. He also makes the point that the tree-like diagram obviously goes somewhere (the Outcome) rather than its wiggly predecessor.

Incidentally, he calls these Open Systems and Closed Systems but I don't think that nomenclature is quite right. He's referring to whether the system state evolves as a whole or whether things keep going forever. Essentially one diagram shows forces, and no state, and the other shows some forces, and a big change of state. Different objects, as well as a different grammar.

Very often these models are faulty on first presentation, but somehow the apparently finished state - signalled by the neat lines - is off-putting. The reaction could be "that's a bad model take it away" rather than "you missed this bit out HERE let me fix it".

The J Curve: The Dichotomy of Design and Evolution

2006-07-14T09:09:00.000+01:00

Fascinating post on fundamentals to do with Design as we know it vs. emergent paradigms such as GA-driven problem solving.

The J Curve: The Dichotomy of Design and Evolution

Steve Jurvetson is mostly taking about how to do it, how to get a big system off the ground using parts that are designed and parts that are brewed. The interfaces, aargh the interfaces. Every surgeon knows that evolution gives you beautiful functionality but messy interfaces.

Steve presents these two as divergent paths, but I think I'm more hopeful for success in integration of the two styles of technology. I'm not sure why, but I think Layers and Architectures are significant and helpful.

We could add to this another dimension of systems engineering - the Verification/Validation stage. Many of the patterns that have been establisehd in systems engineering rely on transparency of design. Given an evolved system, or even a designed system containing an evolved system, how do you verify the integrity of the system if you can't inspect the drawing or the code?

Or what if the system itself evolves in use, such as an automonous array of communications routers, or a fleet of spacecraft? How can the safety of the users be assured?

We need to look at tending gardens, using animals and employing people for models of how organisations use evolved resources in systems. Track record and training will be as important for machines as it is for people and organisations.

Architectures and Organisation

2006-05-15T11:28:00.000+01:00

In this post (and its predecessor) David J Anderson speculates (in his Agile Management blog) on how Lean ideas and product architecture play against each other.

It's pretty obvious I think, that when you have a team of organistions working on a product, some of the decisions about the architecture and interfaces of the product are determined by the organisational structure of the team, and that a different set of partners working on the same problem would develop a different architecture, for management rather than technical reasons. This is entirely legitimate by the way, and working out the best route is part of the function of all technical managers. Sometimes the organisation will be shaped by the product, and sometimes vice versa.

Anderson's thoughts are directed toward Lean, or Agile development, and how that imparts further gradients onto the decision space.

Irregularity

2006-04-28T15:56:00.000+01:00

See that? Evidently Word can't cope with too much irregularity. Which is what this paper is going to be about: Extreme Projects, what they are, and how we might manage them.

Requirements resources

2006-04-04T21:36:00.000+01:00

I'm becoming involved in Requirements Engineering (RE), as it is now known, on numerous fronts, including a module for our MSc in Systems Engineering Management. This relates in many ways to the front-end management issues that I've written about here previously. Consequently, I'm in knowledge acquisition mode.

Our requirements tutor, Anthony Hall, hopefully won't mind me mentioning that Ian Alaxander's site is packed with great book reviews including many on RE.

More requirements-tagged items: requirements

Tufte Forum

2006-04-04T12:50:00.000+01:00

Why hadn't I seen this before?

Edward Tufte's forum on visualisation issues, including Project Management graphics and the terrible Gantt chart. I scoured the latter for inspiration on the strategic project visualisation idea – previous post. Lots of ideas but mainly too tactical.

Check out Sparklines "word-like display of data": nice example here at NASA Ozone Hole Watch (that sounds so much more urgent than Ozone Layer Survey). They say this is sparklines-inspired rather than the true in-text sparklines.

Here's a more on-message sparkline from a company called Bissantz, who do software to create Truetype fonts for this.

The latter also claim to implement yet another bright idea I had in the bath – audible data playback! Should we call it audioisation?

Several of the Tufte forums are going straight into the feedreader. For one thing, I'll know when his new book will be ready.

Strategic process models

2006-04-03T22:20:00.000+01:00

Strategic thought about future projects needs to be accurate, but because of the innate uncertainties the area is resistant to usable models.

Why model strategically? I'm looking for some way of preparing thought at the stage of the business case (the full one not the bean counter's profit statement) or the research proposal. We need to know what's connected to what, and what gaps exist. We need exact knowledge of uncertainty. We don't want to commit to tasks and sequences yet, but we do want to shake out the structure of organisational relationships with the underlying technology.

The tactical level is well-trampled, principally by the Gantt chart. For discussion of some of its deficiencies and some possible alternatives, we'd better Ask Tufte. However, the strategic, beginning level of projects is airy fairy whiteboard stuff, the fuzzy front end.

Snagged from a somewhat random US army document about process modelling.

This is the commonly used ICOM model, a Lego brick of many process model formalisms. I'm trying to think how it could be used in a strategic-level project modelling system.

Inputs and Outputs of generic activities are obvious elements to model, but we don't want to imply that a task is done once. Rather like a diagram of body parts, we want to infer circulation and iteration of knowledge and materials between connected parts.

Instead of Mechanisms and Controls, we can use the vertical faces of an activity node to represent Resources and Constraints respectively. We can utilise this in a mapping scheme to show contributing organisations arrayed along the base of the diagram and customer/external organisations in the upper part.

Ideally I'd like to connect this to hard data (tables) about the connectedness and certainty of each of the elements. I'd like to take the drudgery away from the drawing aspect, and have the ability to do basic traceability and completeness analyses on the strategic model.

Sound good? Next week I'll draw a few.

New APM Body of Knowledge

2006-03-03T15:34:00.000Z

After a long gestation, the APM have published an updated Body of Knowledge. It's much improved over the previous version, and contains helpful notes and references on a wide range of project management topics. Material on Strategic management of projects, Issue management, Technical/Technology management, Processes, Governance, Learning and Ethics have all been added now, and the majority of the rest upgraded and updated. In other words, it's useful. The only snag is how you get hold of it.

The APM Body of Knowledge 5th edition has been written by practising project managers for practising project managers. It is designed to support frontline practitioners, consultants, advisers, senior managers in project-driven organisations, trainers, students, researchers, authors, publishers, librarians, information specialists and knowledge managers. It is used by the APM as a foundation for its membership, professional development and knowledge services.

ISBN: 1-903494-13-3
APM Publishing Bookshop

You can have a taste of some of the underlying definitions on the main APM website (PDF here), but basically they are charging money for the main dish.

I personally think they should be propagating this quite freely, since their membership route is now linked to an examination of this knowledge. I suspect many training providers may amortize the cost of the publication into their fees!

(Disclosure: I work for an organisation providing APM-accredited training.)

Firefox 1.5

2005-12-10T14:55:00.000Z

Got it yet?

Firefox, a multi-platform web browser has many qualities (free, not IE, tasteful, RSS, tabs), and price performance is another one of them. Now with 50% extra free. (At time of writing, version 1.5 updated from v. 1.0. )

Go on!

elgg Learning Landscape

2005-12-08T22:04:00.000Z

I'm intrigued by elgg and its Learning Landscape. I discovered it by following, through the flocking mechanism of delicious, who else had linked to a particular post on the corporatisation of universities (this is the little flock) following their adoption of electronic media (itself an ironic current).

Which goes to demonstrate that sometimes this social stuff actually works.

Doug Mather : communications

2005-11-24T21:41:00.000Z

Doug Mather of The Creation Company spoke at tonight's UCL/APM Project Management workshop about communications issues in project teams, using a fun exercise based on Myer-Briggs Type Indicator theory.

The fun part was getting up and moving around according to one's assessement of position along the various type axes. Great ice-breaker, and also the physical act of moving seats places you in a mental "camp", which illustrates the theory nicely.

Why can't that lot be more like us?

He's graciously provided his slides: 760 KB Powerpoint file

Hello Dave

2005-11-18T16:03:00.000Z

I'm glad to see Peter Antonioni has resurged his blogpiece. He's a management lecturer with me at UCL, but he's got good qualities as well.

Subscribing to feeds

2005-11-16T17:31:00.000Z

You might have heard of RSS FEEDS, or Atom feeds, and wondered what they all are.

RSS and Atom allow you to simply subscribe to a weblog to receive new postings in what’s called a news aggregator or newsreader (NB not the same as software that gathers Usenet articles).

First get hold of an aggregator. I’d recommend setting up an account with Bloglines (it’s free and works on any machine with a web browser, and there's no software to install) – but if that's not to your taste there are many others.

If you’d like some step-by-step help then this ‘how to’ is perfect for a Bloglines beginner.

Then copy and paste the URL of the RSS feed (in this case of Double Loop: “http://loop2.blogspot.com/atom.xml”) into the appropriate box and click on ‘Subscribe’ (or ‘add’ or whatever looks best)..

Now you can check your aggregator the same way you can check email. Each time a new item is posted to this weblog you’ll be able to read it there.

What’s even better is that you can now use the aggregator to subscribe to as many weblogs and news sources as you like… for example if you like one site you will probably like some of the sites they are reading (typically listed down the right of any given blog), they all have RSS or Atom too.

In fact the Guardian has RSS feeds, so does the NY Times and so does the BBC. These links will tell you more about their feeds.

So when you turn on your aggregator it’s like you’re reviewing hundreds of sites to check for new content, all by visiting one place.

So what are you waiting for, get going… get a bloglines account (1 minute), subscribe to my RSS feed, check out the sites I’m reading, your favourite news sites, subscribe to them and you'll wonder how you managed before!

[If this text looks familiar, it's because I nicked it almost verbatim from Incorporated Subversion.]

Mind the planet

2005-11-11T18:28:00.000Z

I'm really not sure about Minding the Planet. On the one hand it's interesting enough, and up to speed on right-now things in webness. On the other hand, it's a bit gee whizz and breathless about other topics. I had thought about unsubbing (a bit of churn in my bloglines can't be bad - let's get things done - GRR!) but I'm letting it stay for now, especially since I might get one of his 178+ readers to come here.

My aim is to steer my blog reading habit away from the obvious top of the rankings pioneer blogs to sources that are directly related to what I'm all about, with a healthy mix of the broad and the deep.

You know, everybody subscribes to Kottke, because he's Kottke. It's how the power law is powered. These days he's in HK looking for things to eat rather than doing groovy web design (which is why everyone latched onto him in the first place – only he had a clue about what CSS was for).

And another thing, just while I'm being iconoclastic, I really don't get calling things Web 2.0, (graphic) let alone Web 3.0 (semantic layer). I see a sort of progressionist fallacy emerging, and I don't think life's like that. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for microcontent and emergence and user-driven change and peer power, but I don't think I need a one-dimensional label for it.

Speaking of links in general, if you look at Matt Whyndham on Superglu you'll see there's now a feed. So you can subscribe to all my web stuff in one place if you want to.

Visualisation tools

2005-10-12T15:32:00.000+01:00

I hate long lists, so I quite like mind maps (here's one by Suw Charman on the UK digital rights advocacy landscape) and like a lot of people I start using the techniques in documenting ideas, presentations or projects, forget about them, pick them up again ad infinitum. One day, I'll reach the tipping point and adopt them permanently into my toolbox. Part of the resistance to persistent use is the obvious need to turn my frightful green feltpen creations into communicable electronic documents. Over the years I've tried numerous mindmap tools but none of them have stuck. The other resistance, which might be the same as the first, is the effort it takes to get other people (colleagues) involved as well.

At the Mindjet blog, they are furiously exicited about a new release of Mindmanager? What seems like ages on their website – ahh Windows only. If you want to share your maps with Mac and Unix users, try Freemind. This is free, so at least worth investigating as a baseline even if you feel the need to spend money on something else later, and it's cross platform. Loads of platforms. I might stick with this, especially as colleagues look like they might wanna play too.

My ideal product would play nicely with OmniOutliner as well as the usual Word and HTML formats. What about some standards?.

Our Technology Management Group has had a lovely time with EndNote. The fact that it reformats citations on the fly within Word is the killer feature, and that has sold it to us. We are few, so sharing – and keeping synchronised – a small number of bibliography databases has been un-troublesome. Had we been a larger number, we might have elected to go with a product that allows networked databases, like Reference Manager. There didn't seem to be a cross platform solution to this last time I looked, whereas EndNote plays on Windows and Mac. We could always save to the web, I suppose, and adopt Cite-U-Like, but then we lose the Word integration.

Now what's this on the radar? RefViz, a little (Windows) tool that does textual analysis of references and shows you the correlations. Because I hate lists, I used to dream of this stuff when I was seriously slurping literature, and I could use it again I'm sure. It looks promising, but I'm not clear whether it needs the full texts to succeed, or just the abstracts.

Learning in an engineering environment

2005-09-23T08:11:00.000+01:00

A research student I supervise has started blogging his research on Learning in an Engineering Environment.

There are many theories of learning and practices of teaching around. Some of them actually relate to each other. Most of what we do in life consists of spontaneous learning episodes (i.e. unplanned and self-directed), but funnily enough most of the economic action in teaching and learning revolves around formal teaching/learning.

These are undertaken when, to disparage it unjustifiably I am sure, the learner hasn't got (or been given) anything better to do.

For example, amongst the tedium that new employees undergo, they are often "sent on a course".

A UCL student in Systems Engineering, Dan Singh, is looking at these phenomena in an engineering context. His main question is "what knowledge-related practices affect the effectiveness of engineers", or something like that. One way this is manifested is in the way an engineer, let us say a software developer, adapts to the knowledge (tacit and explicit) about a complex system they will work on. Clearly there are different ways of storing and transmitting system-specific information and translating this into useful knowledge. The question for a manager or an organisation is what methods actually work for them? Writing man pages? Going on courses? Having a wiki? Writing blogs? Anyway, enough of me, watch Dan's blog, Learning in an engineering environment.

Requirements: stated or discovered?

2005-07-31T18:47:00.000+01:00

Or, the Cathedral/Bazaar dialogue hits hardware engineering?

At some point, I'm going to come to the topic of Requirements and how they should be generated. Particularly, I'm interested in how a research community (like mine in space science) ought to work to generate technological requirements for itself. From a single configuration-controlled document, or in an ant-hill like a Flickr forum?

Because I simply don't feel (am I allowed to have an emotion in this?) that technological features must be (as I read it at least one System's Engineering textbook) driven top-down into the product from on high, I'm going to study this carefully.

Here's one (trendy?) place to start, and to store up my feelings before heading into the desert of hard engineering. from Eric von Hippel's Democratizing Innovation (Freely downloadable from his site, but if you want to pay money for dead trees, try the Milton Keynes branch of Amazon.)

The user-centered innovation process just illustrated is in sharp contrast to the traditional model, in which products and services are developed by manufacturers in a closed way, the manufacturers using patents, copyrights, and other protections to prevent imitators from free riding on their innovation investments. In this traditional model, a user’s only role is to have needs, which manufacturers then identify and fill by designing and producing new products. The manufacturer-centric model does fit some fields and conditions. However, a growing body of empirical work shows that users are the first to develop many and perhaps most new industrial and consumer products. Further, the contribution of users is growing steadily larger as a result of continuing advances in computer and communications capabilities.

In this book I explain in detail how the emerging process of user-centric, democratized innovation works. I also explain how innovation by users provides a very necessary complement to and feedstock for manufacturer innovation.

Knex parts

2005-07-09T14:00:00.000+01:00

DSC_3234,
originally uploaded by Drift Words.

These are the parts used in the first session of our UCL Project Management course.

Awareness of risk

2005-06-27T13:11:00.000+01:00

I'm pretty certain that most managers know what they are talking about most of the time, but, despite applying tools, techniques and frameworks diligently, still find themselves in trouble with their projects.

I happen to think that a big driver of project problems is not that tools are inadequate but that deep skill is needed to select the right ones for the circumstances. Methodologies and standard processes (such as PRINCE) assist by pre-selecting a range of tools, but success here depends on the conditions in the project at hand being consistent with the assumptions in the methodology.

Assuming that managers can compentently select appropriate control paradigms, awareness of the project environment and internal health is critical. Risk Awareness is one case in point, one that I think is undervalued at present, despite the apparent depth of numerical frameworks. I wrote about this before, showing my framework for the descision space of all projects.

Here's another project classification I like, since it focuses on the nature of uncertainties that may be met in a spectrum of projects.

Link roundup

2005-06-21T08:52:00.000+01:00

Hilarious analogy by Richard Stallman between software and literature that shoots a torpedo at software patents.
How management should be done:
There were no complicated negotiations between Worthy Farm and the Jaxx camp, adds Buxton. "They said: 'Do you want to move up the bill?' and we said: 'Yeah'."
Story.
What is Learning? by Albert Ip. That's a nice taxonomy you got there, Albert. Does it actually run?
Interesting blog on, er, blogging. Specifically productive blogging ideas for all sorts of professions. Comes from James Farmer, who's been promoting innovative tools in education for a while, and has now branched into the so-called professional world.

On Being Dumped into an Existing Project

2005-06-13T17:10:00.000+01:00

No link or anything, just some musings sparked off by what one of my students is about to embark upon, which chimed with some of my own experience. I found myself on both sides of the same knowledge divide at various times. First as the have-not, then as the have, or rather, once-had.

I asked my student if he had some headway with developing some descriptive models or frameworks for learning and knowledge processes? In truth, we are still looking for generic or well-worn models in this area.

I had some overlap with this topic, which sparked this post, when a colleague consulted me on a project she had become involved with. This is a data analysis and instrumentation calibration exercise that I had worked on some years before. It is one aspect of a larger system of instruments and spacecraft. We discussed what it was like to join a pre-existing technical community.

We both felt that the experience of climbing aboard an ongoing project is typically likely to have a confusing aspect. There might be several hundred documents (or software code examples) that serve as the reference literature, but it will not be clear to an outsider what the relationships between them are. Strategies to improve this might involve indexing or tagging/keywording collections of documents, or for a documentation writer to write meta-documentation that assumes particular specimem tasks, and guides the user through the documentation as much as the task itself.

Workers already on the team might be unable to articulate their knowledge in a way needed by the new arrival, especially if the newbie's question is regarded as trivial. A very advanced query might get rapt attention, on the other hand. This is a cultural and/or timescale issue.

Finding the right mentor is a crucial step - someone with the time to deal with enquiries, with sufficient expertise, and yet empathy for the learner's point of view.

Another strategy of acquiring knowledge is to proceed in chunks, studying some aspects of the functionality of the system in isolation.

As the learner grows in knowledge, one way that they deal with the confusion is start gathering references to the body of knowledge, and building a store of useful links - a subset of the entire content set.

Later, when they are able to describe their work process in relation to the existing system (which might be different from everyone else's process) it can be documented and added to the system archive. This documentation activity is a valuable learning tool for the author.

There are difficulties in ensuring that this new secondary knowledge does not itself become lost in the body of knowledge. In some cases there can be barriers to such publication or amendment of the archive (configuration management system?). Knowledge systems should have an alternate channel (preferally collaborative such as a wiki) or allow grades of control. If the quality system demands the perfect document it will never get written (and will hence cause product quality to suffer).

Merlin

2005-05-18T21:40:00.000+01:00

Merlin is a wizard. Merlin is a project wizard for Mac OS X.

It's an interesting application, with some of the non-Microsoft feel of Pertmaster mixed with a bit of Basecamp. It's light, fresh, and cogniscant of non-bureaucratic ways of thinking at working. In contrast, MS Project feels stodgy and administrator-centric.

I think it's a bit immature to be relied upon as the sole tool in the box, and certainly not representative of the industry enough to be used in teaching (we feel we have to prepare people for the prevailing practices, even if they are not the best ones -- is that wrong?).

Playing with the demo, I feel like Mickey turning on spells I don't understand.

Fantasizing that he's in control of the very forces of nature, he's rudely awakened to a flood of reality; even the simple broomstick is beyond his control. Realizing too late that there's no shortcut to greatness, Mickey learns you've got to slosh your way to the top one bucket at a time.

from the Disney Archive

One of the things that got my toes wet is the concept of Elements, despite skimming the 10-page explanation on their site, I couldn't understand if these were defined data types within their project database or arbitrary links to external files, or, confusingly, a mixture. I'm clearly going to have to study this.

These Projectwizards also need some translation into actual English. Though the Eurolish is effective enough it keeps me chuckling.

New MSc project : assessing engineers' understanding

2005-05-12T10:24:00.000+01:00

Rather than sit and take notes, we both stood and filled the whiteboard. This is fine for planning a short research program.

We started by thinking of an airport-book style subtitle: "Why some engineers are so much better at getting to grips with complex systems projects, what this means for product quality and what to do about it."

I think we both concluded that informal learning mechanisms are going to be quite significant in determining the performance of engineering teams.

In addition, both of us will be feeling slightly nervous as this research gets into social and qualitative areas, as distinct from engineering or physics. There seem to be some tractable fronts of inquiry, so a start can be made.

I'm very interested to see how this one will turn out.

UK Education resources : changes afoot

2005-04-19T16:55:00.000+01:00

My usual mode of operation in the edu-game revolves around the annual round of production and feedback linked to the academic year. I'm looking ahead to future concepts right now, and it's around this time that I start trawling around the national resources. I've just spotted that the entity formerly known as LSTN has mutated into the UK Higher Education Academy.

The reason I'm looking here is to get a sense of what practitioners are doing with learning technology around the country. I'm suspicious that what I'm seeing is not representative of the best. Certainly sites the the UK HEA don't fit the zeitgeist of now, and more importantly my working practices. No attribution (Who are you guys?), no contribution (no comments boxes!), no RSS (what, none at all?). Too many empty strategy papers (aarrgh PDF!! arrgh dead URLs in the PDFs!!!) and out of date case studies.

An example, I came across an LSTN-branded working paper, in the Physical sciences subsite (why?), entitled Virtual Learning Environments stating that

The most basic form of asynchronous communication with computer technology is the use of email, where a message is sent and the reply is sent later i.e. asynchronously. So, all VLEs should provide at least basic email facilities.

What, university students don't have email they can use? Why are these dated papers still being circulated? Hasn't the community moved on in the last two years?

I suspect the valuable practical lessons are out there somewhere not being reported, at least not here. Back to the blogfields.

I'm ramping up my orbits around blogdom looking for inspiration. A very small sample can be seen in the sidebar of e-learning reports, an e-learning blog I'm involved with. I'm getting a consistent impression that the best learning technology practitioners, at least the ones who blog, are seriously struggling against two things.

1. Managerialism and corporate approaches to learning technology implementations. Example: teachers being required by directive or circumstance to use a particular VLE tool.

2. Directed experiences of the learner, i.e. prior programming of a student's responses at course-design time.

To some extent these two aspects support each other. Heavy tooling up leads to industrialisation of production, whereas the opposite models are also mutually supportive. Many commentators are advocating a pick and mix (a.k.a. the filling station model) toward both provider technology (blog, wiki, podcast, webpage, VLE if you must) and learner acitivity (browsing, using Google, emailing each other, discovery).

Podcast

2005-04-15T11:01:00.000+01:00

This link: points to a podcast. Double Loop Audio.

Er, What?

Pointing your podcast-gathering software to the above link will cause an audio file to appear automatically in your [insert media player of choice here]. If you set it up right, it'll happen quietly in your sleep. Later, you can listen to the 'cast on your 'pod.

If you want to know how it was done, blow by blow, leave a comment below.

It's done as a capability test. We might use it for teaching later on.

Why is it a triangle?

2005-04-12T15:30:00.000+01:00

You know: time, cost, quality. Pick any two.

But why three? And not four points?

It could be because :
- jokes use triplets
- it's the next paradigm after Dualism
- it's just a verbal construct used in marketing

This is serious because something better could be in the fog, waiting. Like an integrated cost/quality metric. Or something.

There's a rambling thread on Jason Kottke's blog about this. Numerous forgotten-their-college-philosophy types and over-reductionist engineers pull and push at the question without its centre moving very much. It's even so long it reaches repetition point, but don't let that put you off. You know: Funny, Informative, Short. Pick any two. Or something like that.

Three Mind map blogs

2005-04-12T13:48:00.000+01:00

I've just followed (mooo!) Beyond Crayons by adding three mind-map related blogs to my bloglines - over there in the sidebar. They are:

The Mindjet Blog (quasi offical team blog), Hobart's Mindjet Blog (again?), and the application-centric Writing about art is like dancing about architecture.

These are all by Mindjet staff - they make MindManager software. This tool seems to be growing in capability all the time.

CiteULike

2005-04-06T14:36:00.000+01:00

Increasingly people are turning to web-based services to manage their personal information clouds. Here's mine:

Photos (and chat!) Flickr
Blogs : Bloglines
Bookmarks : Del.icio.us
Did I also mention Furl - haven't tried it but it behaves a lot like del.icio.us, but with storage of bookmarked pages and more privacy. Note that this is more of a commercial outfit than open-sourcey del.icio.us - look around as user:demo password:demo to get a feel if that gives you goosebumps.

The deal about these is that they don't care where you are, and they encourage sharing.

And now, real work. Academic citations can now be gathered in the same type of thing. Throw away your clapped out old EndNote and RefManager, embrace the shiney new world of CiteULike,. online, sharable, taggable reference collector.

Note the big big thing in common: tags tags tags tags tags.

Tipping Point reached

2005-04-04T11:53:00.000+01:00

I am behind the curve, possibly, but I finally got round to picking up a copy of The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (link Amazon.co.uk). This looks interesting from a variety of perspectives: social theory, project organisation, bottom-up behaviour etc etc. Even more interesting is the thought that one may be able to engineer and exploit -- for good, of course! -- such phenomena.

I go forewarned, thanks to this amazon reviewer:

The chapters on context and the case studies are the most interesting. He does a particularly good job in demonstrating how very small changes in environment (context) can have a profound impact. He provides the best and most convincing explanation I have read of why New York's 'no broken windows' zero tolerance policing approach worked. The case studies of smoking (smoking isn't cool, smokers, or rather people with a strong disposition to smoke, are), Micronesian suicides and the law of 150 are very interesting.Overall, it is worth reading (providing you are not too cynical or too familiar with the subject areas that he draws on) and it does provide a number of good conversation topics - I just wish that either he was more familiar with Occam or had a better editor.

The System is the Project.

2004-10-29T13:43:00.000+01:00

and the Project is the System.

Two of my (sucessful) Systems Engineering MSc students had this to say about system development projects, from different angles:

The architecture of a system and the organisation of that work are fundamentally interdependant.

Well, duur. Aside from the obvious, we spoke at length about the two sub-systems: the product side and the project side. Like all systems, you don't want to optimise any one part, but the whole.

Here's another case: software (specfically, database) development at Flickr (a burgeoning product, with a comparatively tiny dev-team). Sometimes the usual quality criteria on the product side may be better compromised if you want to achieve desirable behaviours on the project side. Ergo, by way of interconnected, don't bother normalising your data tables like you were told in college.

Starting research

2004-10-20T15:40:00.000+01:00

Setting out a research agenda is hard. I should know. It's possible (probable) that if there's the freedom to spend time doing any research at all -- if the effort it's not results-driven -- then the initial directions are hard to define. That can lead to difficulties in making the final stages of the work yield value for the numerous stakeholders. These difficulties are endemic to Masters and Doctoral theses but are common in "higher", team-oriented, research efforts too.

Some work and proposals flowing near me have crystallised some views and criteria, all of them pretty obvious and well-known:

In the beginning, seek to define the terminology and knowledge landscape under study. This establishes a beginning place.
Have a working hypothesis (Proposition A), and work for or against it (transforming it into Truth A). This is an initial direction. Even though it may be a stalking-horse, it should be conceivable that demonstrating the hypothesis could be a goal of the research.
Tools (e.g. Tool A) you acquire to deal with knowledge and statements shouldn't be an end in themselves.
Be prepared to abandon the hypothesis if it looks inappropriate to what can be found. Don't proceed without forming a new one (Proposition/Truth B).
At a later stage, you might be fed up with hypotheses (too many of them, self-evident by now, etc) and may wish to progress towards demonstrating a usable product (Tool B). That's fine, but again, don't abandon the hypothesis/es until you can define B's characteristics.
Keep defining the targets of the proofs and products in terms that the audience of the research will value (this does not necessarily mean that ready Applications are always required).

What's most important? If you come away with a Tool B, then that's something in itself. Then, less vitally, Truth B, then Truth A. Tool-A's are incidental (but creditworthy). The whole thing is creditworthy if the above paradigm is followed adeptly.

This article has turned into Marking Research, which is as it should be, since Specification must always have its own Evaluation in mind.

Small tools

2004-10-14T16:01:00.000+01:00

I was having a discussion about how PM syllabi are becoming full of trophy topics, straining new entrants to the field with a weight of learning objectives. A sign of maturity? Not necessarily. Mature thinking might be about letting go of childish ideas, keeping what you really need. Hence: let go of monetary flow control routines; grasp the idea of measured work value.

A bunch of stuff I've come across recently seems to be about light toolsets. Some of this from Innovation Weblog.

Mayomi is a web application for mind maps. Not very rich yet, and certainly not dynamic. When I pick up a tool I expect to be able to mess around with scenarios, rather than document perfected thoughts (the essential fact that makes thinking with Excel different from declaring with Word). One to watch. The developer makes the most of post-HTML web tech.

Another Flashy thing is Webnote. I've set up a space for Double Loop, with a topic in tool use in Project Management for us to try. This is sooo simple (emulated stickies) yet potentially powerful. Please, get involved at Loop2, Surface1, or use its XML feed to keep in touch.

And finally, Basecamp is a web-service oriented towards project management. Rather than produce scientifically intense charts and diagrams, it focusses on making communication between collaborators and clients easy, coupled with deadline-sensitive displays. Certainly easy to jump on if you know blogs - its spools projects out to RSS feeds and everything. Cheap too, if you compare it to hulks like Project, which if truth be known tend to paralyse the analysts and isolate the manager.

Now, off you go to Loop2Surface1. I'll buy you a drink if you correct my spelling mistakes, two if you add a Note that kicks the topic.

Large construction

2004-10-10T10:58:00.000+01:00

Large construction,
originally uploaded by Drift Words.

or small construction? Smashy or Nicey?

Sometimes, our PM students don't quite get it. "Why are we playing with kids' toys?" Others just get on with it. Warming up the brain is a key element of this game, regardless of the PM lessons. We like this game, despite all the yelling we have to do.

Here, however, I'd like to point out that the Risk v Scope dilemma is plain to see.

sylloge - innovation process at Flickr

2004-09-22T13:32:00.000+01:00

Stewart says "in Flickr, there's no not invented here, here". Hear Hear! Instead, they have "recombinant idea folding".

read: sylloge

Risk vs Scope

2004-09-09T15:48:00.000+01:00

As a follow-up to the last note, here's a simplistic view of part of the project management triangle (remember: On Time, To Budget, Right Quality -- pick any two).

Sometimes scope is drawn in explicitly (a tetrahedron!) sometimes not. Sometimes Quality = Performance/Requirements, other times Requirements have their own dimension. Basically, it gets more potentially confusing the more properly you think about it, and despite many brave attempts the Triangle is a persistent idea. The central idea of a consciously managed trade-off -- along any side of the triangle -- is the one thing all the models have in common.

Let me have a go. This one's called Risk vs Scope :

Gemini

2004-09-09T11:22:00.000+01:00

Smash! Tinkle

The Gemini sample-return vehicle, er hard-landed, yesterday (news, video - 6MB Quicktime) .The waiting choppers, piloted by famous dudes, were fortunately nowhere near (they weren't hired to stop a ballistic missile). The solar-wind sample discs are almost certainly mixed up with ambient bits of Utah, rendering them of little remaining interest to space scientists.

The tinkle (lost samples) is more of a problem to scientists than the smash, although not as newsworthy. Engineers, who deliver the science baby, should be pondering. Beagle-ers have heard it all before, and wished they had seen that one too.

Clearly, there is a reporting bias that brings disasters to the fore, so that spectators grumble in pubs "why can't they just do things right?". Putting aside that spin, and even allowing for the fact that in millions of everyday cases, innovation goes wrong before it goes right, there are long-standing questions about the right ways to perform such experiments.

Do engineers and their managers really know where they stand on the Scope vs Risk slope? Or are there deep gaps in our knowledge of the uncertainties? Would even greater modelling of outcomes or diagnositc instrumentation of the apparatus help or hinder? One has to remember that such efforts have to come out of the same project's budget, putting us on entirely different scope/risk hill. On the other hand, ontological polyfiller, like talk, is cheap.

Even if we did know where we stood in any given mission, the debate continues as to the best economic choice for a program BS6079: "group of strategically-related projects". Test test test and guarantee an occasional Rolls-Royce ride to the finish line? Or race learn race learn, sending waves of evolving Fords out to the track?

Remember, though, that your race entry fee includes the use of a space rocket and is priced accordingly.

Drucker on Adaptive vs. Plan-Driven

2004-09-08T11:13:00.000+01:00

How to reconcile the need for planning with the whitespace required for innovation?
Drucker predicts Agile processes, it says here! Does he mean Planning in the operational sense, or Project Management as we know it? Investigate here : Drucker on Adaptive vs. Plan-Driven.

On a side-dish, is CMM compliance (more processes in place) a Bad Thing for innovation, by this light? I must talk to Mike Emes and Steve Welch about all this.

Step 1. Make a List

2004-08-26T14:25:00.000+01:00

I'm not sure about these lists. Using them is a bit like having food chewed for you. These particular ones are OK, don't get me wrong, but I feel a complete manager ought to have an underlying theory in mind so that lists and syllabi can be grown at will when needed.

Something like the Balanced Scorecard, but for projects.

Hal Macomber: Ten Rules for Project Managers

Computerworld: The systems builder as leader (five skills and six practices)

APM: Body of Knowledge

PMI: Body of Knowledge

MainlyMartian: That dog, still dead

2004-08-25T11:35:00.000+01:00

MainlyMartian: That dog, still dead

MainlyMartian picks up the last pieces of Beagle better than I could. His commentary of the Leicester analysis (reports available here) fills in many details and nuances.

Ship, land down there.

2004-08-23T11:09:00.000+01:00

OK, so the main problem with Beagle 2 may have been inadequate funds (surprise!) or poor risk management but a pertinent factor had to have been the control of the a tricky process like parachute landing through a planetary atmosphere.

Near open-loop control is viable when the craft under control is in a predictable medium (such as vacuum) and where the craft is essentially a rigid body. The many successful journeys to the gas giants exemplify this approach. With proper flight planning, there will be plenty of time for corrections (maybe even with an Earthman in the loop) if a manouevre doesn't get the craft into its target state.

This could be the killer application for spacecraft autonomy (more so than, say, scheduling of obervation modes). Big guns are working on it.

I would guess that some of this will be spin-off from UAV tech (very hot at Farnborough this year).

Others are more excited at the thought of autonomy in the process of going up, rather than down.

Hooray! Projects and Mindmaps

2004-08-21T16:46:00.000+01:00

Mind maps for (small) projects!

Seen in Reforming Project Management. Hal also generally recommends the source site, Innovation Tools.

Mindmaps turn up again here. This tyime, they're made from your del.icio.us tags (a free-form open bookmark space, that certain bloggy types seem to be hot on).

Breathless Fluff to Deep Thought?

2004-06-28T16:17:00.000+01:00

Nova Spivack on Minding the Planet has written an unusually lengthy post, let's call it a "paper" entitled Semantic Web to Global Mind. The title says it all really.

My reading of it seems to be fairly close to Danny Ayers', that is, an appreciation of the effort to understand what's going on mixed with curmudgeonly disliking of the gee-whiz frothiness.

There could indeed be something interesting going on with contemporary communications media, but I don't think it is in terms that this author asserts, nor are the particulars he claims that unique.

Semantics: what knowledge is, how it is processed and represented. Beyond syntax (form) into meaning.

If semantic behaviour, (cough) thinking?, occurs outside of human heads then we could well have a global mind on our hands. Except it would be out of our hands. It could well be that recent techniques have, or will shortly, enable this.

The usual suspects are underneath somewhere: Dennett, Dawkins, Minsky.

Some spins of my own: without explicitly codifiying a general scheme, semantic data and processes already exist and have done for millenia. They are present in systems and behaviour - what people do with the words and texts - and are occasionally represented by gestures, punctuation and the whole continuum of what is sometimes called meta-language. They are augmented by all sorts of social considerations. The fact that a given conference was in London rather than Budapest is "meta-data". But we need to be careful with our terms, many examples given as language meta-data (tone, gesture) are actually explicitly linguistic. Tone in Chinese being a simple example. Even pre-written language had asynchronous storage: well, hello there wandering poet!

As I keep saying whenever someone asks me bitter or lager: Categories Don't Exist. There is no clear division between data and meta-data in nature; genes and memes don't particularly care how they are expressed and transmitted. DNA, RNA, mother's milk -- there's no system definition.

Knowledge seems to be slippery anyway, and it's not reliant on syntax, more on modelling another's internal states. What do I think you mean? That's what I guess you meant, I think. Who are you anyway? What do you want?

The step change in capability, if there is one, is not that TADA! a given "layer" of metadata can now be described, rather that the thinking itself can be let go of, delegated, by virtue of distributed processing. Maybe by eyes and brains, maybe by wires and scripts. This paper illustrates how this could operate very nicely. It could well be that XML is what makes a global neuron fire, or is a step in the waggle dance of the hive mind. But I'm not sure that this, or even the internet, is a necessary part of such a thing.

Want an example of pre-existing emergent semantic processing, on a global scale, with no semantic layer definition? The Economy.

However, semantic layers and their objects are genuinely interesting. If one knowledge object can "mark up" another than some additional evidence can be left behind of process. Aha! Writing! The trackback (the two-ended link, the link as relationship) is seen from this viewpoint as the locus of this paradigm shift, rather than any implementation of XML. But that brings into question the notion of open data fields (blogs with TB, comments) vs closed ones (commercial entities, sealed from graffiti).

Those are some technical issues I have with the paper (I'm also with Ayers on other issues, like the non-applicability of the Turing test argument). But I'd also argue with what it all seems to mean.

If there is such a thing as "the" weblog community, and if it indeed has a mind then it is not a wise one. At present its personality seems to be infantile with disturbances bordering on the psychotic. Impulses related to vanity, currency and other faddishness seems to dominate. Hence my grinching today rather than writing a 3000 word paper of my own, tomorrow.

Also, were I his editor -- gosh! In blogdom, I am! -- I would also recommend that the paper be de-fluffed. Mention "my company" once and once only puhleeze.

The Report overturns: not many hurt.

2004-06-23T13:03:00.000+01:00

Here's a story column about avoiding academic reporting styles in live projects, getting the punchline out there first, so to speak.

Academic style (background, problem, details, then consequences) is still, I feel, necessary outside of the regular status meeting. The rigour of in-depth analysis and reporting helps projects (i.e. trains people) to make rapid decisions (reported in a journalists' inverted pyramid style) in the tussle of project work.

I still feel sorry for the bull though.

We're Doomed!

2004-05-27T16:32:00.000+01:00

Of all my projects I like the Doomed ones the best. Here's a Computerworld Q&A with Sue Young on, essentially, how to sense being doomed.

no more e-learning.

2004-05-27T16:16:00.000+01:00

I loathe the use of e-. e-marketing, e-governance, e-ducation. Its use seems to denote an immature reaction to the existence of new(ish) tools. I prefer the e-is-everywhere-get-on-with-it approach. On a parallel track, here is an industry columnist saying, rightly, that the days of the "IT Project" are over.

Chris Argyris

2004-05-26T16:24:00.000+01:00

This biography of Chris Argyris, who was instrumental in developing the models of single-loop and double-loop learning and applications to organisational (for example, let's say "Management") behaviour, includes extensive references and links to the Monitor group (where Argyris is a director).

From infed.

The robots are playing around with wierd stuff.

2004-05-25T22:14:00.000+01:00

This time they are doing Origami, and working in other non-manufacturing domains. Some snippets from the bench of Devin Balkom, a grad student at the CMU manipulation lab.

How to get knowledge

2004-05-25T14:59:00.000+01:00

... according to Denham Grey. Think: do we do this?

plop!

2004-05-25T14:24:00.000+01:00

Another fish dragged in. This is a nice mindmap homepage index from a guy who's doing some research in the knowledge management area. Here's his blog (en francais).

social software: Thou Shalt

2004-05-23T21:56:00.000+01:00

Social software, what's that? Online groups, how do they work?

Clay Shirky, of Many2Many, gives the lowdown. Cruise through this 10-minute talk, Google the terms you don't know and get back to me. Let's talk.

He's on again on the subject of Wikis. This time try wikipedia first (Read an entry where You know more than They do. Edit it. You are Them) then read why this works. Talk to me.

Beagle 2 criticised

2004-05-21T18:45:00.000+01:00

What? UK semi-amateur mission to Mars, added on (by embarrising series of press conferences) to ESA orbiter. Or, depending on your POV, glorious Blur/Hirst brit-art spin-off with science bit added in for show. Come Christmas day 2003, there wa-as no-o blee-eed-din signal.

What happened? It left the mothership (ugh) Mars Express Orbiter in a nominal manner, but then probably crashed, probably probably because the height detection part of the freshly-developed and innovative landing system (aero braking, chutes, airbags) sent false data.

A comission of enquiry has critised the handling of risk in the project.

Why? Start here. ~~Seek the ESA report.~~

24/5/04: "Report won't be published, only ... recommendations" Press Conf today ...

24/5/04: So, space robots are tricky, but surely the answer isn't space men? Link

Why blog?

2004-05-21T12:33:00.000+01:00

You may be wondering what the Business Case for this whatever-it-is that you are reading is. Well, in lieu of one, this: Bill Gates says it's a neat thing.

Systems Behaviour

2004-05-21T09:59:00.000+01:00

In case anyone is in any doubt as to the importance of systems-aware project management and engineering, let them take five minutes to read this, from The Register.

Cube solver

2004-05-19T15:32:00.000+01:00

I'm not sure what this has to do with my core topics, but here it is mentioned anyway. A chap called JP Brown has built a machine to solve the Rubik's Cube ... out of Lego. And an imaging system, natch. Seen on Joi Ito.

Beats my 27-seconds in the back of the school bus in '79.

Mind fullness illustrated

2004-05-17T17:43:00.000+01:00

OK, here's a Visio mindmap, illustrating my research directions. It's a bit rough at present ... more to come.

Technically, the process of drawing this in Visio was OK, rather than wonderful. Visio drawing concepts are unlike standard illustrating tools. Once this hump is over, everything is easy.

I would like links to external documents and sites to complete the mindmap.

Free Mind mapping software

2004-05-17T14:33:00.000+01:00

Ah haa! Some open-source mind-mapping software. Goodee!

It's in development so there's a few features to come - like rich graphics? If you want to explore further, the authors give background info that refers to other breeds, some non-free, of mind-mapping stuff. Mind maps? Examples: here.

It's time for me to get back into this style of paperwork. I'll be seeing how MS Visio (search: mind map)copes with the task as well.

Qualitative Research

2004-05-17T14:28:00.000+01:00

Coming at things from a physics/engineering POV, I need help with
qualitative research methods. This site at SLAIS/UBC provides one of the best collections of resources I've seen.

Prototypes

2004-05-14T17:08:00.000+01:00

The degree of risk in a project should be reflected by the
penetration of prototypes into the development life-cycle.

I will have something to say about this in due course. In the mean time,
have patience, perhaps go here for guidance.

.

I declare this journal open

2004-05-14T16:30:00.000+01:00

The title of this blog refers to the following distiction between learning styles.

Single-loop learning is identified as "the ability to know what to do in a particular set of circumstances, or in response to specific triggers and stimuli." Individuals learn how they can do better, improving what they are currently doing. This may also be seen as learning at operational levels, or at the level of rules."

Double-loop learning is concerned with "why" in relation to what is being carried out. Lines of reasoning are added to the "what" approaches of single-loop learning so that, as well as learning new qualities and attributes, the "mental model" of reasoning, justification, evaluation and analysis is adjusted and developed also.

Sounds like A Good Thing, no?

Practically, this will be about academic teaching, e-learning and associated new media developments, and the application of emerging and existing tools to the management of innovative technology development.

Essentially, this is a discussion forum related to certain themes within my work.

Thanks to Richard Pettinger for summarising the two loops. Now buy his book.