The Problem Might Be You – Comparing Text With Video
July 2nd, 2009
Last week I wrote a post called “Be The Change You Wish To See“.
This week I cover the same topic in a 2 minute video.
Which one has more impact in delivering the message? Which one captures my emotions about this topic? Text or video?
Be The Change You Wish To See – Project Shrink Episode 23
How do you get your team to do the right thing?
Show them. Do the right thing yourself. If you want to see some fabulous behavior in your team, be fabulous first.
You can watch the episode below or follow this link.
Subscribe with iTunes to “The Project Shrink Podcast”
Full Video Version of Project Shrink videocast
Subscribe with iTunes to “The Project Shrink” video podcast.
The Problem Might Be You – Comparing Text With Video
Originally by Bas de Baar from Project Shrink on July 2, 2009, 2:23am
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Invitation to breakfast and a bit of theatre
July 2nd, 2009
You’re Invited to the EPM Breakfast
July 14, 2009 – 6am
Register today!
Back by popular demand! This year’s EPM Breakfast will be held in Ballroom II on the 12th floor of the Westin New Orleans Canal Place in New Orleans, Louisiana on Tuesday, July 14 from 6:00am - 8:15am. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from Microsoft Senior Executives, including Kirk Koenigsbauer, General Manager of Project, Seth Patton, Director of Project, and Doug McCutcheon, Worldwide Partner Strategy, Project Marketing Group, on business strategy and technology roadmap for Microsoft Project.
During the breakfast you’ll have an opportunity to win a Dell laptop computer.
*Quad-Core Processor, 8 GB RAM, 2×250 GB 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive and much more. Dell certificate will be given in lieu of actual product.
If you haven’t already registered, you can do so now by clicking the ‘Register’ button below. Space is limited, so be sure to register today!
Partner Solution Theatre
3 EPM Partners Chosen to Present
Congratulations to EPM Live, Pcubed and UMT Consulting who were chosen to present at this year’s WPC Business Productivity Partner Solution Theatre.
Come and learn about their solutions built on Microsoft’s 2007 Office System. The Partner Solution Theatre will be located at the Business Productivity Booth #423 on the Expo Hall Floor. Scheduled presentations include:
EPM Live (Monday, July 13 at 6:50pm)
Pcubed (Tuesday, July 14 at 4:40pm)
UMT Consulting (Wednesday, July 15 at 2:00pm).
Plan to attend!
For a complete list of Project activities at the WPC see http://blogs.technet.com/doug_mccutcheon/archive/2009/04/22/what-happening-at-the-worldwide-project-conference-for-project-partners-this-year.aspx
See you there!
Originally by Doug McCutcheon from Project business blog on July 1, 2009, 11:38am
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Deploying a MICROSOFT EPM Solution
July 2nd, 2009
Deploying an EPM Solution – Talk by Microsoft –MPUG hosted learning opportunity
Are you a Project Manager having difficulty evaluating the best Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution for your business?
In this session, we will look at the benefits of an EPM solution and investigate the different deployment options available. We will discover how to speed the realization of ROI by eliminating costly consultation time, as well as demonstrating all of this with real world examples.
The following topics will be covered in this presentation:
· Improving team collaboration and communication; increasing visibility across all projects.
· Publishing plans to a browser to drive stakeholder consensus.
· Hosted, onsite, pre-configured, out-of-the-box – evaluating different deployment options.
· Practical applications – demonstrations from four Microsoft® EPM Partners.
Register today – limited seats available!
Originally by Doug McCutcheon from Project business blog on July 1, 2009, 2:53pm
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Workaround Tips for MS Project Professional 2007 SP2 Enterprise Global Bug
July 2nd, 2009
As stated in a previous blog post, there is an issue with Project Professional 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) in which you may corrupt the Enterprise Global Template (EGT) by opening it with Project Pro:
http://www.projectserverhelp.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=69
According to Brian Smith, Microsoft is planning to have the bug fixed in the August 2009 Cumulative Update package:
In the meantime, however, here are some workaround tips for dealing with the Project Pro SP2 bug that causes corruption of the Enterprise Global Template.
1. Use scheduled administrative backups
First and foremost, I highly recommend that everyone use this feature, regardless of the SP2 issue. If you are not familiar with scheduled administrative backups, you can configure Project Server to save daily backups of several types of data to the Archive database, including the EGT. If you have this feature configured to take a nightly backup of the EGT and someone accidentally corrupts the EGT during the next day, then it is very easy to restore yesterday’s version from the Archive database.
PWA > Server Settings > Schedule Backup
2. Disable editing of the Enterprise Global Template
To prevent anyone from editing the EGT and possibly corrupting it with Project Pro 2007 SP2, Disable the ‘Save Enterprise Global‘ permission on the ‘Project Web Access Permissions‘ page in PWA
PWA > Server Settings > Project Web Access Permissions
This will prevent Project Pro users — even those with administrative privileges — from opening the EGT (Tools > Enterprise Options > Open Enterprise Global), and will display the following error message:
3. Revert to a Pre-SP2 version of Project Pro 2007
If someone absolutely must edit the EGT before the issue is fixed, then they should use a version of MS Project Pro 2007 prior to SP2.
How do you know if you have Project Professional 2007 SP2 installed? Open Project Pro and select Help > About Microsoft Office Project:
If the dialog box says "SP2" near the top, then you will need to check in all projects which may be in the local cache, uninstall Project Pro completely according to Brian Smith’s blog post (including the local cache), reinstall a fresh copy of Project Pro 2007, and update it preferably to the February 2009 Cumulative Update level (not April CU, which is after SP2!):
Hopefully Microsoft will release a hotfix prior to the August 2009 Cumulative Update, but these tips should help to preserve your Enterprise Global Template in the interim.
Good luck!
Originally from Project Server Help Blog: Posts on July 1, 2009, 9:34am
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Description of the Project 2007 hotfix package (Project.msp): June 30, 2009
July 2nd, 2009
Originally from Most Recent KBs for Project 2007 on July 2, 2009, 10:09am
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ProjectPro: Setting Buffers (Part 1: Schedule Buffer)
July 1st, 2009
Seeing as my last post was on how to incorporate risk assessments into schedule design, I decided to post information on how to create buffers in Microsoft Project Professional. Note that this post is not the definitive guide to incorporate risk-loaded schedules in Microsoft Project, but instead rep… (More)
Originally by Andrew Lavinsky from EPM Team on June 29, 2009, 1:25pm
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Project Rhythm
July 1st, 2009
This is a guest post by Andrew Sparks. Find out more about Andrew at the end of this post.
What does a well-run project sound like?
Generically we speak of successful, high-performance projects (or factories or other team operations) as “humming” or “ticking like a Swiss watch”.
Every successful project I have ever seen has had its own pace and rhythm.
When problems occur, they do not knock the project out of balance. Problems are just grist to the mill and the project team cranks through anything that crops up during the normal weekly schedule of meetings, discussions and decisions.
Image by phylevn.
Conversely, poorly performing projects seem to lurch from crisis to crisis, buffeted and knocked off balance by almost every single thing that crops up.
My karate teacher used to say that essence of combat is imposing your rhythm on your opponent.
In a sense this is also what is happening in a well executed project.
The team is able to impose their rhythm on the status quo to achieve their project objectives.
All very well – but what are some practical pointers for a PM wishing to improve their performance in this area?
First off set clear expectations with your project team about the weekly rhythm of work. Publish the schedule of meetings and project communications, then stick to it.
I don’t buy in to the school of thought that only says only schedule meetings on an as-needed basis.
I advocate fixing the meeting schedule in advance and then cancel the meetings if there is nothing to process.
All part of building up the weekly rhythm of work for the team.
I don’t buy into “stand-up meetings” either.
You have a meeting with recorded notes & actions and good time-management, or you don’t (and it’s just an informal conversation – watercooler optional).
Some things need to be formally managed in projects that are generally informally managed just about everywhere else. Properly managing the meeting and comms schedules is one aspect of this.
Set the pace of work within the team appropriately. Sometime we have to push, and push hard indeed, to get the project tasks/deliverables/(you know what I mean) ready for a milestone.
Some PMs unfortunately interpret this as having the team work 18 hour days from the very start. I have seen a few PMs burn their teams out for no reason trying to prove what hard workers they are and how urgent it all is. You need to start with the end in mind and set the pace (and resources) appropriately.
Understand that pace and rhythm are different from volume or style (just pushing the musical analogy a little further). The team can be working at a high medium or low tempo (or flexing to demand). This says nothing about their style of working.
Loud & noisy or quite and controlled. It’s all good.
About the author: Andrew Sparks is a Senior Practice Director, working for Oracle EMEA. He runs the EMEA International Projects practice. Here he is seeing the wood for the trees. Andrew is also the author of the Project Lifestyle blog.
expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle.
Subscribe with iTunes to “The Project Shrink” video podcast.
Originally by Bas de Baar from Project Shrink on June 30, 2009, 4:15am
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IT Portfolio Reporting the US Government Way
July 1st, 2009
Well, I have to say, it is very interesting to see one of the more powerful new Portfolio Reporting solutions be one from the US Government. As part of an initiative to provide visibility into IT spending, the US Government posted what I would see as a huge leap forward in simplicity of reporting from […]
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Originally by Bill Raymond from ProjectNation by Bill Raymond on June 30, 2009, 6:11pm
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Update for Project Server SP2 Fixes Expiration Date Bug
July 1st, 2009
Originally from Project Server Help Blog: Posts on June 30, 2009, 12:16pm
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SQL Server Native Client – 64 bit - Failed to build the OLAP cubes
July 1st, 2009
<dry – watching Wimbledon>
Just a quick reminder that if you’re struggling with getting Analysis Services to build successfully one of the errors you might see is ….
Failed to build the OLAP cubes. Error: Analysis Services session failed with the following error: Failed to connect to the Analysis Services server BenHowardSQL08. Error: Cannot connect to the repository. Analysis server: BenHowardSQL08 Error: Provider cannot be found. It may not be properly installed.
This is basically letting you know that you don’t have the correct SQL Native Client installed.
This occurred for me on a Windows 2008 box, using SQL2008 on another server. All software was 64 bit.
I used the following technet article as reference for the installation to get the cube bits loaded… (I had arrived onsite and the customer hadn’t done any cube configuration) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd285466.aspx and as per the article I downloaded and installed the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Native Client from the Feature Pack for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 - December 2008 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=142288). This has a timestamp of Nov 2008 (and is called sqlncli_x64.msi)
Knowing that everything wasn’t right, I hunted around again and installed the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Native Client from the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack, October 2008 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=228de03f-3b5a-428a-923f-58a033d316e1&DisplayLang=en. This has a timestamp of July 2008 (and is called sqlcli.msi)
This resolved the problem and everything works sweetly.
Thanks to Brian Smith’s blog (and of course Brian for writing it) which pointed me in the right direction. http://blogs.msdn.com/brismith
Cheers, Ben.
Originally from Applepark Ltd on June 29, 2009, 5:01pm
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