Anyone who manages people knows that this is a vastly under appreciated skill. Effective managers facilitate and catalyze execution by ensuring resources are aligned to priorities; balancing how they're utilized; and removing obstacles that hinder execution. The best managers assemble high-performing teams who generate brilliant results and make it all seem effortless. For these teams, work is fun and rewarding and each new day is a welcomed challenge.
Ineffective managers are markedly different and so are their results.
Read More
From an article by Brian Gillooly, editor in chief of Optimize Magazine:
"6th Sense Analytics in Morrisville, N.C., has captured the attention of the venture-capitalist community with an on-demand approach that lets IT departments track developers' progress across distributed projects. The automated strategy eliminates human interaction in the monitoring process, reducing the risk of bias or human error. It also provides visibility across multiple vendors' products rather than a single point of view."
“Oscars for Software Development” Recognizes the Year’s Groundbreaking Innovations
Morrisville, NC — February 13, 2007 — 6th Sense Analytics, a pioneer in improving software development metrics, today announced it has been named a finalist in the 17th Annual Jolt Product Excellence Awards, the high-profile award competition sponsored by CMP Technology’s Dr. Dobb’s Journal. Selected as a finalist in the Project Management category by a team of editors, columnists and industry gurus, the 6th Sense Analytics solution allows software developers and managers to automatically collect software development data and delivers immediate insight into the execution of physically distributed software development projects.
Read More
There’s an excellent book by David Ropiek and George Gray called Risk, which explores the perceptions and realities of what we should and shouldn’t worry about. Of course, the overwhelming conclusion is that our fears are misplaced, and we should really worry about our broccoli intake, not snakes, spiders and plane crashes. But we�re human, and snakes, spiders and plane crashes are viscerally more frightening than heart disease.
This got me thinking about the outsourcing debate. The natural instinct is to fear outsourcing. After all, outsourcing is the export of business processes. And if you believe the pundits, this is nothing short of pure evil — the “giant sucking sound” and the wholesale export of jobs. Like snakes, spiders and plane crashes, this is scary stuff.
But should outsourcing be feared?
Read More
“When the 6th Sense Analytics founders presented their company at DEMO, I got a creepy feeling that this was another company using technology to invade privacy. I still have some of that feeling, but I’ve talked to the executives now to hear their side of it.
The tool can turn off its measurement of individuals and instead report collective data on groups. But the manager has the option to choose either way. The list price of the tool is $960 per annual subscription. 6th Sense uses the data from the tools to come up with its own meta data across companies, on an anonymous basis.
It can measure a team as small as a few people or a huge team. The company launched the full tool in September and has paying customers now. They’re finding out things. For instance, they notice that developers often use tools outside of Eclipse to do tasks that could be done within the software tool.
The tool pays off in a 24-hour development cycle that is common where you have programmers in the United States, Russia and China all working on the same code. You can have one team sign off and another pick up.”
You can read Dean’s full post here:
http://www.mercextra.com/blogs/takahashi/
Rob O'neill and E S wrote a recap of Chris Shipley's trip to New Zealand and her thoughts on DEMO 07:
"Shipley, fresh back from Down Under, opened the show with a talk about the power shift now taking place in business and personal computing. Although she didn’t use the term 'power to the people', that is what she implied the shift is all about.
'We are breaking away from putting technology at the centre and we are putting people at the centre who have the authority to influence technology,' Shipley said.
Nevertheless, it will be technology that powers that shift. And, at this year’s conference, new products and technology were proof of that.
For example, 6th Sense Analytics has created a toolset which is designed to address the challenge of distributed networks and distributed projects — 6th Sense Analytics’ technology helps project managers maintain visibility into the progress of any project."
Full article here:
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/15E22ADB0FD9F751CC257276000B56E9
Esther Schindler from CIO Magazine counts 6th Sense Analytics among the new innovations unveiled at DEMO 07 that CIOs should
really care about.
"Every CIO wishes she could judge developer productivity accurately and use the combined project data to determine whether a development team was on track. One tool that may help is 6th Sense which lets you find out what your software developers are really up to by automatically collecting software development data."
Read Esther's full article here:
http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=28639
Chris Shipley has built the
DEMO franchise into the premier launch pad for emerging technologies. It is unquestionably the most credible and highest-impact venue for launching a new product, drawing an audience of 700 of the most influential players in technology and bringing them back each and every year—for 17 years and counting. Palm, Tivo and Sun’s Java are just a few of the breakthroughs first introduced at DEMO. While other events have grown larger, no other event has retained its exclusivity, clear mission or loyal attendance. Unlike most conferences, DEMO gets better with age.
Read More
eWeek's Michael Vizard says,
"By now everybody and his brother is familiar with the statistics that show how many software development projects fail and our collective abysmal ability to manage these types of projects. But while everybody likes to shake their head in dismay about the problem, very few people seem willing to do anything about it because application development tools are largely built for single users who don't lend themselves to any collective oversight. And because developers themselves don't want to be bothered by having to actually report on their progress or lack thereof, everybody is pretty much in the dark about the status of any given project."
Read his full post.
From the article by Thomas Claburn of InformationWeek:
"6th Sense Analytics presented a promising online service to track software developer productivity. It lets programmers individually, or as a group, measure productivity by monitoring various development tools like Eclipse and other applications. Having automated tools that gather productivity data should make managing dispersed teams of programmers much easier."
Full article here:
http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197002257
