It's hard to miss Apple's new advertising campaign. One of the recent editions really caught my attention. The PC was describing the "fun stuff" he can perform, and he mentioned "timesheets." Of course this is completely tongue-in-cheek.
Timesheets are not fun. It's interesting that of all the "un-fun" things a PC can do, Apple chose to lead with timesheets. [BTW, I would have chosen "doing taxes," [but that's just me.] I wonder if their hourly employees use them. I certainly haven't met many people who like filling out a timesheet.
However, timesheets fulfill a necessary function -- they account for money. Human capital (or time as we like to call it) costs money. Timesheets account for it.
So it's obvious why they exist and are necessary. Why aren't they fun? Honestly, they typically result in someone getting paid for something. Getting paid is fun -- yet not the timesheet.
I think it boils down to a few issues:
- It's really hard to remember what happened. Unless you are uber-anal about doing time-tracking every day, it's tough to remember what happened a few days ago -- especially when you are immersed. There is scientific evidence that when knowledge workers are in the flow they have a distorted sense of time.
- It's a necessary evil. Ultimately, filling out a timesheet doesn't contribute to the outcome. Most people get their fulfillment from accomplishments. For me, it's building and selling software.
We think that we can help out in this area. While I don't think we will make timesheets or a PC "fun'" I know we can address some of the pain encountered when filling out a timesheet.
We have the data on where the time was spent eliminating the deep thought about what happened last Tuesday at 10:36AM. Hopefully this data will enable folks to get timesheets out of the way quickly and return to what they love -- accomplishing something.
BarCamp is headed here to the RTP area and we are very excited to be part of it. Judging from the wiki it's shaping up to be a very cool event. 6th Sense Analytics is now a proud sponsor of the event. Plus, we'll be sending a few folks from our team (including me, Todd Olson) to chat about AJAX, SVG, and Software Development Metrics. We look forward to seeing everyone at the event on July 22.
You know it’s bad when a consultant chucks in the towel! Pamela Slim, a consultant to enterprise-level management of 10 years� standing, is giving up because she’s tired of banging her head against the wall trying to creatively present stupid ideas to employees, that create an atmosphere of resentment and unwanted competition.
Pamela has penned an excellent 10-point open letter to CEOs, COOs, CIOs and CFOs, outlining a plan of action that centers heavily on dumping the PowerPoint and getting to know, and really value, employees. It also serves as a call to stop using buzzwords and meaningless jargon like “our employees are our most valuable asset.”
You can read the letter here, but Pamela raises some points that apply to the world of software development, and hit on some of the issues 6th Sense Analytics is trying to resolve.
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It’s easy to criticize or to be negative — especially when it comes to new ideas and concepts. It’s happened throughout our history. The concept that the Earth travels around the Sun, not vice versa, developed by Copernicus was revolutionary, quite correct and completely rejected by the Church at the time.
Remember when Java and “write once run anywhere” was devised? Well� OK “write once and run anywhere” is a little questionable, but few people got the idea or understood Java in the early days, and most expected Java would wither away.
Kathy Sierra notes there�s one real reason that people diss new things: it�s because the thing in question challenges beliefs or ideas they have invested in heavily. They could have invested time or money, or staked their reputation.
“They’ll diss things because embracing those things might force them to re-examine thoughts and assumptions they care about, or because those things represent a change they don’t want to make,” Kathy says. She goes on, that the less someone knows about a subject, the more passionate the dissing.
The changes we are in the midst of today are once again challenging some old ways of working. Turn-around times in software development projects are speeding up, development teams are becoming distributed and harder to manage, and there is a greater focus on quality and return on investment by the business.
These require a more flexible and predictive way of running projects. It’s no longer good enough to steer projects using gut instinct or to tear everything down and start the next project from scratch, without carrying over best practices and lessons learned from the previous effort. There’s too much at stake in terms of saving money and reducing your exposure to risk.
Yet people can be slow to embrace the changes these challenges demand. Either, people think everything will be OK because they’ve done this kind of thing before, or they get religion about the tools they already have.
On the first point, things could well be OK, but surely the question becomes: how can you make things even better? On the latter, it’s fine to use existing tools - we encourage it - but these tools will probably fail to provide an accurate or impartial view of the entire development ecosystem, because they are tied to a single vendor’s stack.
Facts can be uncomfortable things to face but facing them is the first step on the road towards self-improvement. That’s why 6th Sense Analytics’ tools give people the facts they need to run software projects under today’s changing requirements. We also give people the information in real-time, while also providing a complete view across the entire application development stack.
Who can argue with that?
6th Sense Analytics metrics
Pop quiz: What's the difference between a "nice to have" and a "need to have?" We've drawn up a list of three, seemingly unconnected, items you might rate as either nice to have or need to have. See which you think is the odd one out:
- Travel insurance
- Dell PowerEdge, duel-core, 4U rack-mounted server
- A Porsche 911
Obviously, the Porsche is the nice to have. You don't actually need a Porsche to get from A to B. But travel insurance and Intel servers? Well, travel insurance and a well spec'd Intel server qualify as need to haves. Why? Because, while they may seem like superfluous expenditures at the time of paying -- paying, that is, either for your holidays or when you are deciding whether to pick a cheaper server -- when you are caught in a crunch -- be it illness on holiday or scads of new users suddenly hitting your web site for a marketing offer -- their value, and the wisdom of your choice, speaks volumes.
Both will make your life easier, save you money in the short term, and -- in the case of the server -- help your company make money, as new business can hit the server and not get turned away by Error 404. Nice to have just became need to have.
In a similar vein, you have 6th Sense. We also help you save time and make money by, quite simply, by ensuring your software projects are delivered on time. We do that by letting you know where your project is, where your developers spend their time, and how your software developers are absorbing other technology and business decisions being made on a daily basis.
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More good stuff from Kathy Sierra here. (OK, we�re a little late, as Kathy posted this during what was the dark ages for our blog, but we think this one deserves some more.)
Micromanagement. No one likes it. Everybody hates it. Except, arguably, micromanagers. And as Kathy suggests, there’s a little micromanager in all of us� Isn’t there?
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Much has been said, read and written about application lifecycle management (ALM) in recent years. The logic goes like this: ALM is key to helping software developers work as a unified team. That's important because it helps software development meet the needs of business. Those needs? Hitting deadlines, coming on - or under - budget, and containing features asked for during the requirements gathering phase there were not dumped as deadlines loomed or the users needs changed with the march of time.
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Finally after months of working in our homes and the closest Starbucks/Caribou Coffee, we’ve landed. Other than worrying about satisfying our heightened caffeine addiction, we are ecstatic. We are leasing ~3000 square feet of open space that we will transform into a highly collaborative, stimulating work environment. We are centrally located between Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, close to lunch spots and very importantly the airport.Our address is:One Copley Parkway [Google Map] Suite 560 Morrisville, NC 27560
Thank you!
Hats off to our tenant reps Richard Harris and Robert Hoyt at Advantis. These guys treated us like a huge company from day one and helped us locate awesome space in record time. We highly recommend them for any company looking for real estate in the Triangle. These guys are the real deal.
