Archive for December, 2009
Project Potion: 2009 Lessons Learned
30 December 2009Episode #2 of Project Potion is up.
Dave Prior and I close out 2009 with a review of the things we’ve learned over the past 12 months.
We talk about virtual teams, social media, labels, Artisanal Retro-Futurism crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism, the Pulse Livescribe pen, communication and other stuff.
You can click here if the episode isn’t displayed below.
Have A Fabulous New Years Eve!
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Project Potion: 2009 Lessons Learned
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Project Epiphanies: The One I Add This Year
29 December 2009I think it’s a Generation X thing, this personal development / self reflection / what does it all mean? / WHY? OH WHY? – stuff. 
So without much further introduction, my biggest Project Leadership / Communication Aha Erlebnis this year.
Epiphany: Social Media Skills Improve Communication
Because of this blog I got invited this year to a convention at the other end of my globe. Yeah, I know! I keep on talking about it.
I had never met anyone of the attendees in Real Life before. Amazing situation. It’s weird when people know you from your blog.
Conversations get strange. You’ve never met a person, yet you think you know them. You associate them with the agile crowd, the lean posse, the social media gurus or any other label in existence. And presto, you have a whole set of assumptions about your conversation partner.
It’s strange, but also very powerful. You can skip the obvious stuff and dive directly into some interesting topics to discuss. You connect faster.
It also works like a filter.
People that like your stuff, connect, others don’t. Huge time and energy saver!
The epiphany I took away is this: yes, it takes a long time to get to know a person. Yes, it takes a very long time to trust a person. But what if you don’t have that time? What if you have to work with people you have never met before for a limited period? Turbo charging “getting to know the other” by digital footprint, social media and “personal branding” is a huge time and energy saver.
Creating the blog, writing the about page, it helps communication. It helps connecting.
And. You know. Communication in virtual projects and communication in social media?
Same.
Of course, your mileage may very. This should work especially well for introverts. Although I am not one. Hmmm. At least, I think. I feel another epiphany coming up.
Epiphanies From The Past
Epiphany: It’s About Humans!
During my study I performed field research at a large organization. The projects their Project Managers performed suffered from what they called “interventions”, which were changes triggered by the project environment. Being educated as a plan-driven-pro, I set out my checklist and searched for forgotten process components, only to find out after a couple of months that everything was neatly in place. From standard documents to procedures, they had it all. And still the project went from left to right.
Being the eager beaver that I was, I just kept on looking and looking for the missing ingredient but could not find a single clue to locating the feature or process that would help to solve the pressing problem. At one given moment, I had an “aha”-accident (a hit on the head), which turned out to be a life altering moment professionally. At the coffee corner, I overheard fellow project team members have a conversation about a procedure that they were not going to follow. My jaw dropped. Not following the official procedure? Not complying with company policies? If they didn’t follow procedure then all the changes implemented were going to be completed without the project manager’s knowledge – clonk. The penny dropped. It seems so simple now, but it really rocked my world at the time. They forgot to deal with the people.
Epiphany: Projects Are Performed Under Less Than Ideal Conditions
I think I dreamed one time about a project.
It had already started. Apparently. The people that were available got a new label: “team”. And the budget seemed already gone. I thought. It looked like it. Couldn’t really tell by lack of information. And oh yeah, nobody in the organization liked us.
Boohoo.
So you don’t have the authority you think you have, your information is partial (at best), you have no say in team staffing and … you have to make it work. In a short period of time.
I thought this was a real shocker. Projects are performed under less than ideal conditions.
WHAT!?
And all I had as a Project Leader were my communication skills.
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
My thoughts exactly.
And you know what?
Most of the times, it’s enough.
Or I might have dreamed this.
Did you have any epiphanies this year?
Subscribe with iTunes to “The Project Shrink” video podcast.
Project Epiphanies: The One I Add This Year
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Which Project Server Instance Are You Connected To?
29 December 2009When you connect your copy of Microsoft Project Professional 2007 to an instance of Project Server 2007, Project Pro does not make it immediately obvious which instance it is connected to. When you look at the Project Pro 2007 interface, it may display that you are "Connected" on the lower status bar, but does not display the instance…
To determine which Project Server instance you are connected to, select…
Tools > Enterprise Options > Microsoft Office Project Accounts
In the ‘Project Server Accounts‘ dialog, it displays the "Current account" immediately below the ‘Add‘ button:
Good luck!
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Visit me on another time! I am out of coverage these days
27 December 2009hi all,
I am sorry for not blogging for the last couple of months but it is just a personal issue I am facing and stopping me from doing all of my activities that I used to do.
It is just a matter of time and I will be back. Wait for me and remember to keep visiting me from time to time
Best regards
Bilal Okour
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Using the New Project 2010 Fluent User Interface
24 December 2009
When Microsoft released Office 2007, a number of applications no longer used drop-down menus. Instead, they used a new interface called the Ribbon. With Office 2010, Microsoft made an effort to make sure all their applications used this new interface, which has been renamed to the “Fluent UI”.
The link below is a short 10-minute introduction […]
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Microsoft Project 2010 Technical Preview and Public Beta Expiration Date
24 December 2009Following these two releases of Project 2010 Announcing Microsoft Project 2010, Project Server 2010 Public Beta Availability (Beta 2)and Announcing Microsoft Project 2010 Technical Preview (Beta 1) I am sure you all have been actively deploying and testing this great upcoming release. By the way if you are still running Tech Preview time to upgrade to Public Beta which is a lot more stable.
As a reminder both versions will expire on October 31, 2010
(this also applies to SharePoint 2010)
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Microsoft Project 2010 Overview PowerPoint Deck
23 December 2009Following our two sessions on Microsoft Project 2010 at the last TechEd in Europe (Berlin, Germany): Microsoft Project 2010 Session at Tech Ed Europe 2009 please find here (SkyDrive location) the two decks used.
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This session provides an overview of the key investment areas and capabilities of Project Server 2010 and Project Professional 2010, including demand management, portfolio analysis, time tracking, and reporting. This session provides details of what Project Server 2010 offers IT professionals and developers, including new features for easier deployment and management, and developer-related enhancements across Server and Client. |
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Also check check these two videos we did for IT Pros and developers: Are you Microsoft Project 2010 IT Professional Ready?
Happy 2010 readiness!
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Microsoft Project Server 2010 and PowerShell
23 December 2009In case you have not heard SharePoint 2010 and Project Server 2010 will support PowerShell and hence will ship with a library of already about 650 commands. Please find below a few examples I wrote trying to automate Project Service Application creation.
One useful commands to get started: Get-Help *project* (lists all cmdlet that contains the word ‘project’)
As usual we will release Project Server 2010 PowerShell documentations by RTM on TechNet. One of the great thing about PowerShell is that you can easily create your own commands (think of a utility that issues PSI calls for instance…), stay tune for more samples MSDN, in the meantime experiment the power of PowerShell 
$projectapppool = "ProjectServer-AppPool" $projectserviceapp = "ContosoProjectServiceApplication" $pwaname = "PWA" $projectwebappname = "Contoso Project Server Site" $projectwebappport = 82 $projectwebappurl = "http://www.contoso.com" $projectwebcontentdb = "ProjectServer"+$projectwebappport+"_Content" $adminaccount = "contosoadministrator" $databaseserver = "DEMO2010A" # Create Application Pool New-SPIisWebServiceApplicationPool -Name $projectapppool -Account $adminaccount # Create Project Service Application New-SPProjectServiceApplication -ApplicationPool $projectapppool -Name $projectserviceapp # Create Project Service Application Proxy New-SPProjectServiceApplicationProxy -Name ContosoProjectServiceApplicationProxy -ServiceApplication $projectserviceapp # Create Project Server Web Application with its own Content Database New-SPWebApplication -Name $projectwebappname -Port $projectwebappport -URL $projectwebappurl -ApplicationPool $projectapppool -ApplicationPoolAccount $adminaccount -DatabaseName $projectwebcontentdb # Create New Project Server Site Collection # Get-SPWebTemplate New-SPSite -Url ($projectwebappurl+ ":" +$projectwebappport) -OwnerAlias $adminaccount -ContentDatabase $projectwebcontentdb -Template PWS#0 # Provision PWA Instance New-SPProjectWebInstance -AdminAccount $adminaccount -ArchiveDbname ($pwaname +"_Archive") -DraftDbname ($pwaname +"_Draft") -PrimaryDbserver $databaseserver -PublishedDbname ($pwaname +"_Published") -ReportingDbname ($pwaname +"_Reporting") -ReportingDbserver $databaseserver -Url ($projectwebappurl + ":" + $projectwebappport + "/" + $pwaname) -Lcid 1033
Great PowerShell resources:
- PowerGui: http://powergui.org (great UI editor for PowerShell)
- Zach Rosenfield’s Blog: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/zach/Lists/Categories/Category.aspx?Name=PowerShell (contains lots of SP 2010 examples as well as an intro to PowerShell)
- PowerShell team blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell
- Master-PowerShell | With Dr. Tobias Weltner (eBook): http://powershell.com/cs/blogs/ebook/ (if you want to go beyond standard commands and start creating your own)
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Dear Microsoft Project Community Happy Holidays/Merry Christmas/Happy New Year!
23 December 2009Dear Microsoft Project/EPM Community I wish you all a great break and lots of great non-epm time I see working with EPM as a marathon so here is a picture of a recent one I did (Portland last October), yes spectators cheered someone called “EPM 2010”!
After some rest in the next two weeks I look forward to an exiting 2010 year with a very exiting release in the pipe!
For those of you that I have not met yet, here is a recent video shot before the last Project Conference in September where I talk about what I do, still confused, send me an email http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul-TVO4WJRw
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TechED Europe - Microsoft Project 2010 Overview PowerPoint Deck
23 December 2009We did two Project 2010 sessions at TechEd Europe – Christophe (thanks!) posted the decks on SkyDrive here as he mentioned here http://blogs.msdn.com/chrisfie/archive/2009/12/22/microsoft-project-2010-overview-powerpoint-deck.aspx
We have also shot two short videos on the 2010 news for Developers and IT Professionals as mentioned here.
Happy holidays!
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