Programming Languages for Kids – time to go mobile At the BarCamp following the NZCS 50th Anniversary Conference, there was an interesting discussion on programming languages for kids. It was suggested that the key players ( Phrogram, Small Basic, Scratch etc) don’t get it quite right. That rings true to me. Reflecting on this after the session, I realised the reason: When I was… Read More
Encyclopedia Article This page provides shortcuts to my Earned Value article in the Encyclopedia of Software Engineering. Link to online copy. As of 27 June 2011, you can purchase just the EV article (without having to buy the whole encyclopedia.) [Update, March 2013: the publishers seem to have reverted to selling it only as part of the… Read More
Recent Earned Value Posts of Interest Glen Alleman posted on the difficulty (or otherwise) of the maths in EVM, and several of us commented. He followed that with an example in which the maths is very simple, which I quite liked as an introduction to Earned Value. Marcin Niebudek wrote an article, in which he adds a budget line to an… Read More
Speaking on Earned Value at NZ Computer Society Conference I’ll be speaking at the New Zealand Computer Society’s 50th Anniversary Conference, on the topic of Earned Value Management. I’m looking forward to being part of an interesting conference, and hopefully helping to lift the profile of EVM in New Zealand. Link to presentation abstract ( The abstract’s reference to “Number 8 wire” may be… Read More
Earned Value in a Nutshell I’ve been looking for a way to describe the “essence” of Earned Value Management (EVM). How can I describe the core of what EVM is about – without resorting to an impenetrable jungle of acronyms? This is particularly important when describing it to people outside EVM’s traditional strongholds of defense and aerospace. Outside those areas,… Read More
Added transcript to People Skills video This week’s “People Skills for Nerds” post now includes a written transcript of the talk. (For those who, like me, prefer to read than to watch videos 😉… Read More
People Skills for Nerds – a Summary Video This video summarises they key points I aim to make in this blog, that people skills are: Important, and Learnable (with time and practice) The video is an edited extract of my talk at the AgileRoots conference, at Salt Lake City in 2009. For the benefit of people who, like me, prefer skim reading to… Read More
Converting to WordPress Regular visitors may notice the site looks a bit different. I am transitioning to WordPress. Initially, all the old pages will be available both as WordPress posts and at their old URLs. I will eventually redirect requests for the old ones to the new URLs instead. By the way, this means commenting finally works properly… Read More
Sorry about old comments Most old comments, from before the conversion to WordPress, have unfortunately been lost. (Very sorry!!) I lost them when Haloscan (who I was using for comments) shut down their service. As it happens, there weren’t a large number of comments on any of the pages that used Halscan commenting, possibly because it was somewhat less… Read More
Does our intuition fail us? Why do so many projects seem to be OK, but, when you get near the end, they turn out not to be OK after all? Everyone thought you were going to make the target date, but at the last minute… well, no you couldn’t. I’d like to suggest an answer. Let’s illustrate it with an… Read More