Friday, February 26, 2010

Looking for a flight plan

Commentary:

If I were a pilot about to take an airliner off the runway at SFO to go to JFK, I am pretty certain I would not be able to get off the runway unless I filed a flight plan. This seems like a pretty routine thing. In business it might be called a business plan or a project plan for a project. Project management is a field in and of itself.

Yet, with the wave of technology initiatives currently besetting SJSU I have yet to see such a plan. As an employee charged with supporting these initiatives this is not only discouraging to not know the plan, it is disorienting.

How do you know if you are headed in the right direction at the right pace if there are no established goals or checkpoints along the way? Going back to the airliner metaphor; if a pilot is flying over Chicago how would the pilot know if she/he is on course?

I guess the only thing to do is to do what the air traffic controller says and hope to God that person has a plan. There is a plan that is written down somewhere, right?

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

The buzz about Buzz



O'Reilly's online managing editor Mac Slocum recently wrote Google Buzz: 5 Things You Need to Know. This is a great post for O'Reilly Answers about Google Buzz. In the post Slocum efficiently covers the key points of Buzz and compares and contrasts it to social media tools like Twitter and Facebook.