Category Archives: IT

1 page in MVC and Another in C#?

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As an instructor of NET Framework 4 that uses Visual Studio 2010, ASP.NET is under-the-hood object patterns.  C# is the best language to use since it designed to be compatible with NET Framework 4 and so is SQL 2008 and Server 2008 with Active Directory using Federation features.  Any MS versions less than these are going to be phased-out because the earlier software versions were a bit of a batch job because all the Federation and NET Framework 4 collaboration features were not fully compatible within the same object pattern technology (based on C# features).  Hence, this most currently implementation level now supports all Federal design goals; the federation feature allows MS to use one architect/framework that achieves single one logon for the Internet doing away with dealing with intranet and extranet configurations.  This was and has been Gates’ vision for over a decade.

There will be fewer and fewer radical changes in the architecture unless a sever design fault is discovered.

ASP.NET is a facade build on object patterns to keep the millions of small developers under the MS family marketing umbrella.  Under-the-hood the object pattern inventory services were built to support patterns like MVC, MVP, SOA, and other more advanced object patterns.  ASP.NET will die on its own being replaced by the newer generation of programmers while attempting to assist the older ASP.NET style programmers to move to MVC.  MVC is more robust, easier and faster program as well as less fragile.  Therefore, the best moves are to build using Visual Studio 2010 with C# and NET Framework 4 using MVC object patterns.  This way you will be OK in 2 years when Microsoft will move away from supporting ASP.NET (or just won’t enhance its features).

I have moved to include the SOA service design software such as (WF) Work Flow and (WFC) Windows Communication Foundation since these are used to create Internet facing transaction applications that can be Cloud enabled.  More fun stuff.,,

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SEM+SOA(Security+)+SEO Framework Methodology with Business Scaffolding Approach

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i4Aid has enhanced their IT consulting practice to a short-hand expression of SEM+SOA(Security+)+SEO as a scaffolding approach to transforming business vision while integrating IT service capabilities. It works just like remodeling a building – you start by building a scaffolding consulting framework. Then point-to-point you start changing different parts of the business but start at the top by building a new enterprise vision, mission and goals for the business – then you develop framework for produce-lines or product channels – all the way to a single product and or service item by recasting service capabilities and maximizing SEO values for hub website and social networks. This moves a firm into the future of a fully actualizing there business vision in a cloud Internet environment – into an actualize, relationalized, modernized, futurized, and revenuizing business

This remodeling method stresses team goals not personal performance such that when a team goal is achieved the team is honored equally (it follows some Scrum rules) Also it promotes a choice cascading style of management such that empowerment is made policy at each level in a business or organization. This creates a growth pattern of management while promoting service capabilities and social networking possibilities for marketing and eCommerce.. Combining these team skills in a directed top-down approach – with a SEM+SOA(Security+)+SEO framework aligns business vision with marketing vision and integrates your vision into to very fabric of the service capabilities at all levels in the IT framework while promoting excellent SEO – thus achieve the business vision while promotng promoting cloud Internet actions.

New Resume link on My LinkedIn Profile Page

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My resume link on my LinkedIn page has been updated to use “Browser Resume Box.net” to display an html version of my resume.

More details…
View Eugene M Murray's LinkedIn profileView Eugene M Murray’s LinkedIn professional profile< – click “View Full View” then go “Box.net – Eugene M. Murray @ i4Aid Profile and click on one of my resumes and down load!

Website Outages & Blackouts – the Right Way

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To see all the details go to Website outages and blackouts the right way by Pierre Far
…
tl;dr: Use a 503 HTTP status code but read on for important details.

Sometimes webmasters want to take their site offline for a day or so, perhaps for server maintenance or as political protest. We’re currently seeing some recommendations being made about how to do this that have a high chance of hurting how Google sees these websites and so we wanted to give you a quick how-to guide based on our current recommendations.

The most common scenario we’re seeing webmasters talk about implementing is to replace the contents on all or some of their pages with an error message (“site offline”) or a protest message. The following applies to this scenario (replacing the contents of your pages) and so please ask (details below) if you’re thinking of doing something else.

1. The most important point: Webmasters should return a 503 HTTP header for all the URLs participating in the blackout (parts of a site or the whole site). This helps in two ways:

a. It tells us it’s not the “real” content on the site and won’t be indexed.

b. Because of (a), even if we see the same content (e.g. the “site offline” message) on all the URLs, it won’t cause duplicate content issues.
2. Googlebot’s crawling rate will drop when it sees a spike in 503 headers. This is unavoidable but as long as the blackout is only a transient event, it shouldn’t cause any long-term problems and the crawl rate will recover fairly quickly to the pre-blackout rate. How fast depends on the site and it should be on the order of a few days.

3. Two important notes about robots.txt:

a. As Googlebot is currently configured, it will halt all crawling of the site if the site’s robots.txt file returns a 503 status code for robots.txt. This crawling block will continue until Googlebot sees an acceptable status code for robots.txt fetches (currently 200 or 404). This is a built-in safety mechanism so that Googlebot doesn’t end up crawling content it’s usually blocked from reaching. So if you’re blacking out only a portion of the site, be sure the robots.txt file’s status code is not changed to a 503.

b. Some webmasters may be tempted to change the robots.txt file to have a “Disallow: /” in an attempt to block crawling during the blackout. Don’t block Googlebot’s crawling like this as this has a high chance of causing crawling issues for much longer than the few days expected for the crawl rate recovery.

4. Webmasters will see these errors in Webmaster Tools: it will report that we saw the blackout. Be sure to monitor the Crawl Errors section particularly closely for a couple of weeks after the blackout to ensure there aren’t any unexpected lingering issues.

5. General advice: Keep it simple and don’t change too many things, especially changes that take different times to take effect. Don’t change the DNS settings. As mentioned above, don’t change the robots.txt file contents. Also, don’t alter the crawl rate setting in WMT. Keeping as many settings constant as possible before, during, and after the blackout will minimize the chances of something odd happening.

To see all the details go to Website outages and blackouts the right way by Pierre Far

Any Recommendations for Project Management Software?

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One issue I have always had with most software project tool is load balancing between planning and implementing stages. The issue we need to plan the type of skill level with load balancing to project expected levels and types staffing per roles needed. Said another way, we use staffing by categories to forecast staffing by role needed – so we can consider roles needed in combination with learning level requirements. Consider, the skill level within a defined role of a given person changes very significantly between six, twelve, eighteen, and 24 months but is fairly constant from 2 years to 5 years. Thus, if your resources are limited to people with less than 2 years more training and supervision will be required with the six months level requiring the most. This same grading of level of experience applies equal to company knowledge (acculturation effect) level of experience, another significant forecasting issue that can increase funding levels. And so-on and so-on .
However, when we assign an actual person, they may fill more than one of these forecasted roles and they are usually over loaded (how about 120 for a 40 hour work week). Obviously you can’t avoid this overload skewing. It can be mitigated as long as it does overly skew monthly, quarterly or yearly manhour planning. Once the initial planning with overall WBS has been iterated a couple of times a guesstimate of actually staffing levels can be used, But this doesn’t guarantee the actual persons wanted can be acquired so recasting using a scheme such as PA1, PA2, etc can be used to possibly reduce the eventual skewing of actual person/role versus manhours forecasting. Also, one would like the system to keep this staff forecasting by role for comparison against actual staffing. More fun stuff…

LinkedIn: The Project Manager Network – #1 Group for Project Managers
Topic: Any recommendations for a project management software?

Success for Projects – Anything Over 85% Complete

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Success for many projects is anything over 85% complete. Why 85% – you need to read on. Also, 4 out 5 successes is great but I’m talking major IT development project over 2 years. Many projects are just called complete based on a time period of 1 year (we did this at Toyota Motors, USA). Why? The reality is that there is always scope creep as stakeholders improve their business knowledge base and their expectations. The 2nd year starts a “new” project with all the new expectations and new goals (and partly for financial reasons).

We literally took all the completion requirement sheets, turned them over, took them off the table, and put a new, blank sheet of paper out to emphasize the past/old was done and now they could start asking what they wanted for the 2nd/next year. It was amazing thing to do and watch the shareholder expressions – but works! There is also a physiological and mental characteristic that says making something “old” and it becomes an accepted fact; you can do this mental switch by starting with a fresh blank piece of paper (this also works in training). And wait – for the other side to start talking about what “new” goals and requirements they want.

One very important aspect of completing a project is giving the staff a definite stopping point because they will continue to attempt to improve or correct software they don’t “feel” is complete. So many projects, phases, and major task points are just called by the lead analysis. On the other hand, you need to have a transition work path that pulls the staff away from the “completed” activities and forces them to devote all their time on the new, transition activities. This is why it is important that leads and project managers repeatedly and decisively call “completion”.

Yes, it takes some courage, experience, and firmness but that is part of being a leader.

LinkedIn: The Project Manager Network – #1 Group for Project Managers
Topic: Is it possible that Project Management can ever reach a point where all projects succeed?

How can a PM Effectively Overcome a Project Handed to Them in the Red?

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Eugene M Murray’s First Response on Linked
First, remember what a sunken cost represents – that is, funds that have already been spent. Many of my clients unconsciously seemed to assume that some how the completion of the project would not only earn the original expected benefits but recapture this sunken cost already lost!

Mike Ellison has very good advice. For several projects, I just started by implementing what is call a positive, forward looking weekly management reports process. The whole notion takes some explaining so I will just give the expected result. Have people report what they have completed for the last 2 weeks and report what they are expecting to complete this week and forecast the next week (submitted on Friday). Have your lower level project leads review these reports in a staff meeting on Tuesday morning (why – another long explanation). The basic result is to emphasis completion and thus success – personal success at every level.

1 – This keeps things moving
2 – Starts to develop an attitude of personal participation in the completion process
3 – Keeps the focus on positive, forward looking behavior while you minimize the “protect your a__” attitude that is usually a present hold over from the past (another type of sunken cost).

While this process is ongoing, review these weekly reports and ask that each groups manager summarize what their people expect to accomplish and how that aligns with their major business goals. Yes, your are asking them to repeat somethings but this simply re-enforces how their completion focus aligns with what their people are doing – more simplistically if you can’t write it down – you probably can’t do it. (If this process becomes a bit repetitious – you are making good turn-around progress by increasing the amount of work they are doing while reducing your time so that you can move on. Enjoy this, the real work with the big payoff is coming!)

Concurrently, review the risk factors in conjunction with major tasks – many times there are immediate results reported in the weekly reports that you can capitalize to make forward jumps in the completion process. Also, this gives you a fast chance to put your energy into supporting the best positive, forward looking near completion results. (Again, they increase their completions while you decrease you time so that you can move on.)

That usually take care of the first three weeks. Week 4 – you should start by partitioning the project into major business benefits forecasting so that you can make a positive, forward looking projection of how to bring the whole project to its final completion; the partition help with proper scoping of the project. This is called a re-targeting process – a heuristic estimate so that you can start realign completion work (now that you have gain more people’s participation) for completing the project.

This process was used to bring early success to the IT development of the Toyota Motors, USA National Part System in just one year. Revenues at start was $85 million and 3 years later revenues were up to about $500 million – but basically the IT goals where completed in the last year and the system accommodated the greater increase in business. The 4th year produced even more completions.

LinkedIn: The Project Manager Network – #1 Group for Project Managers
Topic: How can a PM effectively overcome a project handed to them in the red?

(SEM+BI)+SOA(SECURITY+)+SEO Framework Issues

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Should BI teams be more focused on the business side of things or should they have technical IT expertise?

i4Aid/Internet4Aid RESPONSE:

Ajay Sharma • There is no one answer to this question. BI teams have multiple roles – some of which fit in the business side while others in IT. PMO role is required to manage and deliver to the timelines and comitments from various groups involved in a typical BI project. While business owns the functionality and final outcome of the project, IT should own the infrastrucutre, maintenence, licensing, operational aspects of the BI project. There is general accusation that IT slows down teh project and cant keep pace with the agility required by the business. This is a true statement but can be addressed by carefully designing BI project teams. There are various models that can be implemented based on organization’s structure and culture.

i4Aid • My quick response is that Ajay Sharma presented the appropriate basics including his notion about the integration aspects. Briefly, BI should fill out management policies and provide the first break-down levels for the functional processes but not more than 5 levels of detail. Then IT should review and integrate these processes into their IT framework before doing more levels of detail – it is a kind of first scope and impact estimations as they adjust and balance conceptualization and implementation. Then review and balance with both parties – do this before before specifying any more detail processes and procedures and agree on any high level the risk factors. Then do a rough estimate of project timeline.

We did this on the Toyota Motors, USA National Parts System development and it remained fairly scoped for 1-2 years of our development process such that IBM adopted most of this high-level approach.

I will be entering this in my blog: i4Aid.WordPress.com