Ian Burgess» Ian Burgess wondering and musings of a Project Manager and Consultant

Facebook as a Collaborative Knowledge Management System

Ian Burgess — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:11:22 +0000

What is Collaborative Knowledge Management?

To answer this question we need to first look at what is Knowledge and then think about how we as individuals, organizations and communities use and manage knowledge. First lets look at the definition of Knowledge.

Knowledge is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as (i) expertise, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject, (ii) what is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information or (iii) awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation. Philosophical debates in general start with Plato’s formulation of knowledge as “justified true belief”. There is however no single agreed definition of knowledge presently, nor any prospect of one, and there remain numerous competing theories. Wikipedia

From this we can see that knowledge is effectively the information or understanding that has been gained over a period of time by an individual, therefore organizational or community knowledge is the sum of the network of individuals within that group. The growth of Knowledge Management as a corporate focus has developed software and database structures to deal with data from several sources.

Most of these miss the actual reason and method that most of this information and knowledge is created (through the sharing of ideas and debate), a far more interesting example is to look at social networks and open source projects. There is plenty of information on Wikipedia and its speed of growth proves that the concept works. Lets then look at some social networks like Facebook and Myspace (I am looking more at the software and architecture rather than general perception of Facebook).

Facebook

Information Gathering

The interesting thing about Facebook for example is that it allows for easy gathering of knowledge and the connection of information between text, video and image. The structure allows connections between individuals (nodes) and information from non connected nodes to be displayed in a way that nodes that are connected by the 2^nd degree. An example of this is the individual wall showing messages from unconnected contacts, then this is brought in to a stream through the news feed.

Image of News Feed.

Groups also create knowledge by a community of interest focused round a topic these groups also become nodes in the network, this allows knowledge to be grouped by social or organizational groups (community or company) and subject groups (expert forums for the exchange of knowledge).

For example if you look at the GTD group on Facebook you will see that there is a large amount of information on products and variations to the system that individuals have used to implement their personal system. Why this proves the conversational method for increasing the amount of raw data in a subject related area.

This shows the one area that needs to be looked at if a system like this is to be used in a corporate environment is that there needs to be some form of editorial, this could easily be done by a version of related tagging and user assessment of the content (I like this) but perhaps in to categories a social and subject related category.

Notes

The notes facility is close to individual created articles, this space would be suitable for detailed outlines of individual thought on topics or concepts. The comment facility allows for discussion on points related to the topic of the note which could hopefully be used to create what Goldrat calls the “yes BUT” to hopefully speed the process refining and developing the information.

The Corporate Knowledge

The corporate knowledge could easily be attached to a user that would represent the company and only post accepted knowledge or start conversations to begin to understand the picture.

This is just some of my thoughts as I am in the early stages of designing a knowledge management system.

Edinburgh University MBA Panel – Careers in Consultancy

Ian Burgess — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 21:44:26 +0000

I was invited as Aidan Hetherington to take part in the panel for the IBC the other panel members were Alex MacPhie, Jeremy Webster and Scott Mcarthur. It was good to see the enthusiasm and drive of the future of the consulting industry and grow the links between Edinburgh University and the IBC.

Edinburgh Uni 05032010

View more presentations from ianburgess.

Gateway Project – Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh

50% of Facebook User Access on a Mobile Device

Ian Burgess — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:55:42 +0000

With over 100 million mobile users Facebook is quickly becoming an expert in mobile web and app access, this presentation outlines their road map. It is interesting how they are targeting network carriers and mobile manufactures.

Also the strategy to allow easy integration with mobile software developers with the connect library, This is something I will look in to more for some projects we are working on thanks to Tech Crunch for filming this video.

Adobe Air for Mobile

Ian Burgess — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 10:54:57 +0000

Adobe have committed to launching the Air platform on all mobile devices. Due to my involvement in Mobile Software I can only see this as a good thing.

Read more at Adobe Air Blog it is only a matter of time before this is fully ruining on Windows Mobile, iPhone and Blackberry.

Burndown Charts

Ian Burgess — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 16:22:11 +0000

In a project most of the stake-holders are only interested in the amount of work completed and if things are on track. In a Agile/SCRUM environment the best tool for showing this is the burn down chart. These are extremely simple to create with any Spreadsheet software, I commonly use both Excel and Google Docs for this. I will try and outline a simple way of doing this below:

For the burn-down chart to you need two pieces of information the amount of developer points in the SCRUM and the duration in Working days. After defining the iteration the total points (this is an indicator of the total effort involved) for the Iteration and the launch date of the iteration.

As an example lets imagine that their are 240 developer points or hours remaining and the iteration is over 20 working days, The visual elements of the graph would have duration in days running left to right and points on the vertical axis. In this example the developers would have to complete 12 points a day so a baseline graph can be plotted.

In Excel I create a table showing the baseline points for each day and beside this display the actual number of points left. This cell is generated by the formula number=yesterdays points – points done today. I will attach a example of this sheet at the end of the blog.

This baseline is important if you want to at a glance to see if the project is on schedule or running late, the speed of assessment and the simplicity is what makes the burn-down chart so useful. The other interesting thing is that the burn down chart quickly shows how good the developers are at estimating what they are capable of achieving in a day.

From a project management view point it quickly gives a good estimate to the actual finish date and if there are any issues allows you to spot them sooner rather than later.

The examples are of a project that is running late:

Burndown Chart Example

As you can see the Baseline or the target for the iteration is shown in blue and is an equal and gradual line that reaches the 0 at the end of day 20. The actual iteration is shown by the Green line which shows a difference between the estimated time and completion date. If you follow the Green line you will see that it is going to be about 2 to 3 days late in delivery or that the work has been under estimated by about 2 to 3 days.

It is this speed that makes the burn down chart among one of the most useful PM tools for software development.

Example format for a Burndown chart File Attachment: Burndown example.xlsx (11 KB)

EEE PC Windows 7 Resolution Hack

Ian Burgess — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:47:49 +0000

The only problem with upgrading to Windows 7 was that I along with others lost the 1024*768 resolution. After searching the Net I found this useful hack to give two new resolutions to the EEE PC.

Run Regedit
Search and Modify all values “display1_DownScalingSupported” from 0 to 1 (you have to change them all)
Reset the system
Change the screen resolution to either one of the previous settings or to the new resolutions of 1024*768 or 1152*864

I am currently using 1152*864 resolution and it seems to be working fine.

GTD In Windows Mobile and Pocket Informant

Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset

Ian Burgess — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 06:33:23 +0000

Hans Rosling clearly presents information which shows the changes over time in the health and poverty in the world, the visual style and presentation of the data is exceptional.

Talking at the US State Department this summer, Hans Rosling uses his fascinating data-bubble software to burst myths about the developing world. Look for new analysis on China and the post-bailout world, mixed with classic data shows.

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Football Strip Appeal For Ghana

Ian Burgess — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:57:30 +0000

Long term contact of mine, Mike Kean of Ask Training, has sent out a request for logistic support for football equipment to be shiped to Ghana.

To see the work they are doing watch Brite’s Story.

If you can support this please contact Mike by email at mike@asktraining.co.uk.

Challenges World Wide

Ze Frank Nerdcore Comedy

Ian Burgess — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:26:06 +0000

This is so funny just watch.

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RationalPlan Review

Ian Burgess — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:20:00 +0000

Some time ago I was asked to try and review RationalPlan by Tiberiu Ghioca. There are two versions of the application Single Project and Multi Project. The version I used was the Multi Project Version which retails for around $98 per user (compare this to MS Project more about that later).

The one obvious advantage along with the price is the fact the application works on Windows, Linux and Mac OS-X. This is appealing as I am among the few Windows users (by the way I am happy with this) in most of the projects I work on. So finally a Project Management application that is not online (I travel a lot and do not always have easy access to the Internet) that can be shared among all the users on a project.

What the best environment RationalPlan?

From using the application over the last few months it holds its own in the SME and Micro Company market against any of its competitors. Where the project management is maybe only a full time job for for one or two individuals or where a small team are delivering projects to multiple clients at the same time.

How did it road test?

Well I used this on a group of small projects using the same delivery team and was really pleased with the ease of use and simple interface. This screen shot was taken on a EEE with a 10.1 inch screen and this is a suitable screen resolution to make the application easily usable when I was on the move. Its lighter functionality in comparison with MS Project on was never really an issue when I was mobile.

What can it do?

From a functionality level it is more than capable of managing projects, baselines, risks, cost and resources which is really all you need to manage a project. If you are an MS Office applications user you may miss the import and export functionality the MS Project has with Visio and Excel. Although I have to say what I love about this application and has set it above all the other competitors that I have looked at is the project set up wizard. I have shown this to a few project managers who are starting out and everyone has been impressed with this tool.

The Project Set Up Wizard

This is the applications killer feature (shown in yellow in the screen shot) a quick group of forms that you can work through in a logical order and outline the whole project.

Project Section

The Project section allows you to define the whole project easily setting up all the project basics such as calendar and basic info but screens for notes and links also allows you to link to documents on the hard drive or network drive. There are also screens to capture risks along with assumptions and constrains which help to reduce the paperwork (files to manage the project) and make sure that by going through the set up you have thought about these factors.

Planning Section

The planning section start with creating a WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) and then on to building relationship and scheduling the tasks. Once this is complete and you should have a good understanding of the project you then add resources and materials that you will need to the resource bank. At this point you will use the next three screens to manage the assigning of resource to tasks, with the Multi Project version you can see availability due to other projects on the level resources screen. Working through the project section allows you to get the scheduling and resourcing right easily. You also define additional cost in this section of the wizard.

Controlling Section

Once the project is live you can track tasks and monitor resource levels and cost, I found it useful to refer to the other screens during the controlling stage. This being said you can still easily manage the project in the Gantt and resource views but the wizard mirrors good practice and helps the planning process. For this alone I would use application to help create projects and get all the information in a a re-viewable format quickly.

Why would I recommend it?

I already have on several occasions and it is especially suited to:

If you are new to project management the wizard will help support good practice.
For most users not needing complex integration and Portfolio Management it will do more than you need.
Small teams with multiple clients.

It is not a competitor to MS Project but if you are looking for PM software you could save a lot of time by down loading a trial from http://www.rationalplan.com/download.php