One of the main duties I performed as a consultant was kicking off a project for a new client. The process went by many different names. Iteration zero, project kickoff, inception, and QuickStart. Sometimes a combination of them.

The thing I learned right away was that there was always plenty to think about and set up. All projects are different of course, but all projects are also the same in many ways. So, I began to do what I always do in a new situation and make a checklist.

I learned this skill a long time ago and it has served me well in many different ways. To my clients, I seem to have a super memory and intellect. Combining the checklist with GTD helps greatly. To my colleagues, I can share the list and get feedback and improvements for my own projects and help theirs. Now on with how to create your checklist.

First, I almost never start from scratch. I look to those who have done it before and have learned lessons the hard way. Nobody is smart enough to think of everything, and besides, why duplicate work? Look to retrospectives, post mortems, project wrap ups, lessons learned, bug reports, lawsuits (yep…), API versions, forums, email lists, etc. Anything where people are seeing 20/20 after something went well or, more importantly, something went wrong. Put it all on the list without filtering. If you don’t have stuff written down somewhere, try interviewing people and listen to their war stories. You’ll learn some good lessons. Write. Them. Down.

Second, once you have your list, try organizing it by rough topics: architecture, project management, QA, analysis, client relations, contracts, etc. This is a good time to take the list to your coworkers and ask them to fill in areas that you’ve missed. The important thing to remember is to keep things on the list unless they are incorrect. This list is for all projects, not just “your” project.

After you’ve created your checklist, put it somewhere it can be seen and used as well as collaborated on. A wiki is great for this because you can have multiple editors and you’ll get to see all of the versions. Tell people where it is and have them use it. Asking for feedback on how it works is a great way to get them to use it. They’ll improve things and add new items as they come up.

At this point, you’re probably expecting an example or even full version of my checklist. Sorry. That would rob you of the experience of creating it yourself which is well worth your time in just the collaboration alone.

Initially, people will complain that your checklist is too long. Ignore them. Explain that the checklist is there to keep them safe and spending a 30 seconds or a minute on each item on the checklist will save them loads of time and mistakes later.

One last thing. The checklist is a great tool to make sure you haven’t forgotten anything, but it isn’t a substitute for critical thinking. The checklist will help you to not look dumb, but you still have to be smart. Good luck.

I’m always trying to find new ways to use technology to keep track of what’s being said out there.  Be it websites, RSS, mailing lists, twitter, etc. I try to know what’s going on for myself, my clients, and my colleagues.  As with most other things in life though, I always find someone who is doing it better than I am.

I created a twitter account using my name and not more than 24 hours later, Jason Calacanis followed me.  While this is not huge news (Jason has 62k+ people he follows), it was to me.  It means that Jason or a script is parsing his mailing list subscribers and finding them at places like twitter.  He can hear the train coming from miles away.  Can you?

I had a conversation with a colleague about doing consulting and that there’s really no such thing as an “organization.”  There really is just a bunch of people who need their minds changed.  The CxO’s I work with usually only need a minimum of technical help, mostly they need an outside change agent to help get their people in the mood to do their best work, so they hire me.

You already know how to deliver excellent service that blows people away. You just don’t feel like it. Your organization has the resources to buy that machine or enter that market or change that policy. They’re just not in the mood.

If I accomplish anything on a good day, it’s helping you change attitudes. I’m working hard at getting you in the mood to do the things you already know how to do. I think that’s what your boss/the market wants you to do as well.

via Seth’s Blog: In the mood.

An occupational hazard of being a consultant is that you get to see lots of the same problems in many different organizations.

It seems that sometimes little thought is given to how an organization can move from one technology to another or to move from legacy systems (where legacy means it doesn’t fit the organization anymore) to better solutions.

Today’s decisions can be tomorrow’s botleneck or bad design. It’s just a matter of time.

What can you do to help your future organization? Things like SOA can help. Great tests around your application are essential if you ever make the choice to change.

I’m looking for something better. I don’t know if you can ever get to a system that is that responsive to change. I’d like to see one that is.

I’ve started a project to create some useful Ubiquity commands for Mingle.

Here is a video of it in action.

Ubiquity for Mingle – First Cut from Joe Homs on Vimeo.

You can view the project at github.

OK folks, I’m now on my 3rd client having problems with certain four letter words coming up in their automatically generated promo codes. It’s easy to get around this problem in a very simple way: Don’t use vowels in your promo codes if you’re using letters. No need for special filtering software or huge lists of banned words. You can always add complexity later, but that simple rule will help you more than the rest.

If you want to get more careful, you could alternate letters and numbers, or use some other strategy. To be kind to your users, be aware that some numbers and letters look the same to people and they will enter your codes wrong (or worse, enter in someone else’s code by mistake).

To help you, here’s a list of the numbers and letters I suggest people use because they won’t get them confused with each other and hopefully your system won’t create any bad words (if they do, let me know). If you’re worried about the number of combinations you can make, just add more characters to the length of your code or allow yourself the option to generate your own special codes.

letters = ['B', 'C', 'D', 'F', 'H', 'J', 'K', 'L', 'M', 'N', 'P', 'Q', 'R', 'S', 'T', 'V', 'W', 'X', 'Y', 'Z']
numbers = [2, 3, 4, 7, 9]

You could then take this and make a simple ruby method that does something like this:

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letters = ['B', 'C', 'D', 'F', 'H', 'J', 'K', 'L', 'M', 'N', 'P', 'Q', 'R', 'S', 'T', 'V', 'W', 'X', 'Y', 'Z']
numbers = [2, 3, 4, 7, 9]
promo_set = letters | numbers # combine arrays
promo_code = promo_set.sort_by{rand}[0..14].to_s # randomize array and take the first 15 elements and make them a string
=> "CS4FZLHVMPK3QJN"

Joey at 7 Years By Ruth

Last night, as I sat with my grandsons reviewing their five and seven year old accomplishments, I was drawn again to memories of my own childhood experiences. Joey, my seven year old, proudly displayed his ability to write in handwriting, which had mostly been learned through self teaching, some of his capital letters. This, despite the fact that his mother was repeatedly requesting that they say goodnight and get ready for bed. “Let me show you a capital T, Gramma”, he said, laboriously outlining his project. “Oops!” I remarked, “You shouldn’t have crossed the T, honey, that makes it an F.” There was a stricken look on his face, and with an “Oh no!” he left the room. He returned shortly with his specially wrapped gift for his parents which had a large beautifully made capital F in “Fo Mom & Pop.” I whispered to get an eraser and we would fix it and he went and desperately began searching the drawer where such things were kept. Mom, by this time, and not knowing what was going in, demanded that bed time was now! And she forcefully directed him toward the stairs. The enormity, to him, of his predicament, started a totally frustrated cry, but he went upstairs. When she returned I briefly told her what was happening and went to call the sobbing child for just one minute. I explained to him that if he added a small “r” to the “Fo” it would change the word. With brimming eyes, and a moment’s thought, he realized it would say “For” which was perfectly acceptable. Tears stopped, the correction was made, and a true weight had been lifted in his young mind.

It is the tendency of busy adults to forget the importance of the little tragedies that are as monumental to a small store of experiences in children as larger ones are to adults. Showing them how to deal with and minimize error is one of the best and kindest tools to give them. The humiliation and lack of self esteem that comes from not doing what is acceptably correct can leave a scar no different than the scar an adult gets from the same type of things. The child has within him the adult he will be. Treat him with the respect you would afford, and the kindness you should use, in your dealings with all people.

The enormity of unresolved calamities of my own childhood, though they are small by adult standards, still come back to haunt me. Not that adults were uncaring, but there was an opinion that because children were small, their feelings were relative to their size. Not so! The adult is wrapped in a small confining package, straining to find answers to enormous complexities in the child’s body.

I miss you Grandma.

I’ve seen many teams using Mingle as a card wall instead of using real index cards. Usually the teams are distributed, so real cards wouldn’t help anyway. They all run into the same problem that Mingle doesn’t have a feature to automatically refresh a page throughout the day as the team updates cards. I’ll show you a few simple solutions you can choose from to refresh Mingle automatically.

Firefox Extension

A quick and easy solution is to use a Firefox extension that can automatically refresh any page called ReloadEvery. This is probably the least amount of work and works just fine.

HTML IFrame

I’ve also created a small bit of HTML that uses Javascript to refresh an IFrame that takes up the whole page. Just change the google URL to whatever page you need to point to and the amount of seconds you want it to refresh (set to 5 right now). It works in all of the browsers I could find.

Download Radiator

Do you love using Firefox’s built in Google search? Wish there was a way you could do that with your Mingle projects? Well, now you can with the code below.

I’ve provided a download of the xml file here.

You’ll need to edit the file to point to the Mingle project you want to use the search tool with and then you need to install it into your searchplugins directory for Firefox, which for Windows is probably something like

C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins

and for Mac is something like

/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/searchplugins/

Drop the xml file in the folder and restart Firefox and you’ll have your new Mingle search up and running. It should look like this

Note: I’m working on getting this to work as described in this mozilla dev article for Mingle. It shouldn’t be too hard since we can modify views in Mingle. I’ll blog about it if people are interested.

While taking computer science classes in college, I was taught to distrust a user’s input in all cases. The theory goes that a user’s data can’t be trusted because it could be malicious or just a simple mistake that causes your program to have an error with input it didn’t expect. So you protect your system from incorrect user input and sanitize it. It always felt like one of our dirtier secrets to me, however I fully advocate the practice in code.

My problem comes when the people building software turn from distrusting their user’s input to having a level of disdain for the users themselves. It starts innocently enough with the engineering principles I described above, but can sometimes turn into small things like, “Our users won’t understand that,” and starts to slip into things like, “Our users are dumb, so we won’t do that.” If you’ve started to hate your users, you’ve gone too far. If something is too complex for your users to understand, it’s your job as the developer/engineer/analyst/etc. to make it so that they can understand it. If you think of your users like idiots, your system will reflect that and they will notice.

If your job is to design software for people to use (which, is pretty much all software), make sure you work with the user, instead of against their best interests.