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Posts Tagged ‘business’

If the role were reversed and I sent this email – would YOU hire ME?

25 Oct
P…..n is seeking  Management Consultant/Sr. Project Manager's to  help define a straetgy for a streamlined customer onboarding service model and user experience for a brokerage cleint's advisors and service associates.  Consultant should have top notch SME skills in brokerage as well as be able to run streams of work
 
15 + years experience in the brokerage Industry
candidate must have heavy PM skills – focus on Wealth Mngt/Private Client
 
Work with both Technology and Business employees
 
 Great Client Facing skills is a must for both. Large scale project initiatves.
 MUST be able to present a Strong Strategic vision
                                      
Skill Description
Sr Project Mngt. Strong Business focus. Able to handling multi work streams.
excellent writing and analytical skills
Experience on solutions type (fixed) strategy engagments a plus
Experience w/ Customer on -boarding

There are a lot of articles written about what job candidates should do to prepare their resumes and cover letters. Candidates are urged to pay attention to their grammar and spelling if they hope to land even a phone interview. But what about the other side of the conference table? Would you take an offer from an employer seriously if it were written like a 411 email scam? How about taking strategic career advice from a recruiter that can't spell strategy?

The above email from an IT recruiting/consulting company is so poorly written that I first thought that it was a joke. Let's look at this from the point of view that the recruiter should be taking. The Senior Project Manager position will probably bring the recruiting company anywhere from about $20,000 to $30,000 for an employee position and about the same figure for a six to nine month contract position. If we take $20,000 as a reasonable estimate then this email represents a $20,000 opportunity for this recruiting company.

Does this look like an email that you would send to attract and land a $20,000 opportunity? Even if the spelling were correct, stringing together buzz words without understanding what they mean will not attract qualified candidates. At a minimum, I would expect the recruiting company to adhere to the same standards that job seekers are expected to follow  and at least use plain business common-sense. I don't know how many other Sr. Project Manager candidates received this email, but I would love to see the responses of the ones that replied :-)

 
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Posted in Job Market, Just Business, Observations

 

OK GO Project Management? – This Too Will Pass

12 Jul

OK GO Project Management? – This Too Will Pass

OK GO – The band that did the wildly successful Here it goes Again video may have just topped themselves with their new “This Too Will Pass” video.  So what does this have to do with technology, Business Analytics, or Project Management? -  Well nothing directly,  but it is summer, the traditional silly season for news stories  and watching this video does remind me of some past and never-to-be-mentioned-again IT integration projects whose business  requirements run along the lines of: We’re keeping all the systems intact.  We just want all of the request and report functions integrated into an Executive Information System or Executive Dashboard with all of those nice new web features – and maybe adding a ‘lite’ version as well, that can be used on an iPhone or Blackberry).

Unlike some of those projects the OK GO video took months of project planning, ran succesfuly and was captured in one video session. What it does have in common with some of those past projects: Not repeatable; not scalable, not maintainable (all of which of course were not required by OK GO.

If you never saw the Here it goes Again video then you can see it here.

 
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Posted in Just Business

 

Cellphone "Bill Shock" needs legislation?

28 Jun

There was an interesting article in the 6/25/2010 New York Times that  “The F.C.C. is studying a measure similar to one enacted in Europe, in which cellphone users would be notified if they neared a certain limit on their bills.” (Note: I would normally put a link to the article but the NY Times seems to dislike this for some reason – their loss).  Essentially folks get their phones stolen or in the case of the new smartphones run up huge data and phone charges by not understanding when (or how) they are being billed. Apparently this has happened enough in Europe that the EU has passed legislation that puts a ‘cap’ on a subscribers phone bill where the carriers have to notify the subscriber and or stop service once the bill has passed a subscriber determined maximum. Really?

It’s bad enough that the problem is created by the carriers in the first place obviously credit card companies have no problem cutting off cards on suspicious usage because they are the ones that are going to end up eating the loss if any. So why are  the carriers getting a free pass here? It’s their problem if they can’t see that usage more than two or three times higher than ‘average’ (or $18000 phone in service charges instead of $260.00) for a subscriber warrants a phone call to the subscriber then let them eat the cost.

Consumers also share some blame here too – prepaid service is available for pretty much any phone- once your last dime has been spent you have no service until you put money in the kitty (which can be a 30 second phone call). Prepaid works for me, I switched about six months ago and in fact it ends up being cheaper since I no longer have a monthly fixed-price-use-it-or-not phone bill.  I just add minutes when I need them and the minutes don’t expire for a year and I will never have an $18,000 phone bill no matter what happens to my phone.

 
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Posted in Observations, Technology

 

You've got Bing!

26 Apr

I wrote last week about removing the Vuze application from my system after a sneaky update by Vuze infested both Firefox and IE (but not Safari and Chrome) with the Bing toolbar. It took me awhile and more than three attempts to finally unBing my system.

clippy your base pwnedWhile I can’t drop Microsoft or the Bing website from my Windows system, just the ridiculous MSN Bing toolbars, I can lay some blame on Microsoft for their short-sighted attempt to catch up to the Google search giant.  Co-opting the browser search engine default and ensuring that the toolbar is not easily removed may not strictly speaking be malware/adware but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck – theres probably another anti-trust posse lining up to go duck hunting.

How To Uninstall Bing

I ran through three different removal attempts. The first attempt was an un-installation of the Vuze application, which claimed to run succesfully. A quick check however showed that the unwanted toolbar was still alive and well in both Firefox and IE (and still sporting the blue-frog Vuze logo on the side). So much for believing vendor claims.

The second attempt was done using Revo Uninstaller (which is my preferred application removal tool) – I located a running Bing process and attempted to uninstall, this did not according to Revo completely work but it appeared to at least get rid of the running processes.

My third approach was to run ccleaner and clean Bing out of the registry. This appeared to clean Bing from several locations but still left the default search engine as Bing in IE and a  Bing Installation Directory  (complete and ready to re-install from a click) still on the hard drive. I manually deleted the directory and its contents and manually set the IE search engine back to Jawocko (a newish search engine that I was testing).

That appears to have done it and my system is once again Bing Toolbar free.

Related Articles:

 
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Posted in Just Business

 

McAFee antivirus – Oops my bad!

22 Apr

   It’s an old Reagan saying that should be familiar to Corporate IT – “Trust but verify“  (then again with all of the IT downsizing outsourcing and re-alignment these days maybe this is a now a new thought).   Okay, McAfee has egg on the face for the botched update that took out more systems yesterday than any recent virTrust but verifyus attack that I can remember, however the IT departments at those corporate sites that were hit may also have some ‘splainin to do.

   Clearly more and more departments are taking the easy road and either letting their corporate charges go directly to the vendors sites to pull down updates whenever they (or the vendor) feel like it OR if they do install centralized update servers within the corporate network, fail to adequately test those updates before releasing them to the rest of the corporation.
   McAfee has work to do but none of the other big vendors should be resting on their laurels either, IBM, McAfee, Symantec, Microsoft, Adobe or a host of other companies can make a mistake. Even if the update is 100% correct (from the vendors point of view) without testing how does the corporate IT department know that an update won’t take out an important company asset due to an unintentional (and untestable from a vendor viewpoint) conflict?

Trust but verify guys.

 
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Posted in Just Business, Observations, Security, Technology

 

VUZE goodbye!

22 Apr

Competition heats up and Real Estate in real life as well as on the web is precious – the key differentiator is the same location, location, location.

The problem on the web, just like in real life there is a right way to advertise and gain recognition and there is a wrong way.  Space on the browser toolbar is precious. One of the tools that I have  used for a couple of years now is called Vuze. Vuze is a bitorrent client (originally it was a pure client called Azureus) that was tied in to reasonably high quality media available over the Vuze network and it became a clean way to subscribe to internet serials, and video podcasts like the TED or even the MIT classroom lectures.

vuze browser toolbar hijack

The problem is the latest Vuze update essentially hijacked my browser added another line of duplicate search tools and “features” and adding insult to injury, designated Bing as my default search engine while giving it top billing in the new toolbar. The update itself in addition to being sneaky in its installation, is poorly written. The ‘huge’ overhead added to Firefox’s already slow start-up is intolerable. A quick peak showed java, python (jython?) and calls out to the Bing site (with a Vuze token) all while I’m waiting to use my browser.

I’m usually pretty good at not accepting offers to add extra features when installing software but this one came in as part of their update process and enough is enough. Vuze, it was a nice ride for a couple of years but you are history – there are too many good applications and companies competing for attention and browser space to put up with this kind of poor customer service on your part.

UPDATE:

I am now on my third attempt at uninstalling this puppy. The application “uninstaller” left the Vuze application launcher behind and what it terms the Bing toolbar (complete with Vuze icon) still running in my browser. I attempted to take out the application launcher with uninstall again (it doesnt show up) and then with Revo uninstaller (that failed to completely remove it as well) so now I’m going to remove Bing anything .exe from the hard drive and the registry manually and hunt don and remove any related Browser Helper Objects (BHO’s) and scripts – I’m glad I got rid of this application now, because it truly is acting like malware. 

 
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Posted in Just Business, Observations

 

Google's changed the game – again!

16 Apr

Google just unveiled a strategy for universal printing over on its chromium blog. The technology ties in to the chrome browser but, it will go beyond that to (in Google’s words) allow printing from any web app:

Infographic from Google Chromium blog: http://blog.chromium.org/2010/04/new-approach-to-printing.html

“...design a printing experience that would enable web apps to give users the full printing capabilities that native apps have today. Using the one component all major devices and operating systems have in common– access to the cloud– today we’re introducing some preliminary designs for a project called Google Cloud Print, a service that enables any application (web, desktop, or mobile) on any device to print to any printer.” Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted in Just Business, Technology, Web Services

 

Why you should NOT use twitter for project management.

26 Feb

I have been running across quite a few articles lately on why project managers should use twitter as a management tool. The rationale usually goes something like this:

  • Communication – keeping stakeholders informed.
  • Coordinating teams
  • Coordinating resources
  • Managing the work stream progress.

Essentially the (correct) takeaway is that a large part of the day to day project managers job is to communicate and that the best way to do that (incorrect) is through Twitter. I also have an underlying suspicion that these Project managers are not tasked with or worrying about little things like confidentiality and risk management (as it relates to information security not the project risks)?

In general, the project Manager will create a project plan – identifying the milestones and tasks and the communications artifacts for the team and stakeholders. Part of the effort that the Project manager puts into establishing the communications vehicle is to ensure that the communications have been received, understood and when required, acknowledged. Sending out Tweet’s ensures none of these things.

If the company or project does not have a formal content management system or other repository requirements in place I find a simple wiki like Dokuwiki works very well for two way communication and to store project artifacts.

Twitter can be useful for non-critical communications, for note-gathering, for obtaining consensus at large meetings and conference calls but I don’t buy it as a general Project management tool.

Twitter is also not entirely new, remember AOL instant Messaging (AIM)? There was a time when every email messaging system and web portal on the planet was falling over themselves to ensure that the subscriber status was noted (Green- I’m online or at my desk; Red – Not online don’t ‘IM’ me) and potentially available for instant communication.

Most people quickly realized that they liked the store and forward delay of email just fine and did not want to be interrupted at any given time of the day by colleagues needing an immediate response to a instant message where that expectation would not have existed if an email was sent or a voice-mail was left. Twitter does not change this and I suspect that a large number of the folks that wax ecstatic over Twitter today never had business AIM (or the IBM and Microsoft equivalents) inflicted on them in a business environment. As a project manager I would be more concerned when my development team were constantly updating their Twitter ‘status’ instead of the ‘code’ repository.

 
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Posted in Developer, Project management