Jinn of Quality and Risk

I live in Camden, London. Deemed by "authorities" to be one of 22 "excellent" councils in England. O Low Standards, very low. BBC News: An in-depth assessment of local councils across England has highlighted what has been described as a "postcode lottery" in service standards. Camden council... was highlighted by the Audit Commission as an example of how to run a council in an area blighted by poverty. But neighbouring Islington... was criticised for providing a "poor" level of service to its residents. 

Marc Canter: Timelines are a great viewpoint on data.  It worked in VideoWorks, MusicWorks, Director, Premiere and Flash.  Even Final Cut and iMovie (in fact ALL media editors.) Other useful viewpoints he cites: outlines, slide shows/sorters, storyboards, lists. Marc quotes Alan Kay: with every new viewpoint, comes 10 more IQ points. Can you think of other essential viewpoints that act as knowledge-multipliers? table of contents, index, ticker tape, ... 

Excellent use of Wiki. Brad DeLong: My kids--both The-Nine-Year-Old and The-Twelve-Year-Old--get the payoff from reading immediately. But they don't immediately get the payoff from math. I'm going to have to convince them that the payoff from math is there and is interesting, or else I'll have failed as a parent, and [their] future opportunities will be much smaller than they might have been. 

OpenOffice.org: OpenOffice.org uses a modified version of mozilla.org's BugZilla to track issues. CollabNet's BugZilla is called IssueZilla as it extends that bug-tracking system towards more generalized Issue tracking. 

In the UK, "weather" is a popular, obvious Google query. In France "horoscope" is a hit, and so is "loveparade" in Germany — while "lottery" scores in Japan. What is the common thread? 

Oooh! I've only seen one of Google's top ten movies: Spiderman, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Jackass, Scooby Doo, Die Another Day, 8 Mile, Signs, The Ring, The Lord of The Rings.

On the other hand, here are some movies I appreciated this year: Talk To Her, Rabbit-Proof Fence, The Grey Zone, Atanarjuat, The Quiet American, and Monsoon Wedding. I wanted to review them all, but haven't gotten around to doing it, yet. 

I don't listen to any of Google's top noise-makers of the year: eminem, shakira, madonna, nelly, 2pac, korn, blink 182, ja rule, metallica. Ha! what happened to poetry and melody? 

According to Google Zeitgeist, here are the top 10 brands in 2002: first Ferrari, then Sony, Nokia, Disney, Ikea, Dell, Ryanair, Microsoft, Porsche, and last HP. There lies the essence of the brand-conscious: dreams of fast, red cars; music while commuting or jogging; loud ringtones and voicemails in public places; copyright-addicted entertainment; self-disassembling furniture; standard (ahem, cheap) computers; cheap (sorry, low-cost) flights; omnipresent software; more fast cars; and a company that lost its way. What's missing? food, drugs, and clothes, for starters. 

Another perspective on the year 2002, Google Zeitgeist brings you the Timeline 2002. Timelines are great tools to capture important events and activities, showing at a glance their sequence and duration, if any. Very useful during a project debrief, for instance. Google believes that [the word "zeitgeist" is] appropriate to describe the program it implemented to share global search statistics and trends... 

Google Zeitgeist: 2002 Year-End Zeitgeist offers a unique perspective on the year's major events and hottest trends based on more than 55 billion searches conducted over the past year by Google users from around the world. Look at the past year through the collective eyes of the world on the Internet, as captured and interpreted by Google. 

Is there a site that tracks major contractual disputes with IT consultants? CNET: Information technology services provider Computer Sciences [CSC] is embroiled in a $100 million arbitration dispute over a service deal with auto-insurance company 21st Century Insurance. According to 21st Century spokeswoman Fiona Hutton, Computer Sciences abysmally failed to deliver software systems as promised. ... Computer Sciences said ... any damages should be modest, nonmaterial sums (does that sound like an admission of guilt?). There is not much information available about the actual dispute in the CNET article. 21st Century says CSC did not complete its obligation to provide the insurance company with software and other programs. They have written off $37 million of investment in CSC software and are seeking more than $100 million in arbitration. CSC refuted the claim, saying it did meet its contractual obligations but 21st Century did not complete work allocated to itself.

Some quick comments: $37 million is a huge project, unreasonably large as one integrated piece of work; a large project should have a project plan, including activities, responsibilities, and dependencies, and should be managed according to the plan; whichever party was not performing according to plan and responsibilities should have been evident as soon as it impacted dependent tasks; in such a large engagement, there ought to be a Programme Management Office (PMO) able to predict and report, if not influence, the outcome months in advance; if the project was on a path to failure, it should have failed (and stopped or re-started) earlier. Without access to further details, it looks like the product of bad planning and incompetent project management.