Author: andrewpallant

New Project or Team Manager – First Two Weeks

There are plenty of tasks a person could do in their first two weeks as a new Project or Team Manager.  I have isolated some of the more important tasks that need to be addressed in the first two weeks of starting the new position.  Mind you these can vary depending on the size of team and the discussions with your new superior.

  1. Discuss your role and management styles with new superior.  Ensure you are both on the same page.
  2. Become intimate with company policies
  3. Get to know everyone on the team including their name, responsibilities
    and what they have done in the past
  4. Review all project descriptions and time lines
  5. Find out what each team member is currently working on and where they are in the time lines
  6. Compare where each team member is at on the time lines with the actual time line
  7. Discuss progress with My Boss
  8. Team Meeting
    • discuss priorities
    • discuss what everyone’s expectation is.
    • discuss what I expect of them
    •  ideas to get the projects back on track
    • look for team suggestions
  9. Discuss progress with my superior
  10. Meet with each member
    •  – discuss where they are in the project
    •  – together figure out how to advance in a more efficient way
    •  – set some realistic goals
  11. Discuss progress with my superior

Google Please Hire ME

Read about this on a tech web site ( cannot remember where ).   I thought Matthew Epstein ( http://googlepleasehire.me/ ) had a great targeted job search idea.   Loved the video and loved the site.   I think only a true marketing guy could have pulled this off so well.   Would not likely to work for most, but I have seen companies ask for applicants like this.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRHFEDyHIsc]

My Reading List

Andrew has read this book
Andrew has read this book
Made in Canada Leadership

by Amal; Morissette, Francoise Henein

See this book on Amazon »
Andrew has read this book
Andrew is reading this book
Andrew has read this book
Andrew has read this book on the Kindle  (Learn more)
Andrew has read this book on the Kindle  (Learn more)
Andrew has read this book on the Kindle  (Learn more)
Andrew has read this book on the Kindle  (Learn more)
Andrew has read this book


Andrew has read this book


Andrew has read this book


Andrew has read this book


SQL Bible

by Alex Kriegel, Boris M. Trukhnov

See this book on Amazon »

Andrew has read this book


Andrew has read this book


Andrew has read this book


Andrew has read this book


Andrew is reading this
book


Andrew is reading this
book


Andrew has read this book

Recycling and Trash Ideas

I had just watched Trashopolis on the National Geographic Channel; it featured Paris France.  On it they showed the history of excess trash and how Paris overcame it.  From the principal of rag pickers, they created city sponsored enterprises.   Back in the 1800’s a rag picker would be a person or persons who who would pick through trash, fix or clean items and resell the items at flee markets.

With the city sponsored enterprises, the entrepreneurs would run a depot where citizens would drop of batteries, old appliances, clothing and other items.   The depots would then clean, fix or re-purpose the items for donation or resale.   This seems to be cutting down on garbage, increasing recycling efforts and ultimately saving the city from garbage.  As an added bonus, the people running the depots run routes that would allow them to pick up items from vendors, shop owners and households.   I can really see the benefits here.

London Ontario every year discuss what they can do to save trash costs, increase recycling efforts and work on new contracts with garbage collectors.  Not once I had heard of the idea of a city sponsored enterprise being setup to fix, clean and re-purpose items for resale or donations.  This would also help the city encourage entrepreneurship, increase arts and crafts and hit the international stage for becoming more Green.

I think for thing to work, the city would only have to find a person to run things, donate a building and help build a business plan for the person to start.  This would be a great venture for a young person with a basic knowledge of electronics and business, recruit some local artists to help re-purpose items and you could have a good little business helping the city to become more green.

May be worth while sending a small team of business and city officials to places like Paris who seemingly are doing things a little better.

Click Once Deployment – Improperly Formatted

Error Message:
Cannot continue. The application is improperly formatted. Contact the application publisher for assistance.

Application validation did not succeed. Unable to continue.
Unable to retrieve application files. Files corrupt in deployment.

Solution:
For every project in your solution,

  1. Close your solution
  2. Open every project file in notepad ( csproj for c# projects )
  3. Look for the ToolsVersion attribute
  4. Make sure all projects are using the same ToolsVersion
  5. Save
  6. Load your solution and deploy.
Note: The Target Framework Framework is not the same as Tools Version

I had searched for hours for a solution, so I hope this helps someone else.




Value of Social Media to an IT Professional

The value of social media is all in how it is used and measured. Tech savvy users often use social media to stay informed, collaborate and to broaden the colleague base. Often business owners will make policies that make using social media websites an outlawed activity without any thought of why their Information Technology department would use it. Employers often believe that using social media sites will decrease the amount of work that one can get done in a day. It can also be believed that they are risking the loss of an employee to another company, should that employee network properly. Although employee poaching is a possibility, it is unlikely if the employee is satisfied.

Why do I use social media websites? I use social media sites to ask for help from other professionals, be in the know of events, and know about new technologies and to help mentor juniors that do not work directly with me in me field of work. Without the social media sites, I would be limited who I could ask for advice from and I would not be as educated in what I do. Every day I pick up at least one new technique from my social media channels. Today’s graduates that are using social media sites are often bubbling with knowledge through their blogs and other forums. I use my Google reader RSS feeds and my Twitter as a daily technology newspaper.

Some social media sites I use are:

  1. Twitter – Short instant messaging between users
  2. Google+ – Social media channels, organizer and broadcaster
  3. Facebook – Social media channels, organizer and broadcaster
  4. LinkedIn – Professional Social Media channels, organizer and broadcaster
  5. Blogger – Tool to be used for personal journalism
  6. Paper.li – Consolidate Twitter and Facebook information into a newspaper format
  7. BufferApp.com – Schedules Tweets to send to twitter.
  8. HootSuite – Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook feed reader.

Yes, it is true that social media can be abused. Users can post to often and about inappropriate things. Knowing your boss or family could be reading what you post, you should probably not post about going to work with hangovers, your bad dates (or an dates) or you interview that are going to or had. Always think your social posts can directly how people portray you. If you are posting every five minutes during the day when you should be working, probably means you are getting nothing done.

To know how effective you social media, you need to subscribe to metric sites. While there are lots of services popping up every day, you need to make sure the data they are providing is accurate and useful. On my radar right now is www.Klout.com. I like Klout because they publish how their metrics work, their graphs are easy to read and they watch more than one site. They are by no means perfect, but they give me a pretty good idea of where I sit. It is important to know your broadcast range, the number of republishing posts and acknowledges and it is important to know what topics you are known for.

What do the social media sites get out of their services being free to us? They get advertisements to the masses, but not in an annoying way. They gear the advertisements to what you are talking about and what you are interested in. They also get data sources of what is popular, trending and new. We as the social media users essentially build their businesses. get data sources of what is popular, trending and new. We as the social media users essentially build their businesses.

Why use LINQ

I was asked “Why I never used LINQ?”   I guess the real answer was, I never thought about it.  I really had no good reason for not using LINQ other it was new and unfamiliar.  When I finally used LINQ; I found I was getting rid of old habits and making code simpler and cleaner.

Example of code written in C#:

foreach (Charges charge in (ary))
{
     if (charge.ChargeDescription.ToLower().Contains("total"))
     {
         ary.Remove(charge);
     }
}

Code converted to LINQ:

var rslt = from Charges charge in ary where charge.ChargeDescription.ToLower().Contains("total") select charge;

while(rslt.Count() > 0)
{
        Charges chargese = rslt.ElementAt(0);
        ary.RemoveAt(ary.IndexOf(Chargese));
}

To this day I still use C# with a little LINQ to simplify my code.   I use LINQ for validations, quick look up and data manipulations.  It is definitely a change from what I used to do, but worth learning.  What I like about the above code is I had eliminated the nested if without complicating the code.