Vicky Lalwani

Roughly 5000 IBM’s customer support and service team members have been virtually shipped online to 50 different virtual islands on Second Life.

The intention is to bring on board IBM’s potential and existing clients and partners to be able to interact with their staff online. IBM has lifted various staff from its Australian and Asian offices to join 3D game to help boost and improve its customer service and educate the users on its products. Some of the 5000 team members also use other social interaction sites and programs to communicate.

The various islands are used for research, new staff induction, and meetings.

By means of putting them in a 3D social environment, the users are able to communicate by voice, text and read materials available in the game.

IBM claims that about 10,000 visitors have moved to this type of communication channel since it open in May.

General Manager of IBM.com said “In our IBM virtual Business Centre, we’re combining the content from our 2D website with our real IBM sales people, all in an immersive, 3D virtual experience,” “This forms a new, 3D client interaction model, one that we feel will be very effective. It may even be, we believe, the way some of our clients prefer to engage in the future.”

IBM stated that this early adoption of a 3D environment is a risk that it has taken however works as a tool in completing their current website, as opposed to a replacement.

Source: http://www.smh.com.au/news/biztech/ibm-expands-virtual-world-presence/2007/08/24/1187462452853.html

A similar concept was applied by Hyro to recruit new staff members - http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/9525/50/

In gamers can visit Hyro’s virtual office to view current career opportunities, submit applications, attend interviews and get more information about the company.

First we had the luxury of using a revolutionary search engine, then they moved to giving us the view of the Earth, further to maps of streets, and now we’re going to be seeing stars.

With an additional add on to the Google Earth application, users can now view the rest of the universe spending endless number of hours browsing through millions of stars and galaxies.

That probably explains why NASA gave Google a portion of their land and access to NASA data a year or two ago.

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2005/09/28/google-plans-expansion-on-nasa-grounds

Hopefully this doesn’t kill time that office workers spend in front of their computer desk, or am I being naive? Duh!

Alright Google - so you’ve done Earth, the Moon, Mars, and now the Universe - what’s next?

Facebook as most of us know is a highly booming and addictive social network site. 

The site allows for people to communicate with friends they know by adding them to a ‘friend list’ allowing for various interactions from private messaging, a publicly viewable wall of messages, photo galleries, videos, and all sorts of apps that keep pulling users back into the site repeatedly. 

The site started off as a university directory in America, but then took off as a worldwide social network.

Australia alone subscribed to an amount of 195,000 by 29^th July 2007. 10 days later this figured jumped up to 224,000. 

There are various groups on facebook that are dedicated to each company, down to people who just ‘slack off at work’. Users who sit not far from each other at work bypass the use of internal email and use facebook instead for non work related conversations. 

While some companies are restricting facebook internally, others are establishing protocols by which these sites, or other social networking sites, can be used.

On an average, an employee would spend an hour each business day on facebook – costing the company roughly $6200 per day. 

Multiply that 800,000 business across Australia and you have your $5bn problem.

Moving from Wiliam to Fairfax Digital has given me the opportunity to work closely within a Project Management environment as opposed to a role that was vague and pended definition.  

Working now as a Technical Project Co-ordinator in the real estate sector, means new systems to learn, new processes to adapt to and new faces to earn trusts of.  Moving from the standard PMBOK and PRINCE methods that I, in some form, used at Wiliam are completely different to a SCRUM methodology used at Fairfax Digital. 

One of the things I’ve learnt really quickly about SCRUM is that it works perfectly well in projects that change very often, or have high priority requirements. The management of projects are broken out into periods of time (usually a month) otherwise known as Sprints. Each sprint dictates what the capacity of the team members are, the expected output of work required and the monitoring of the progress of tasks during that sprint.

A graph is laid out to indicate ideal output .vs. actual output per staff. This then equates to overall project success. At the beginning of the project, the project manager lays out all the tasks into a ‘Product Backlog’. Out of that backlog, tasks are pulled out to form a ‘Sprint Backlog’ which determine what tasks are expected to be done during that sprint.  

A daily meeting is scheduled to get an update from the team members on the progress of their assigned tasks. 3 questions are be answered in each meeting – ‘what was done yesterday?’, ‘what will be done today?’ and ‘are there any issues?’  This meeting is in now way a means of status, but a means of commitment ensuring that what each member said is heard by their peers and the next day is heard again confirming “yesterday’s” tasks. 

The methodology allows pushing in a balance of high and low priority tasks where revenue is achieved in the quickest possible time. Iterations of deliverables are produced at the end of each sprint resulting in the final product launch at last sprint cycle.

Though given that a project in this nature can very well change scope, the SCRUM method allows for additional tasks and changes to the project to be added to the Product Backlog until such time that it is approved to be prioritised into the sprint backlog. 

This method has proved successful at various companies some to mention are Microsoft, Yahoo, Lexis Nexis, Lockheed Martin, Sun Microsystems and of course Fairfax Digital. 

In due course I will discuss about various phases such as planning, monitoring, project managing and delivery stories through this approach.

After a drop by 38% of students enrolling in IT degrees at University, Microsoft has decided to hire Australia’s bombshell Erin McNaught. After winning Miss University 2005, Ms McNaught decided to drop out of university and pursue her fashion career and is now positioned as Miss Australia.

Attending and hosting gaming and gadget shows, Erin admits that she is no computer whiz and that her body and mind is all she has to present to the target audience.

With the given curves, and jaw dropping gorgeous looks, Microsoft invited their bombshell to attend the Microsoft and Australia Information Industry Association annual technical education conference hosted in Gold Coast, Australia.

Microsoft Human Director, Rose Clements, stated that the IT industry is “not one of the sexier professions”. True that! Wait, I am in the IT industry… damn!

During my experience in web development, I played a part of project management for various projects sized from 1 man hour through to 1000 man hours. Each project varied in the way I had to deal with the client, resources and controlling the project in itself.

It is said that approx 30% of started projects are considered successful. Most of them fail while the rest are generally challenged by overruns, inaccuracy or loss to the business.

Hence this blog will try to explain what I think a project manager should bear in mind to be able to deliver a project on time and on budget.

Most experienced project managers have a certain discipline or a consistent behaviour when it comes to project management that are not only shown during the production cycle but also in their day to day lives. Project managers learn from experience and use them in their future tasks. Without knowing what to anticipate a project manager is simply stabbing the dark and hence why projects tend to fail. No project is guaranteed to succeed unless it has been properly planned out.

Some sort of tool needs to be put in place in order to manage projects. Be it a spreadsheet or a Microsoft Project plan, an application must be used in order to manage resources, report on the project status, achieving deadlines as well as assist in the initial estimation.

During my university days, my professor insisted that Project Managers should love ‘change’. Changes to a project can sometimes open opportunities for things to be done differently and gives you a fresher perspective on the project at hand. Sure enough it can damage your plans on the whole, but that’s what makes it challenging.

Project Managers would definitely require a skill in foreseeing problems in a project and not after it has occurred. By being able to successfully make the right decisions, meeting your budgets and deadlines, aiming to lower the cost of your project (by still billing the client the same), managing your resources to avoid conflicts and finally delivering to the scope of the project allows you to ensure that your project is smoothly run.

A PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) process defines the bare minimum required as the basics of project management. This involves:

Initiating a project. This involves a proposal template, wireframes, specification, scoping documents and estimation of the project itself.

Planning. By being able to understand the availability of your resources and their skills, you map out a project plan that defines when a project starts and ends along with determining your project’s critical path, dependencies and risks. It is always good to focus on milestone achievements at various stages for your entire project.

Executing. This is where your people skills come into play whereby you successfully delegate and ensure that the work required to be done by each resource. It is also a good idea to be checking that that work produced meets quality and accuracy of the project specification.

Controlling. Using your project management tool, you are able to control changes, monitor activities, meet milestones and therefore ensure that the project does not drift away from its primary objectives.

Closing. The most crucial part of the project phase and usually the last 5% that holds a project back. Ensuring that all quality assurance has been executed, that the client has completed their obligations to the project and have successfully signed off each phase as outlined in your planning phase.

Regardless of what methodology is used by a Project Manager, I find it best that the client be told during a project kick off meeting as to what the phases are, and in what way the Project Manager intends to drive the project. This obviously gives some confidence to the client while at the same time allows to the client to understand what they are responsible for (if any) that could delay the delivery of a project.

There is no better feeling than a Project Manager being able to successfully deliver their projects completing it on time and on budget. With the above basics, it may allow for project managers to start thinking about their own methods of project management.

In my coming blogs, I will aim to talk about various tools including one what was custom built for the production environment during my time at the web development agency.

Looks like a scientist has decided to spend some time in researching how healthy it is to sit next to a laser printer… Seems like QUT (Queensland University of Technology) has some time at hand for this research work.

Apparently “hazardous” particles are emitted when printing and can cause respirator, cardiovascular, and possibly cancer depending on the type of particle. While none of the particles haven’t been studied on, it seems they are dangerous to our health. Should we now be complaining about the smokers at work or the laser printer that sits on the corner constantly puffing away?