TaskCoach

There are a lot of little tools out there which can allegedly help you get more organised, better with time management, etc, etc. Personally I find most of the tools are more awkward to use and so consume time that is better spent on actually do the stuff that needs doing.

However, I did find TaskCoach which is a simple enough .exe file that I can around on USB stick, any task that needs doing I stick into there. It's possible to organise by category and to set deadlines on. It's short of a few features I would like, for example, no software seems to get the idea of chained-tasks, that is where one task has to be completed before another starts so as soon as you flag the first task as complete the second appears.
TaskCoach does have quite a powerful category system for organising items into different groupings and I'm using this to organise work tasks by week number. This is a very useful way of seeing what I've got on for the week and what can be deferred to a later week.

All in all it's a lovely little tool. Now, all I need is a checklist tool.....

Why change control can be a Bad Idea

I'm sure that many people have had to endure the torture that is a change control process. In short, change control is a process whereby changes to a system have to be approved by a change control panel.
Generally, the panel is a group of people who probably don't know about the system and/or don't much care about it so you have to be quite vocal in why and change might be needed.
The actual ideal behind change control is to moderate changes to a system in such a way that should a system fail or have problems it should be possible to use the change control tool to work out what recent changes had been applied and undo those changes or research/test to see if those changes could be the root cause the issue. Sounds ideal doesn't it? In reality it never works that way.

In the long run a change control tool can actually do more damage that it's designed to prevent. How come?

Let's say that you have a website which has a fairly minor bug. Let's say that you know that the change control process will take two weeks to follow it's winding path and that you will need to invest about four hours to write and represent what is, at best, a 20 minute change.

What do you do?

Do you spend the time and fix the bug or do you forget about it and press on with the several hundred other things that's on your list?

Let's say you pick the second option (and I don't blame you if you do because I've done that) and several months later that small issue could explode to be a big issue.

And that's why change control systems need to be as flexible as possible otherwise what appear to be minor changes will be quietly shelved and in the long run that can lead to a major incident.

I'll provide some suitably altered real world examples in a future article.

Marriage!

It's certainly been a busy previous six months. Not only the company take over but I got married last week.

The amount of work required for a wedding reminds me of one of those projects with an unmissible deadline except in this case the deadline really is unmissible!! Once a date is set, that's it. Full steam ahead until the big day and wow, what a day. For me, the big day was June 29th and it was too hot. Mind you, we had some lovely photos taken down by the river and then off for the honeymoon in Paris.

Now that I'm back at home things feel like they are calming down but I'm sure the next major piece of work isn't far away.... why do I have the feeling that my wife wants to have most of the rooms redecorated......!

Anyway, here is to you Krys.