Monthly Archives: December 2010
The Four Pillars of Entrepreneurial Behaviour
Unless we are in some way mentally handicapped we are all innovative. By that I mean it is almost impossible to find a human being who cannot think of a simple and immediate way in which the circumstances or conditions in which they find themselves cannot be improved…
…converting the potential innovation into something that delivers a tangible return is what separates the entrepreneur from the dreamers. In other words, we could express the formula as:
Id + E = I (~) = a/A
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Jesus of Bagada
Jesus of Bagada is a modern day nativity set in the West African town of Ideji, a place that is a mixture of my childhood memories of Nigeria in the late 60s/early 70s and Nigeria as it is now. While the angels do battle with Lucifer’s forces for supremacy of Heaven, a lowly postal worker and fanatical evangelist, who lives in a corrugated iron hut in a shantytown, discovers to his amazement that he and his wife are to be the surrogate parents of the Holy Child.
58,000 words Continue reading
The Dreamkeeper
In every culture live some who know that real magic is done by manipulating dreams. Within this group a select few know of the legend of the Dreamkeeper, the boy who brings the stuff of dreams to life. This is the story of the search for this boy by three dream magicians. One wants to rule him, one needs to use him, and one must stop him from being used at all costs because he knows the boy’s deadly secret.
80,000 words
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Dev Team Rescues Chilean Miners
It was fascinating and uplifting to watch the Chilean miners being winched to safety in their tiny capsule. But what would have happened if the operation had been handled as a typical software project? Month 1 First there would have … Continue reading
PM Creates face of Jesus in Gantt chart
We’ve seen his image on toast, in pancakes and in vegetables. We’ve even seen it photographed in a bowl of cheerios, but in a surprising new twist, Project Manager Jake Ronay of e-Cripes Inc claims that he created the face … Continue reading
Dumber than a bag of hammers
calculations reveal that the IQ of a bag of hammers is exactly 3.7, which our experts tell us is probably on a par with a man who does nothing in life but bang his head against hard resistant objects. Continue reading
The myth of fixed price projects
Even if it is entirely their fault, suppliers will do their utmost to stay in business, and running unprofitable projects is not a good way to remain solvent. They will under-deliver on what was promised, scale back on resources allocated to the project, either by using less or cheaper labour, and they will hit back with that dreaded weapon, the Change Request. Continue reading
A Breed Apart
Back in the eighties, a smart and eager young COBOL programmer became the butt of many a joke when, entirely unbidden, he wrote some assembler code to read and write records. This he claimed was more efficient than using the equivalent COBOL statements. Now it does not matter if you are technical or not, suffice to say this is the equivalent of putting a small motor in your wall with a gyroscope attached in order to keep your pictures level when you hang them Continue reading
A penny for your thoughts
Your blogger was in Nigeria a week ago, trying to think above the incessant wheeze-choke-rattle of the neighbours’ generators, which kick into life every evening to compensate for the appalling absence of state-generated power. Perhaps ‘think’ is too rich a … Continue reading
The jargon of innovation
While doing some research on usability as part of a review of a Computer User Interface I happened upon thousands of pages of what looked like complete gibberish. Then I noticed a pattern; the gibberish repeated itself! What did this … Continue reading
