Obama protest during girl-on-girl church shooting*

Holly Harkness recently blogged about the importance of having *interesting* presentation titles. Just today, one of my favorite bloggers, the ascerbic, bitter Jetpacks has a similar post on *interesting* blog entry titles. Check it out.

UPDATE: I just got an invitation to “Kill What’s Ugly While It’s Young™ & Other Unspeakable Mtg Truths” from PMI. What a great title! Best of all, what showed up in my inbox was truncated after “Kill”. I was in a big hurry to find out what/who needed killing, and clicked on the email right away. Excellent.

*Totally fictional, but attention-getting, you’d agree?

Excel and Big Pitchers of Beer

When I worked at ISS, my bosses forced me to try to do documentation project planning with Microsoft Project. Imagine the following problem:

• You have a giant pitcher of beer and 11 glasses of different sizes.
• There are 20 people in the other room expecting to get different amounts of beer at different, specific times.
• You will need to use the 11 glasses for all 20 people, some expecting their beer first, some expecting their beer last, and some expecting their beer sporadically; and some people are dependent on others for their beer.
• I could add more, but you get the point.

You would be about as successful in using Project to plan the on-time beer delivery as I was in using it to plan our doc team’s resource allocation and doc delivery. Project is not made to work the way we worked at ISS. It’s certainly not made for cross-project planning where everything is fluid: resources, project priority, units of work, etc. After trying to make it work for a few days, I called the best project manager I know: my sister. She works for a consulting company that specializes in IT project management on the Enterprise scale (so she really knows her shit!). She listened to my problem for about 90 seconds, and then told me, “You don’t have a project management problem. You have a MATH problem. You use Excel for math problems, not Project.” I told her my boss insisted on Project, and she said, “Well, then you’re screwed.”  And of course I was, so I’ve moved on to nicer things.

Since then, Mike Hughes started working over at ISS/IBM and has evidently convinced them that Excel is the way to go, probably because he has a really cool method for tracking projects with it. You should check it out, if you haven’t already.

Project certainly has its place; I think it works best when you have a projectized organization and a well-defined Work Breakdown Structure. Otherwise, I think Mike’s method is a better bet. I’d love to hear about methods that work for others!

Yes, I would like to hit something…

…but I would not like to “Hit Share”, despite Jing’s getting started instructions to do so. I would rather hit the writer who composed these instructions, the editor who allowed (missed?) it, and/or whoever took Jing’s really fun, modern style guide a little too far.

I’ve been using Jing for, oh, about 20 minutes now. I’ll attempt to embed the URL of the offending screen cap here. As a lifelong user assistance professional, I of course skipped over anything resembling a user guide or tutorial and just started playing around. As a result, I have yet to discover a lot of what Jing can do, other than host my rants about their help for free on a site they provide. But I’m looking forward to learning more. Are you using Jing?

As far as hitting keys goes, my beloved Visual Thesaurus has published some bullshit heresy about it being OK to use “hit” (or its ugly inbred cousin, “strike”) metaphorically wrt keys. I can’t like that. I have, however, seen it in a couple of different places lately. Is it making a comeback??