Communication Style

1. Back-office vs. front office
2. Client vs. customer
3. Dates - June 1991 or October 1, 2003, or Nov. 10, or the 12th of May
4. Dollars - CDN$12 million or US$10 million
5. e-words - e-business, e-government, e-mail
6. Healthcare (not health care)
7. Home page (not homepage)
8. Internet (not internet)
9. Italicize titles of books, magazines, newspapers while place "titles of shorter works" (e.g. articles, reports, studies) in quotation marks
10. Nearshore (not near shore)
11. Spell out a number (unless a calendar year) at the beginning of a sentence
12. Spell out whole numbers below 10, except $2 million or $20 billion
13. Use a hypen after words ending in "y" when large numbers must be spelled out (e.g. five hundred fifty-two)
14. Spell out "percent", use % where space is limited
15. Offshore (not off-shore) vs. onshore (not on-shore)
16. Offsite (not off-site) vs. onsite (not on-site)
17. Online (not on-line)
18. Telephone numbers - (123) 345-7890, ext. 1234 or 1-800-111-2222
19. Time - 9:00 a.m., 10:00 p.m., noon, midnight
20. Vice-president (not vice president)

Create a winning team

1. Start a WBS and see who and what you need
2. Make a list of the skills your resources need to complete the work
3. Start the work authorization process early so that time for your project is blocked out on the resource's schedule
4. Plan training that helps the team succeed
5. Plan groud rules
6. Set up work space
7. Clarify who will be responsible for hiring, firing and performance assessments
8. Choose your leadership style

Columbia Software Engineering Project Manangement

Lessons Learned

1. Validate all assumptions as soon as they are identified.
2. Conduct detailed stakeholder analysis as early as possible in the project. Pay attention to those who may not seem to be directly impacted by the project.

Clarify INTERESTS & CONCERNS, not POSITIONS

- Be persistent and patient in asking about interests - often a question about a party's interests will only get them to restate their position
- When estimating their interests and concerns, try to see the situation from their shoes

~ Negotiation tips from Common Outlook

negotiation - summary

negotiation - influence or persuade someone to get an agreement/outcome that are satisfactory to both parties

create value in negotiation by expanding the pie

work as partners to solve the problem

1. process - be fair
2. best alternative to a negotiated agreement - not a bottom line (walk away)
3. interests & concerns - not position, looking for differing and non-conflicting interests
4. options - be creative
5. benchmarks - not manipulable by any party
6. commitment - clear and operational, checking assumptions
7. communication - two-way, clear protocal
8. relationship - trust, respect, goodwill

Silence is gold

- Stop advocating after you have made your point
- Slow the pace and talk less when you feel nervous

News:Googling for ATM Master Passwords

Lessons Learned - always change the defualt password.

Blog: The U.S. Government's $12 Billion Sinkhole

Here's a fun little item, outrageous to both good project managers and U.S. taxpayers alike. The federal government has about
$12 billion in information technology projects "either poorly planned or going poorly," the General Accountability Office says.

News: Malware Money Tough to Trace

News: Credit Card Rules Reflect Industry Changes

Pebble Beach, California

Interview Question - Quick Sort

Cyber-Thieves Steal $700K Via ATM Hacking

Leasons Learned: GUI Test

When conducting the GUI test, one should also monitor the error logs of application server as well as the database server. Sometimes even the GUI does give you any error, the backend pieces might have issues.

Tips: Creating custom view in MS project

Step 1: create a new table
1.1 View -> Table -> More Tables
1.2 New or Copy

Step 2: create a new view using the new table
2.1 View -> More Views
2.2 New or Copy

Step 3: save to local global
3.1 Tools -> Organizer
3.2 Views and Tables tab
3.3 Copy

OSI Seven Layer Model of TCP/IP

Level 7 - Application
Level 6 - Presentation
Level 5 - Session
Level 4 - Transport
Level 3 - Network
Level 2 - Data Link
Level 1 - Physical

Database principles - ACID

Atomicity - all or nothing

Consistency - only valid data will be written to the database

Isolation - transactions will not interfere with each other

Durability - any transaction committed to the database will not be lost

XML Web Services

XML web services - the buildling blocks of distributed computing on the Internet
- exposing the functionality on the web through SOAP
- describing the interfaces in a WSDL document
- registered in UDDI

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)
- SOAP is a specification that defines the XML format for messages
- SOAP spec also describes how to represent program data as XML and how to use SOAP to do Remote Procedure Calls. These optional parts of the spec are used to implement RPC-style applications where a SOAP message containing a callable function, and the parameters to pass to the function, is sent from the client, and the server returns a message with the results of the executed function.
- SOAP also supports document style applications where the SOAP message is just a wrapper around an XML document.
- The last optional part of the SOAP spec defines what an HTTP message that contains a SOAP message looks like. This HTTP binding is important because HTTP is supported by almost all current OS's.

WSDL (Web Services Description Language)
- WSDL file is an XML document that describes a set of SOAP messages and how the messages are exchanged.
- WSDL specifies what a request message must contain and what the response message will look like in unambiguous notation.
- WSDL also defines where the service is available and what communications protocol is used to talk to the service.

UDDL (Universal Discovery Description and Integration)
- UDDL is the yellow pages of Web services.
- A UDDI directory entry is an XML file that describes a business and the services it offers.
- There are three parts to an entry in the UDDI directory:
-- The "white pages" describe the company offering the service: name, address, contacts, etc.
-- The "yellow pages" include industrial categories based on standard taxonomies such as the North American Industry Classification System and the Standard Industrial Classification.
-- The "green pages" describe the interface to the service in enough detail for someone to write an application to use the Web service.

-- Microsoft

UML

Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a standard language to specify, visualize, and document the artifacts of software systems.

Use Case Diagram
- A use case is a set of scenarios that describe the interaction between a actor (user or another system) and the system being modeled.
- A use case diagram displays the relationship among actors and use cases.

Class Diagram
- A Class is composed of a name, a set of attributes, and a set of operations.
- Class diagrams model class structure and contents at three different levels - classes, packages and objects.
- Class diagrams have three different perspectives - conceptual, specification, and implementation.
- Class diagrams display relationships such as containment, inheritance, associations and others.

Interaction Diagrams
- Interaction diagrams model the behavior of use cases by describing the way groups of objects interact to complete the task. The two kinds of interaction diagrams are sequence and collaboration diagrams.
- Sequence diagrams demonstrate the behavior of objects in a use case by describing the objects and the messages they pass.
- Collaboration diagrms show the relationship between objects and the order of messages passed between them.

State Diagrams
- State diagrams describe all of the possible states of an object as events occur.
- Each diagram usually represents objects of a single class and track the different states of its objects through the system.

Activity Diagrams
- Activity diagrams describe the workflow behavior of a system.
- The diagrams describe the state of activities by showing the sequence of activities performed. - Activity diagrams can show activities that are conditional or parallel.

Physical Diagrams
- There are two types of physical diagrams: deployment diagrams and component diagrams.
- Deployment diagrams show the physical relationship between hardware and software in a system.
- Component diagrams show the software components of a system and how they are related to each other. These relationships are called dependencies.
- Many times the deployment and component diagrams are combined into one physical diagram.

-- Kennesaw State University