Mitch Lacey’s book »The Scrum Field Guide: Practical Advice for Your First Year« is an extremely useful book that helps new Scrum practitioners take the first step from learning about Scrum to actually doing it. The book does not explain the basics of Scrum and its artifacts because it assumes that the reader is well…
All of us who manage IT projects know that risk management is very important. At least that is what they teach us. However, do we really manage risk in the real world, do we pay it enough attention and last but not least, do we even understand the meaning of project risk management? — MonitorPro…
Dealing with today’s huge amounts of data requires analytics. IDC’s recent Big Data and Business Analytics forum was all about connecting data and analytics. The organizers of the event addressed questions such as: what are the forces behind the explosion within the digital universe? Technology has certainly helped, by driving down the cost of creating,…
As data volumes increase to the point where we call them “big data”, users’ appetites increase alongside. They want to be able to quickly analyze these huge volumes of data and achieve immediate business intelligence results. Agile approaches are becoming common in software development because they enable users to receive tangible results in short time…
Too often I meet data warehouse development teams who are implementing what they call »data quality« in order to help the business have cleaner data to work with. But what they are really implementing is »data gatekeeping« which hurts the business even more than if they didn’t have any data quality in the first place….
Humans often understand data better if we see it in a graphical format rather than just looking at numbers in a spreadsheet. Data visualization technologies enable us to transform data into visual building blocks that enable us to easily spot trends, discover connections among data elements, present interesting discoveries to others or to detect trends….
Whenever we talk about large volumes of data or »Big Data«, we almost always mention Hadoop, which may have even become a synonym for storing and accessing huge amounts of unstructured data. Although there is lots of chatter about using Hadoop in business environments, many business users don’t know what it is and how to…
All of us who work with data could donate some of our expertise to charitable causes through non-profit organizations. The organization DataKind helps to bring together volunteers with organizations who need data related services. I decided to attend an event organized by DataKind’s European operation DataKindUK based in London. The event, which was basically a hackathon, took place the…
Once again I was invited to participate in PMI’s publication PM Network, this time in their June 2013 issue. I contributed tips about how to be more productive on projects. The article lists ten miscellaneous tips for project managers. One of them was mine, about resolving minor issues by clearing the air via telephone call rather than…
Social media is increasing in popularity, both among individuals and businesses. Companies have their social media presence where they listen to what customers say about their products, services and brands. Such information can be useful in business intelligence solutions because they represent another useful source of data. — MonitorPro magazine, summer 2013, p. 16-19