Scratch notes on what is a Project and Project Management

Frederick Giasson

What is a Project?

All projects are the result of a certain sort of cogitation. They normally born from fuzzy ideas and their realization are uncertain and faraway.

Some will say that they are building or developing a project. Other will say that they are leading a project. As you can see, a project is in reality a state. This is the state where the project managers are when they try to reach their objectives, with their ad hoc means in given deadlines.



A project could then be seen as a working team that tries to be in such a state.

What Is Project Management?

Project management is the activity that has as goal to end a project by reaching the objectives, with certain means in given deadlines. Managing a project also mean that they will need to take into account the constraints applied to the project and unforeseen events that could happen, and that probably will, during the realization of that project.

  • Time management. The time management will help the project manager to be sure that he will be able to end a project, in the deadlines. Managing the time means defining a path to follow to end the project, and to timestamp it. The addition of these timestamps will form a time envelop. It is that envelop that the managers will have to manage. The main tool used to manage it is the old fashioned calendar. Then the manager will know if he will be able to reach the objectives of the project, in the specified deadlines.
  • Resources management. At the beginning, the project will benefit of a given budget. This budget represents the means of the project. With that budget, managers will be able to buy the resources that they will need to reach the objectives of their project in the specified deadlines. Managing the resources could means buying material they will need to end the project. It could also means building effective working teams, or knowing their employees to know what they are really good at and affecting them for the right tasks. All things that belong to a project are resources and are there to be managed.
  • Production management. The production management is nothing else than the path managers will follow to reach their objectives.



You need to have in mind that objectives, deadlines and means are inter-linked: they are the mind, the heart and the guts of Projects.

These definitions are applicable to all type of projects. However, if you put them into context, you could see the things differently.

By example, in a software development project, the objectives will only be totally defined at the end of the project. It could seem strange, but if you think about it, s software is not tangible. It is an aggregation of functions that will act together to create a certain comportment. Software developers will define what are the functionalities of their software (potentially with your client), they will model it, create prototypes, and test available technologies. Then they will eventually develop it, test it, tweak it, debug it, and finally release it. But they will not know how the final release version will really works before finishing it, impossible.

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Welcome to this new version of the Fred On Something blog

Frederick Giasson

I am proud to announce the opening of the new version of the Fred On Something blog.

Why have I changed the blog? The first reason is to be able to blog when I will be in India, in some months. I needed to have access to a web interface to publish my posts and Radio Userland did not give me that possibility. So I started to search for a blogging platform and hosting service. It is at that time that the “28 things to check when searching for a blog system and a hosting service” list is born.

I finally got all these wanted features at a local traditional web hosting company that created a new blog hosting service last week. I got this beautiful package for 9$ CND per month at IWeb-Hosting. The blogging system used by Iweb-Hosting is b2Evolution. It is a beautiful piece of software wrote by Francois Planque. It is really easy to install and to customize.

The transfer had been a pain. I had to repost all my posts and comments, and also had to change the dates of each of them. Why? Because there is no any exportation feature in Radio Userland, so I had to do it by hand. It took me around 12 hours to populate my blogs with posts and comments. So take care of this more than essential feature when you search for a blog system!

I had modified and added many things to the basic installation of b2Evolution. So if you find something interesting and would like to add it to your b2Evoltion’s installation, feel free to contact me and I will send you all the code and information you need to implement the feature.

What is new in this version of Fred On Something’s blog?

  • A comments blog
  • A links blog
  • A quotes blog
  • The access to some articles I wrote
  • The possibility to put your avatar (via Gravatar) when you comment
  • The possibility to syndicate all individual blogs
  • The possibility to syndicate the aggregator blog (this blog aggregate all the other blogs. So if you want to be warn when something appear on one of these blogs, syndicate it)
  • The possibility to syndicate the comments feeds
  • A good search engine
  • A domain name
  • And other cool little things that you will discover while surfing it

I hope you will enjoy this new blog.

Please leave me your impressions and suggestions to improve it.

Take a special care of your email customer support service

Frederick Giasson

You have a company that give customer support by email? Take care of your service or it could be worse for your company than not giving the service at all. You have to take care of these points; otherwise you will probably alienate your customers:

  • You need to answer really fast to your customers’ requests. It needs to be a question of some hours maximum.
  • You always need to send the last email.
  • You need to answer to every question, no matter what it is, silly or not.

I talk with my experience of the last weeks. I am currently searching for place where to host my next domain name and blog. I need really specific features so I asked many, many questions to many, many hosting companies. For some of them I never received any email. From others it took days before having an answer. Finally everything goes fine for some of them except that my last question is still unanswered. The result? I never found the company I will do business with to host my blog.

I think that it is a paradox, I mean, I contacted many companies specialized in blog hosting and they virtually had all bad virtual (mail, forum, etc) customer service. How could blog hosting businesses survive on the market if their customer support is as bad? A possible answer could be that no good web hosting service exist, I mean, for an acceptable monthly price (under 15$/month).

The result of this inability to answer to my questions is deep. It alienated me to their services and it is sure that I will never ever try to do business with them again. No one of these companies will have my money.

So the conclusion is simple: if you are not willing to put the time in a service you give, do not give it at all, otherwise it could be worse for your business. Internet is young; it takes time to business to adapt their strategies to it. However, you have to know that customers are already adapted to this new way to buy goods and services. They now have expectations, so you have to answer them.

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Replace a generalist by a group of specialists.

Frederick Giasson

Why communication is becoming more and more important in today’s world?

In the last centuries, scientist/philosophers had all their time to discuss, understand and observe their world. In the last 40 or 50 years, we explored space, created artificial life, developed planetary communication systems, discovered the power of the nuclear, etc.

In the past they had hundreds of years to muse on their discoveries and their impacts on their world. Today we only have 1, 2, 3 or 10 years if we are lucky. Our world has changed. This new complexity brings an astronomical quantity of information to analyze and to understand. The era of generalists is finished. The thing is that we also need to muse and think about these new discoveries, has our ancestors were doing.

The generalist that thought about every aspect and impacts of a problem will be replaced by a group of specialists, communicating and cooperating, asking themselves the same questions has the old generalist. The only difference is the quantity of information to analyze and the complexity of the problems. We do not have the choice; we are becoming scientific ants, helping each other to try to reach a specific goal: understanding our new world.

It is why communication is and will be so important. We will need to change our mentality toward our peers. We will need to develop new ways to see things. We will need to continue to develop new communication and information systems to help us in to reach our goal.

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Using blogs to manage tacit knowledge in enterprises?

Frederick Giasson

There are 2 types of knowledge in enterprises: explicit and tacit. The explicit knowledge is easily explained, documented and verbalized. This type of knowledge is easily handled by today knowledge management systems.

However, what is a tacit knowledge? This type of knowledge is much more subtle and hard to define, grab and communicate. We can call it the savoir-faire, the know-how, of employees. Normally, the organizations do not know the presence of, or take care of, this knowledge before that a worker possessing a lot of tacit knowledge stops working for them.

The goal of an organization will be to try to identify, to collect, to classify, to verbalize and to diffuse all the tacit knowledge present in the enterprise.

These personal experiences, that create the tacit knowledge, are hard to grab. How could we try to diffuse them, and crystallize them into the organization, if we have difficulties to define them?

The problematic of enterprises is to:

  • Find the knowledge
  • Preserve it
  • Valorize it
  • Actualize it
  • Manage it

The real problem is not to perform these tasks on explicit knowledge, but on the tacit knowledge. How could we find, preserve, valorize, actualize and manage the personal experiences of our workers? How to handle this precise experience, that savoir-faire, which makes the tacit knowledge so critical for our enterprise?

A possible answer: Blogs

I will take a small development team of 5 or 10 people to do my demonstration.

A way to try to crystallize the tacit knowledge is to diffuse it into the enterprise. The problem is that tacit knowledge is not really the knowledge that you will find on the knowledge base of the MSDN library. The tacit knowledge, as we described it, is composing of personal experiences. However, personal experiences could be anything: past working experiences, scholar experiences, personal experiences, etc.

Then, how could we take on this type knowledge? Is there a way?

I think so. A solution would be to implement a blogging philosophy into the working group. Take into account that there are 2 or 3 old school developers into the development team with 7 or 8 fresh graduated university students. The 2 or 3 old schools developers have experience, savoir-faire, and this is that knowledge we need to transmit to the 7 or 8 others.

The best way to transmit the tacit knowledge is probably by informal interactions. It is exactly what is behind the blogging philosophy: a formal interaction between a blogger and his readers. So, think about it. You would give 2 or 3 paid hours to your employees to blog into the internal blog system of the enterprise. You tell them: wrote what you want. Wrote about your past experiences, wrote about your family, wrote about the way you resolve problems, wrote about anything.

These informal communications will give critical information to the enterprise. First of all, the old school developers will diffuse their tacit knowledge to the fresh university graduated students; our first goal is then reached, or at worse partially solved. In addition, the managers will know how their employees think and are. It will help them to manage them more effectively and find if something goes wrong with one of them or a whole working team. Depending on the blogging system they will use, they will be able to find knowledge, preserve it, valorize it, actualize it and manage it.

It is how I think that blogs could help enterprises to grab and diffuse their tacit knowledge: by implementing the blogging philosophy into their enterprise, into their working teams.

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