The Wellywood sign is a lame cop-out. Be confident in who you are and build your own brand, not someone else’s. The world is already aware of the kiwi film and creative talent. We don’t need to cheapen our image by putting up a ‘Wellywood’ sign. It’s a daft idea – move on…

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More Info…

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10727440

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10727527

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10727618

Click to zoom in!

Enjoy!

Managing project scope creep…

Can’t make them all happy!…

Love your work!…

Too Many Chefs Spoil the Broth…

What do you do when your project management portfolio turns ugly?

Some people have a different understanding of "efficiency".

Love this…

and one last one…

..

There’s no single solution that fits everyone, but it’s great to see a company do a proper indepth evaluation of some available tools and even better to see where we sit with ours (ProWorkflow).

We did think it was a well balanced report so have a read and see what you think. Feel welcome to try a free ProWorkflow trial account!

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Project Management and Time Tracking

Article Republished from: Zenovations Blog
July 28, 2010 at 4:30 pm

The world of Time Tracking and Project Management is a vast one. For small businesses like ours, there are seemingly endless time tracking solutions and a good number of project management answers.  I spent nearly two weeks evaluating options in my spare time, so hopefully this data will help save you some time.

Here are the criteria I used to narrow down the possible project management and time tracking solutions:

• Web based application
  Our dev’s use various platforms and it needs to run everywhere without install and upgrade headaches, I also considered Air and Flash apps
• Support for 5 users
  Because, yanno, we need five people to record time
• Time tracking must include timer with start/stop capabilities
  We are multi taskers and like accuracy; we considered products with timer widgets as well
• Feature list and pricing prominent
  Excluded all sites with vague details, no screenshots,  or “contact us for details and pricing” models, due to sheer volume and time needed to research
• Must have a free trial evaluation
  Yanno, so I could evaluate them
• Professional and sharp web site
  Attention to detail is critical to good software design and project management, how they run their site should reflect this

After nearly ten hours of research, I narrowed the field to fifteen products. Then I evaluated each product by importing several of our current projects into it and using the time tracking tools for one day. After which I ran reports and recorded my findings in a spreadsheet. The final ratings were on a 1-5 scale, based on usability, project management capabilities, time tracking capabilities, invoicing features, reporting capabilities, and API and integration tools. Here’s what I came up with:

Once I had some numbers to work with, I weighted each product to meet our needs, based on the following criteria:

• Usability: Ease and speed of use is very important to us, as we have little time for project management (x2)
• Time tracking capabilities: highly critical (x5)
• Project management capabilities: highly critical (x5)
• Low price:  we want to keep the price under $50 a month, so our value calculation was tweaked accordingly:  rating *3 – (price per month/10)
• Invoicing, reports, and so on are nice, of course, but we can make due with our external, existing solutions

So, using this data, here were my findings:

It should be apparent that ProWorkflow is, hands down, the best overall project management software on the market. It’s quality, well thought out, bug free, fast, and powerful.

Skylight was by far the best for our needs, according to price versus quality. The rest of the data is interesting, but several of the products listed had a time tracking or project management rating less than three, which is insufficient for our needs. So the final choices for us were as follows:

• Skylight – use this and put up with the slow, laborious interface; our preference for now
• Basecamp + MyHours/Harvest/Tick – together, these products are a complete package, but pricey
• ProWorkflow – very pricey, but we could bite the bullet on this and get the best quality product on the market.

If you’d like to view or download the complete data, including links to all of the product sites, you can find all the gory details in the Google spreadsheet. You can also view the same data sorted by total quality instead.

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Article Republished from: Zenovations Blog
July 28, 2010 at 4:30 pm

We currently have a ProWorkflow Affiliate Program that can pay a fixed fee for a referral to sale and many people are already receiving referral fees for putting Affiliate banners and links on their sites (that convert to sale).

How does it work?

So basically, you would put a link or ad on your website. You tell a customer or friend to click that link/ad to visit our website. From there we track it all so if they sign up for an account we know you referred them.

Click here to read about the specifics of the Affiliate commission structure. The program has built in reporting and notification (shown below) so you can see the traffic you’re sending and what’s converting into a ProWorkflow sale!

How do I signup & get the Ad/Link for my site?

Follow the instructions below to get setup. It’s worth doing to get a kickback for referring people to the ProWorkflow solution. If you get a cheque in the post it’ll help with the office social fund!

STEP 1.

Visit the Affiliate Sign Up page and enter your details to become a ProWorkflow affiliate.

Note: There’s an option lower down the form to ‘Refer a Friend’. If you do this you’ll clip the ticket on their commissions!

STEP 2.

Visit the Affiliates Area and you’ll see a welcome screen. Look at the links on the top menu. The links are: Reports, Creatives & Settings.

• Reports
  Displays reporting about traffics, clicks, impressions, click-thru ratios etc. The reports also show commission and payment history.

• Creatives
  

  Here you can grab the code for the banners and links that you want to put on your website. Just copy the code!

• Settings
  Your account settings. You can update your address and contact details, payment currency etc.

STEP 3.

Click on the ‘Creatives’ link at the top. Here you can access creative material for both banner ads and text links.

To add a Text Link to your website…
Click ‘Text Ads’ then the available text ads will appear below. Click the one you want to add to your website and you’ll be shown the code.

Note: We recommend adding both the Text Link shown below and a banner ad as well. The more the better!

To add a Banner Ad to your website…
Click ‘Banners’ then the available text ads will appear below. Click the one you want to add to your website and you’ll be shown the code.

STEP 4.

Add the code to your website and you’ll see the text link or banner ad appear. The link to ProWorkflow includes your Affilate ID. For example:

http://www.proworkflow.com/?kbid=XXXX&m=10

When people click the text link or banner ad from your website we track the traffic and lead, and if they sign up you receive a commission (in accordance to the terms).

Let me sign up!

Find out more about the ProWorkflow Affiliate Program and sign up today. You could be earning some good dollars from referring leads, or just from the traffic on your website!

Contact us if you have any questions…

‘As of tomorrow, employees will only be able to access the building using individual security cards. Pictures will be taken next Wednesday, and employees will receive their cards in two weeks.’
(This was the winning quote from Fred Dales, Microsoft Corp in Redmond WA )

‘What I need is an exact list of specific unknown problems we might encounter.’
(Lykes Lines Shipping)

‘E-mail is not to be used to pass on information or data. It should be used only for company business.’
(Accounting manager, Electric Boat Company)

‘This project is so important we can’t let things that are more important interfere with it.’
(Advertising/ Marketing manager, United Parcel Service)

‘Doing it right is no excuse for not meeting the schedule.’
(Plant Manager, Delco Corporation)

‘No one will believe you solved this problem in one day! We’ve been working on it for months. Now go act busy for a few weeks and I’ll let you know when it’s time to tell them.’
(R&D supervisor, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing/ 3M Corp)

Quote from the Boss: ‘Teamwork is a lot of people doing what I say.’
(Marketing executive, Citrix Corporation)

My sister passed away and her funeral was scheduled for Monday. When I told my Boss, he said she died on purpose so that I would have to miss work on the busiest day of the year. He then asked if we could change her burial to Friday. He said,’That would be better for me.’
(Shipping executive, FTD Florists)

‘We know that communication is a problem, but the company is not going to discuss it with the employees.’
(Switching supervisor, AT&T Long Lines Division)

All our SaaS servers are located at the LayeredTech/Fastservers data center in Chicago. They have given us 6-7 years of solid performance with plenty of available staff for onsite 24/7 support at all times.

I get asked regularly why I don’t use New Zealand based hosting providers for our global SaaS company. The reason is simple.

I’m yet to find one in New Zealand that actually takes it seriously, has full onsite 24/7 support and a level of transparent communication at least similar to most US data centers."

I  want to see:

• Multiple support staff onsite 24/7
• Redundancy that works
• Clear open communication with customers

What I’ve seen often (and lately) is:

• Staff go home at 5:30 and monitor remotely
• Redundancy that fails
• Lack of / confusing communication with customers

So what caused this blog post?

Most NZ techo’s would be aware that a few days ago that a data center had major issues with an infrastructure failure that resulted in about 24hrs of complete downtime.

I believe this affected many thousands of websites and a massive amount of email. A few of our non-related websites and email are through a well known New Zealand based hosting provider.

The outage came at a time we were dealing with some important issues and due to the lack of email our company had to pull all nighters calling customers and monitoring our DB based backup support system.

We run a 24/7 SaaS model with US customers awake while NZ sleeps which is why we need to know our servers have onsite support. If they go down, companies literally stop working. We don’t host websites, our SaaS app is a core business system for many thousands of users globally.

To re-iterate, the letter below is not from our Server provider in the US, it’s from a hosting provider here in NZ we just use for email and some small websites. During the outage, this company was very non-communicative with it’s customers. people were freaking out, didn’t know what was happening and they were also trashing the provider on Twitter and other places.

New Zealand hosting providers I’ve talked to and worked with seem to forget a basic fact that a large number of people and companies actually work late, through the night or have global user bases. Even if they do know this, a comment below shows that they seem to put less priority on issues occurring ‘Outside of work hours’ in New Zealand.

Read the letter below we received AFTER the massive outage with little communication through the event. In comparison, our other server provider had some issues lately and updated their status page regularly so customers knew what was happening.

The part that really brassed me off was the part that said:

“During more sociably acceptable hours…” they contacted help to source hardware. So thousands of people, companies and websites suffer whilst they have their breakfast waiting for the ‘shop’ to open.

In addition, their phones and support numbers weren’t accessible, the website was down and they weren’t being transparent or communicative on Twitter. Customers were mostly in the dark. At the very least they should have a blog or status website hosted separate from their facility to keep customers updated.

In contrast, the data center company we deal with in the US store replacement hardware onsite for almost everything needed in case of emergency. They also have a separately hosted Status website for updating customers.

Where was the risk analysis?

When designing the data center, did anyone ask the question “What happens if our firewalls fail?”

Take this as a lesson. Kiwi hosting providers and data centers really need to lift their game if they want global software co’s to host here.

• Tip 1. Don’t go home at 5:30
• Tip 2. Keep customers informed
• Tip 3. Have a status/blog site independently hosted
• Tip 4. Use ‘people language’ not ‘Geekspeak’ (We’re not all techos’)
• Tip 5. Keep replacement hardware/software onsite for key services

That’s the rant for the day – time to get back to dealing with the email backlog.

PS: I’m not angry, just a little frustrated and being totally honest here about how NZ providers need to lift their game.

Dear Customer,

Following Tuesday night’s reported outage (21.30-24.00) which was attributed to a core switch intermission failure, last night the same symptoms occurred (commencing 19.30). Clearly this highlighted that the corrective action of the previous night i.e. the replacement of both core switches deferred the issue rather than provided a permanent resolution.

Last night the fault was again identified by our network management software and the team reassembled consisting of the CTO, Sys-Admins and management. The issue was immediately escalated to our external maintenance support teams (CheckPoint firewall provider and hardware provider) as is standard practice for an outage of this significance. This identified that the fault appeared to be within the Checkpoint firewall clustering software (dual redundancy).

With the assistance of Checkpoint engineers the decision was made to split the firewall cluster and run them as individual stand alone units to resurrect the network. This appeared to temporarily solve the issue at 00.15. For context the firewall servers are running at 15-20% whilst not clustered i.e. with very low levels of utilisation for the spec of the equipment.

At 02.45 the network failed again. The team were still on-site monitoring the network. Our firewall maintenance providers were again called who arranged for patches to be downloaded. At 05.10 the patches were installed and the firewall management server reconfigured to accommodate the patch upgrade. This did not provide a permanent fix.

During more sociably acceptable hours we reached out to our friends in XXXX to help source checkpoint firewall hardware and to provide ‘men on the ground’ to help support our technical team that had worked through the night. In addition to this a decision was taken to move some core applications to the old network (ASA) that was still functioning as was not reliant on the check point firewalls. These include XXXXXXX.co.nz, Email (inbound and outbound) and XXXXXXX.co.nz. However the core network was re-established without the need to deploy this second network with the core applications migrated.

Low level analysis with the assistance of Checkpoint engineers in the USA identified high volumes of fragmented packets originating from one of our shared virtual hosting servers to be the root cause of the issue. These packets were flooding the firewalls and causing the outage.  The source of these packets was identified and blocked at 13:50. The checkpoint firewalls then returned to normal service which finally brought the network back on line at approximately 14:00 hours.

Like all hosting companies, we do not exercise strict control over the content that customers upload to their websites.  It appears that one customer site was compromised, which in turn caused the flood of malformed packets to the firewalls.  Our internal network analysis software did not identify these packets as they were not ‘standard’ TCP/IP traffic.

In order to prevent this level of disruption in future we intend to move all shared virtual hosting customers behind a separate firewall that is isolated from the rest of our networks.  This will ensure that should there be any re-occurrence the offending server is quarantined, and does not cause the kind of outage we have just experienced.

We do sincerely apologise for this outage. These problems are extraordinarily difficult to diagnose, and we are grateful for the assistance provided by CheckPoint engineers in the USA, and local XXXXX network engineers who have complemented the efforts of our own technical team.

Should you require a more technical update, please contact XXXXXX our CTO  or please contact me on my email or directly on my cell (xxx xxxx xxxx).

Once again our apologies for this critical issue and thank you for your continued support.

About The Author:
Julian Stone is the CEO of ProActive Software, developers and creators of the leading web based project management software http://www.proworkflow.com

This is the 3 channel RC glider I’m building. Getting there. Just a bit more structure and some electrical/mechanical work, then I can cover it! Looking forward to throwing it off a cliff after 6 months work!

Bellow you can see I’m starting to fit the electronics. It’ll be a squish in there but we’ll get it all in hopefully! Thinking of adding a small USB camera  ;-)

This is the other plane. It’s a trainer and regularly gets smashed up  ;-)