Recently I have seen number of users reading my feed on outlook. Its been increasing month by month. So I thought there could be many more users who will be interested in reading feeds in outlook. The recent version of outlook, i.e outlook 2007 has feed reader built into it. Using which you can read the posts just like mails.

This is useful as most of us, corporate users have outlook installed by default. You don’t have to fight with your IS/ITS department for a new software or you don’t have to keep your browser always open.
Your browser should recognize outlook 2007 as a feed reader when you access a feed. You can easily subscribe from there. Read the rest of this entry »

I had a conversation with my team mate about the recent buzz word in the market upgrading yourself. The buzz word used by most of the bosses to warn the young generation mostly in connection with recession and pink slip.

Both of us were of the opinion that continuous learning (or so called upgrading) is part of culture you have grown up with. I am not just talking about the work related learning here. I am talking about learning in general.As kids we used to be very curious about the things surrounding us. We always wanted to know more about radio or pictures in TV. The motivation for learning new things was fun or simple curiosity. As we grew up the motivations changed. It was degree in college, job change or promotion when we started working. But the problem was the motivations like job, salary or promotion are not sustainable. Once you get the promotion you are free till the next season.

Simple curiosity or fun of tinkering with the stuff around never dies. Think of kid lost in toy shop. It just goes behind one after the other. Kid never loses interest because its having fun. When was the last time you learnt something new just for fun?

Ourselves to blame?
Mostly yes. Last year I started learning Spanish. My Spanish class mostly had university students, few working professionals. In the second class my Spanish teacher asked me “Are you going to get a promotion after you finish diploma?”. To her I said “yes” but in reality I just wanted to learn another language (one of my dream is to follow the path of Che in South America. Now you know the motivation…its Che). The point I wanted to make is we are mostly behind money than other things. I want to ask you again When was the last time you learnt something new just for fun?

Is it Indian education system to blame?
May be. Most of the parents have a very simple advice for their kids. If you don’t learn this you wont get good marks. If you don’t get good marks you won’t get a good job. That is where we set a wrong motivation to learn something new. Its not just parents, its teachers, professors, bosses and society. We all motivate people around us learn for money.

How about our work place/culture?
May be that too. We will wait till the recession to learn or to innovate. Its not just about the people I am talking here. I am talking about the organizations too. Organizations should also understand person who is not interested in how telephone works probably wont be interested in how internet works. So be careful when hiring the candidates. Motivation for learning is as important as learnability.

So how do we inculcate the culture of learning?
I really don’t know. I am looking forward for tips from you, my readers. All I can say is if you still have kids curiosity, You don’t have to learn anything special to beat the recession.

Engineering until IT came into India was completely *technical*. I have not seen any engineer of my fathers generation doing *only* managerial work. There used to be project managers then too, but they used be part time managers and full time technicians.

With IT boom in India, we got a new breed of managers. IT-Managers or so called PMs, SPMs etc. I am not going get into their job profile or their job description but all I want to say is they were different from previous managers we had seen in *technology* field.

In this setup, natural progression for every developer was to, turn into manager after x years. But there were anomalies in the system all the time. They were always confused..
Read the rest of this entry »

RTPM^TM – Real Time Productivity Monitor^PP is productivity monitoring tool which runs on your resources computer to monitor the productivity. It helps your resources to see their RTPI^TM Real Time Productivity Index^PP so that they can increase their productivity index.It keeps track of the productive work and helps you in estimating cost, average RTPI etc. Below are some features of the application. Read the rest of this entry »

A study by Standish Group reports 80% of the IT projects fail due to over budget, late, missing functionality or due to combination of these. Worse 30% of software projects are so poorly executed that they are canceled before completion. There are uncountable reasons for a project to fail and enough has been said and talked about it. What we are not talking is about success. Strange isn’t it? But its true.

I have been in IT industry for six years now. I have been in more than dozen projects of varying types, size and period. One thing which is common across these projects – every successful project needs a hero (s if the project is big). He is the man/woman who can think, design, code, he/she is super productive and above all he/she can help others. Its because of these heroes those 20% projects see shine of the day. My heroes are same as Bruce Eckel’s 20% struggling programmers. Read the rest of this entry »