Timesheet and Expenses

I think most people share my dislike for doing timesheets, in the service industry it is pretty much a given that you need to track your time. If you are a consultant or contractor you need to do it in order to bill the client accurately, and if you are an in-house developer you typically do it for recovering costs from other departments. It is a lot of work just to produce a dollar figure that someone has to cough up.

Everytime timesheets are due I dread a phone call from the boss to quiz me on some aspect, and while I am not infalable there are instances where the application we use to enter timesheeting information and the reports show different figures - obviously a bug.

Overall, with a little bit of manual intervention the system works, but it could be better. Expenses aren’t automated, we actually have an Excel spreadsheet that we use even though the timesheeting application was originally developed with a view to incorporating that functionality.

So why am I telling you all this? Well, at the moment I am playing around with a few ideas for new application construction techniques, in particular a consistent approach to dealing with occasionally connected client machines. And it so happens that our internal timesheeting requirements provide examples of some of the complex problems that I am trying to resolve with my approach.

My plan is to spend a little bit of my idle time gathering requirements from the various users of the system and look at how the existing system could be improved. From there I will see whether my techniques really do apply and make the situation better.

I will be sure to post screenshots from any prototypes as well as any cool snippets of as I go along - stay tuned.

Installing Energy Blue theme on Windows XP standard

Justin King describes how to install the new Windows XP theme (Energy Blue). I’m using it now, its really nice, nice clean lines - glassy UI’s aren’t for teletubbies.

Using Downtime Productively

This week our project team has been impacted by some connectivity problems to backend systems that we are integrating with. Connectivity has always been an issue because the components we required to communicate with the backend weren’t available, so in order to get this done we created dummy objects to simulate the backend. That was very successful but we are now at the point that all that remains to be done is the actual integration.

Strangely this situation doesn’t come up too often because you can usually find other features to be adding to the software within a particular iteration. We are now slipping time at a 1:1 ratio and there isn’t much we can do about it but find ways to spend the time productively.

I’m working with Joseph Cooney on this project and so today we decided to book a room and projector and cover a few topics with the team presentation style that we think are going to be useful moving forward. It wasn’t complex stuff, but necessary background for upcoming iterations. The topics covered included:

• .NET Role-based Security
• The web-services stack - under the covers.
• WSE 2.0 Overview
• Component-based Development and Extender Providers

My machine also had Whidbey BETA 1 installed so we showed off a few of the new features, and in doing that its already apparent how if we were working with Whidbey today our productivity would be significantly improved. Not bad for a 15-minute demo.

So almost by accident we have had our first internal user group meeting - it just ran long by a few hours.

Attn: Robert Scoble - I have a mission for you.

I have to take partial responsibility for one of Darren’s most recent posts. We were conversing over IM about a few different things and I brought up how I am still trying to produce iterative project plans using Microsoft Project 2003. We both lamented its inability to do (or our inability to make it do) this simple task well, but Darren took it personally and started down the slipery slope of turning our discussion into a blog post.

Now that it is out there I guess its time to start one of those blogborne discussions to help educate us. In order to facilitate that we need to get some people blogging that know what the hell they are talking about blogging. As Darren pointed out, it is difficult to find the blog of a Microsoft Project Program or Product Manager - this is were Robert Scoble comes in.

Robert, your mission if you choose to accept it is to go to the office of the Microsoft Project PM and hold their hand while they set up a blog on blogs.msdn.com, you will continue to go to their office for a week and ensure that they post regularly. They say it takes twenty seven days to establish a dirty habit like blogging, but hopefully a week of close Scoble contact will be enough to kick start the process.

Just in case you aren’t subscribed to my feed or miss this message (after all, you are only subscribed to 955 feeds or 2200 blogs and process 1500 messages an evening) I’ll e-mail a link to this post directly.

For my part, I will make contact with the MS Project MVP in this region and see what I can do about getting them blogging.