Global Corporate Challenge: 10,487 steps today!

Grant has posted up about how Readify challenged the DPE team at Microsoft to compete in the Global Corporate Challenge. Basically the idea is that we wear around pedometer all day and each day we input our total number of steps each day which contributes to a team total. The first people around the world wins.

Competition is everything for the human species, but it seems to me that the greatest competition is with yourself. When I first started recording my steps I wasn’t really using the pedometer correctly, but I’ve improved my technique there and the results show it. The interesting this is that I’m not I am motivated to keep trying to push my step count up.

Even though today was relatively sedantry I did manage to get over ten thousand steps again. I’m going to try and keep it above that level each day and if I’m lucky keep it improving over time.

Now we just need to get Frank’s guys inputing their step counts so we can see how we compare. I reckon his guys do way more miles than us on feet, but know knows. Grant’s goal of reaching 30,000 steps in one day seems pretty awesome to me, I’d love to take a stab at doing that – maybe on a weekend.

Computer Empathy

Rocky made reference to Grant Holliday and I as people who seem to have stuff just work. Its interesting, throughout my computing career I’ve had technology just work for me so it makes be wonder if I have some extra gene or something.

I think what it comes down to is a highly developed sense of “Computer Empathy”. Computer Empathy is when you understand computers, and the software that runs on them from the computers perspective.

What makes me “Run as Administrator” when I go to install a piece of complex software without even first trying to do it any other way? Computer Empathy – I understand that this program “probably” will ask to do something that the computer can’t let it with the user token so I escalate it straight away.

So Rocky, have you tried whispering sweet nothings into your computer’s ear?

Team Foundation Server Reporting: A bed-time story.

I’ve been pretty slack about posting to my blog this week, I usually like to post up something somewhat interesting (to me anyway) every day but it seems that I’ve just been burried under a pile of administrivia and slightly higher than normal workload for the past week and a half.

It started last week as I was finalising my preperation for my MSDN webcast on Extending Team Foundation Server. In many respects this was a dry run for the live presentation that I plan on doing in TechEd Australia this year. I’ve had some great feedback from folks and I’m going to spend some more time tying my extensibility demos into a great visualisation (not sure what yet).

Anyway, getting the webcast out of the road was a great relief. Around the same time I’ve been helping out a little bit with the internal CRM implementation at Readify. The system is coming online for sales staff early next week and we had to get the data imported from various sources.

While CRM itself is a very interesting product, I think the way that Darren Neimke (who is now managing internal projects) has driven the project is pretty cool. I posted recently about the e-mail Scrums he was doing and he has been refining the technique. All internal projects are now beginning to get managed through Team Foundation Server, and the advantage of this is that we get some great visibility of what is happening in projects through the reports.

In two of the projects we are using the MSF Agile process template, and one of my favourite reports is the Remaining work report. Below is a report which shows the relatively short life of the CRM project in TFS (this iteration only). In this case we can see that we have three work items left that we need to close off, and we have completed six (CRM has been installed for months, it was just idle until recently).

This next report is for the corporate web-site which has been getting some work done in the background. Here there are a lot more work items, but you can see that the work item tracking feature wasn’t being used for the first part of the month. Probably the most interesting thing about this report is the drop down in work items towards the end of this iteration. Every graph tells a story and this one is telling me that a bunch of features were pushed into upcoming iterations.

I guess its this kind of instant feedback on project progress which most appeals to organisations adopting Team Foundation Server, I know that in the past when I’ve spoken to customers the people holding the purse strings usually get excited when they see the reporting features. I’m going to continue to monitor the various internal projects that we have going in Team Foundation Server, and if I can point out anything interesting that I come across.

P.S. I’m hoping to put together a presentation at some point which shows a whole bunch of real-life graphs from various projects that have been run through Team Foundation Server. If you would like to share yours please e-mail me a copy of the graph as well as a few comments to describe why it is interesting.