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What's New? This What's New is associated with the Going Ballistic! Issue of our Compass Newsletter. Heretics' Forum The Heretics' Forum is our project dialogue space. Many pages have been added in recent weeks. I have posted the start of a new dialogue and several comments relating to Ballistic Behavior and Unthinkable Things on the Heretics' Forum. Please contribute to the collective understanding by posting your experiences there!I've also simplified navigation. Come over, look and contribute. Recent topics include: ManagingUp - How to manage across instead of from down below XprogMgmt - Managing Xtreme Programming projects PronounTrouble - Elmer Fudd explains a common difficulty ManagingVerbs - Where there's literally "No Thing" to manage ProblemSolving - A honey of a sticky story StartingPlaces - Index of dialogues newly reorganized and categorized WhatDoesNotWork - Newly Updated! Add your experiences. SameOldChange - Can't we change the way we talk about change? DontWorkHere - Recipe for bullet proof engagements MadScience - Misuse of otherwise decent technology. PowerPoint haters, the queue starts here. FeelingUncertainty - Certainty cast as a project's greatest enemy. WhatsNew - Update on newly started Heretic dialogues. Come in and join the Heretics'dialogue! New Training Venues True North has joined with Thinq to promote our Mastering Projects Workshop in companies too small to have in-house training departments. It's clear to them that our Mastering Projects is a unique addition to their catalogue. We are very pleased to announce the start of our relationship with this premier training provider. True North also announces a new association with Ball State University's Center for Information and Communication Sciences. Their Art and Science of Project Management class, taught by adjunct faculty member and Mastering Projects Workshop facilitator Antoinette Hubbard, will be using Mastering Projects Workshop materials and True North is offering special continuing education opportunities for the program's Alumni. Noteworthy Books Issac's Storm by Erik Larson (ISBN 0-609-60233-0 ) The story of the catastrophic 1900 hurricane and flood tide that destroyed most of Galveston,Texas. This is a tale of orthodoxy's blinding influence. No one is to blame for the hurricane. Many share the blame for ignoring the many warning signs that could have moderated the effect. No one believed such a catastrophe could happen there. It did. From the notes section, Gen. P.H. Sheridan took the occasion of a visit to Galveston to issue one of the most infamous geographical slanders of all time. "If I owned Texas and hell," he said, "I'd rent out Texas and live in hell." Tower: Faith, Vertigo, and Amateur Construction by Bill Henderson (ISBN 0-374-27851-2 ) With chapter names like Dumpster Diving, Despair's Ecstacy, Hanging Stones In The Sky, Petrified, and For No Reason?, this is clearly the description of an unconventional construction project. Yet with each chapter, I realized just how unconventional is each project. Henderson uses this project, building a tower for no reason on a rocky Maine hillside, as a medium to work though a dumpster full of dilemmas. I recognize that I do the same thing. Perhaps you do, too. I suggest in my Mastering Projects Workshop that we might use each project as a medium for getting what we really want. Henderson demonstrates how this is done in the real world. In the end, the reason for the tower becomes clear. Delightful!! Man's Search For Himself by Rollo May (ISBN 0-440-55069-6 ) Published in 1953, as we entered the era of Mutually Assured Destruction, May takes on the meaning of life in the shadow of the possibility of total annihilation (in keeping with out Going Ballistic theme this issue) and finds the threat takes nothing away. He discusses the Hollow Man, the one haunted by hopelessness of the age and discovers the absurdity of the hopeless position. Quoting Robbinson Jeffers, which Bill Henderson also quotes a lot, he concludes: "But young or old, few years or many. Signifies less than nothing To him who had climbed the tower beyond time, consciously ..." The Tower Beyond Tragedy from Roan Stallion by Robinson Jeffers ©1925 by Boni and Liveright For those of us who find engaging in meaningful work the surest antidote to our own feelings of inadequacy and mortality, this book is a delightful reminder of just how much we are in control of here. Lava Rock by Elliot Paul Horace Liveright, Inc New York 1929 (Too old for an ISBN) This is a fascinating book by one of my favorite authors. Ever wonder how large construction projects used to be accomplished? This is the story of the construction of a dam on the Boise river in the twenties, when horse power often meant horse flesh was involved. The engineers had their plans and nature had some other ideas. This is an extended monologue, written from the omniscient principal perspective, of the lives involved in this multi-year construction. It follows the process from the earliest visits of surveyors until the last remaining worker takes up residence as the caretaker of the finished product. I was left feeling as though not much but technology has changed. Special Reprint/Special Offer Included in the Going Ballistic issue of Compass, you'll find a teaser front page of the newsletter The Software Practitioner. This is actually a vehicle for distributing a reprint of my article, entitled "Maturity." If you like what you see of The Software Practitioner here, please subscribe for a six month trial period at the special introductory rate of just $25 The usual annual subscription rate for the bi-monthly newsletter is $55). Send a check (no credit cards) to Computing Trends 1416 Sare Road Bloomington, IN 47401 with your address and a copy of the cover page. Thanks for dropping by. Warmly, David A, Schmaltz, President True North project guidance strategies, Inc.
Copyright © 1999-2005 True
North pgs, Inc.
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