I’ve been working hard, but also taking a lot of training lately.

• Last month, I sat for (and passed) the ITIL Foundation certification exam.
• I’ve made a couple of quick (and very pleasant) trips to the Bay Area of California for administrative classes conducted by BMC Software, who produce the Remedy line of service-management products.
• And this month (this week, in fact) I have been immersed in a PRINCE2 Practitioner class. (PRINCE2–PRojects IN a Controlled Environment–is a project management methodology developed by the Office of Government Commerce, the same folks who brought us ITIL.)

PRINCE2: whew.  It’s a lot of material to get through–a 400 page text, plus supplementary material, in a week of classes–but our instructor (from Advantage Learning in the UK) must be doing something right, as 100% of the class passed the PRINCE2 Foundation exam yesterday.

Now, on to the Practitioner exam Friday. Once I recover from that, blogging should resume its normal operational tempo next week.
Related:

• ITIL
• PRINCE2
• Office of Government Commerce (UK)
• Advantage Learning (UK)

Dan Geer is an extremely well respected security expert. When he worries about something, people listen.

One of the things he has worried - and warned - about is the danger represented by IT ‘monocultures’ - the situation that arises when everyone uses the same software, for example, and therefore everyone shares the same vulnerability to a computer virus or other security threat.

[…]
As it happens, Dan’s bomb went off a few days ago, with the breakout of the “Backdoor.Ginwui” virus, a malicious bit of code that Symantec introduced in an alert as follows:

It has been reported that Backdoor.Ginwui may be dropped by a malicious Word document exploiting an undocumented vulnerability in Microsoft Word. This malicious Word document is currently detected as Trojan.Mdropper.H.

The ConsortiumInfo.org Standards Blog: “Monocultures and Document formats: Dan’s Bomb Goes Off”

We love our maps. At first glance, people are shocked by them: the shapes look familiar, yet everything is absurdly distorted. Without even thinking, they have learned something about the world they live in.

Most of our data comes from sources such as United Nations reports and is often tucked away in appendices. No one wants to look at those figures, and it would be hard to provoke any excitement by confronting someone with spreadsheets filled with numbers. But you just can’t help looking at these pictures. After all, a new view of the world, rather like the famous Earthrise photo taken by Apollo astronauts, is a compelling sight.

The maps referred to here are produced by the statisticians and cartographers at Worldmapper.org, and they use a simple but powerfully effective method to convey information: they shrink or swell portions of the world map to indicate the magnitude of the statistics being shown.

Here’s a pair of maps that speak volumes:

New Scientist: Change the way you see the world (subscription required) If you don’t subscribe to New Scientist–and you should; it’s a very readable weekly that wipes the floor with every other magazine that even attempts to communicate with a lay audience–you can go directly to Worldmapper.org and groove on the mappage therein.

Related: Worldmapper.org

Hat Tip: BLDG BLOG via Althouse

OpenOffice 2.0 fully supports this standard.

Go download it now.

Related:

• Free/Open Source Software Toolbox for Knowledge Workers (at Campbell-Online.com) 

It’s cleverly masked as a article about how to format your documents so that they will be easier to share between word-processsing platforms, but it is, in fact, a lesson on basic word processing. (I think she didn’t want to hurt the audience’s feelings by pitching it as, “Hey, idiots… time to finally learn how to correctly use that program you’ve been using incorrectly all your life…”)

Most word processors, Word and OpenOffice included, are set up to work out-of-the-box for people who have absolutely no clue what they’re doing, and who will use the software like a virtual typewriter–inserting hard returns when they need spaces, or, horror of horrors, using tabs and hard returns when they need indentation.

Making an analogy between formatting a document and packing and labelling boxes when moving to a new house , Ms. Haugland writes:

When you use very specific formatting like tabs to indent text and carriage returns to switch to the next line, it’s like trying to control exactly where your spatulas are supposed to go in the new house [instead of putting them in box labelled “kitchen”]. No two office suites are alike, and the more manual, highly controlled items you have in your document, the more likely the formatting will get messy when you go from one office suite to another. But if you use the formatting capabilities to indent and add spacing–well, that’s more like just labeling a box Kitchen and putting the box somewhere that makes sense.

The formatting tips in this article will also give you more professional-looking documents that are easier to update when the content or formatting rules change.

Word and OpenOffice are both very powerful tools for document production. If you’d like to leave the ranks of the Clueless and learn a little about how to actually use some of the formatting features of your word processor, this is a good article to start with. Once you realize that your computer is more than a fancy electronic typewriter, a world of possibilities will open up.

Smart formatting for better compatibility between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office (Solveig Haugland, SearchOpenSource.com)

Copywriting 101 is a set of articles about persuasive writing for the Web:

Copywriting skills are an essential element to the new conversational style of marketing. Whether you’re looking to sell something or to build traffic by earning links from others, you’ll need to tell compelling stories that grab attention and connect with people. This tutorial is designed to get you up and running with the basics of copywriting in ten easy lessons.

Copyblogger

I’ve downloaded and installed it without difficulty. Still kicking the tires, but so far I haven’t seen anything that would make me leave Firefox.

Internet Explorer 7: downloads (Microsoft.com)

One of them is a pointer to a white paper (in PDF format) called Root Cause Analysis for Beginners. (In a former job, I had to develop and teach a root cause analysis class to our problem resolvers, and I wish that I had known of the existence of this white paper; I would have given a copy to every student.)

I hear some of the process-challenged among you asking, “What’s root cause analysis?”  Here, let authors James J. Rooney and Lee N. Vanden Heuvel of the American Society for Quality break it down for you:

• Root cause analysis helps identify what, how and why something happened, thus preventing recurrence.
• Root causes are underlying, are reasonably identifiable, can be controlled by management and allow for generation of recommendations.
• The process involves data collection, cause charting, root cause identification and recommendation generation and implementation.

If you’re not doing root cause analysis on identified problems, then you’re not really doing problem management (as a generic concept) and you’re certainly not doing Problem Management in the ITIL sense.

The second gem is a pointer to an article from CIO, comparing ITIL, COBIT, and ISO 17799 (a standard for information security) with respect to their requirements for security and controls. (This is an area of particular interest to CIOs around the world, due to regulatory laws like Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA in the U.S. and similar legislation elsewhere.)

It turns out that the three standards work well together:

ISO 17999 provides security controls. It does not provide implementation guidance and does not specifically address how these processes fit into the overall IT management processes.

ITIL is strong on delivery and support processes. It describes how to structure operational processes but is weak on security controls and processes.

COBIT is focused on controls and metrics. It also lacks a security component but provides a more global view of IT processes at the IT organization management principles than ITIL.

Root Cause Analysis For Beginners (IT Service Blog)
ITIL, CoBIT and ISO: Overlap or Complement? (IT Service Blog)

Print them out, stick them in a plastic sheet protector and keep them near your PC.

Two caveats:

(1) Much of this stuff is what a friend of mine calls “advanced common sense,” and most experienced managers wouldn’t find much to disagree with here.
(2) Some of it deals specifically with government-contracting situations, and may not be directly applicable to what you do (if you do something else.)

As a quick, readable reminder of What’s Really Important, though, it almost can’t be beat.

A few of Mr. Madden’s rules:

Rule #12: Don’t get too egotistical so that you can’t change your position, especially if your personnel tell you that you are wrong. You should cultivate an attitude on the project where your personnel know they can tell you of wrong decisions.

Rule #24: One must pay close attention to workaholics—if they get going in the wrong direction, they can do a lot of damage in a short time. It is possible to overload them and cause premature burnout but hard to determine if the load is too much, since much of it is self generated. It is important to make sure such people take enough time off and that the workload does not exceed 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 times what is normal.

Rule #33: If you have a problem that requires additional people to solve, you should approach putting people on like a cook who has under-salted the food.

Rule #40: A working meeting has about six people attending. Meetings larger than this are for information transfer (management science has shown that, in a group greater than twelve, some are wasting their time).

Rule #66: Don’t assume you know why senior management has done something. If you feel you need to know, ask. You get some amazing answers that will astonish you.

Rule #83: Sometimes the best thing to do is nothing. It is also occasionally the best help you can give. Just listening is all that is needed on many occasions. You may be the boss, but if you constantly have to solve someone’s problems, you are working for him.

Rule #89: Whoever said beggars can’t be choosers doesn’t understand project management, although many times it is better to trust to luck than to get poor support.

One Hundred Rules for NASA Project Managers

(Note: The version of “100 Rules” at the NASA site is different, and is now up to 128!)