In a Digital World

Connection

is the most valued commodity.

S u p e r S e c r e t p l a n . c o m

Table of Contents

05 PhilosophySome guiding principles I use in my life as a professional firestarter.

09Bay Dynamics Video

I produced the shooting day of a project to create a video short for a cyber-security company .

07The Knktd App

Example of an IOS app I worked on as account manager and Scrum Master that is in the Apple app store now.

11 Enterprise Platform I worked on a collection of projects on the Solutions Directory which Intel uses link solutions with companies and partners.

17 The Third Party ProjectIn addition to the normal challenges of creating a web application, there is the experience of collaborating with multiple companies on one project.

13 FailureSometime things are prone to fall apart. The trick is be-ing able to see it and fix it before it happens

15Business Case

Analysis and Website Sometimes clients don’t know what they need. I analyzed their business, created a specification then managed development of their new website.

I’ve learned about all the popular project management frameworks and philosophies. Agile, Lean, Waterfall, Kanban, Six Sigma and the list goes on, at the end of the day I think that I belong to the Bruce Lee School of Project Management, if there were such a thing. Famous Martial artist and actor Bruce Lee invented his own Martial Art/Philosophical system called Jeet Kun Do. It’s based on the idea of formlessness

Lee emphasized that every situation, in fighting or in everyday life, is varied. To obtain victory, therefore, it is essential not to be rigid, but to be f luid and able to adapt to any situation. He compared it to being like water: “Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now water can f low, or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

Lee’s theory behind this was that one must be able to function in any scenario one is thrown into and should react accordingly. One should know when to speed up or slow down, when to expand and when to contract, and when to remain f lowing and when to crash. It is the awareness that both life and fighting can be shapeless and ever changing that allows one to be able to adapt to those changes instantaneously and bring forth the appropriate solution. Lee did not believe in “styles” and felt that every person and every situation is different and not everyone fits into a mold; one must remain f lexible in order to obtain new knowledge and victory in both life and combat. One must never become stagnant in the mind or method, always evolving and moving towards improving oneself.

I try to hold the same philosophy when I engage a project. All the the frameworks are trying to accomplish the same thing. The best practice is to find a system of simplicity that fits with the resources, timeline, and scope of the agreed upon task. Frameworks are just ideas meant to help us communicate and synchronize our efforts more efficiently. If I find something useful in the waterfall framework I won’t hesitate to use it, even if I’m working inside an agile scrum.

Time

Resources

Scope

The Bruce Lee School of Project Management

6Super Secret Plan

Matt Holland and his company Synergistic Creations had an idea for a disruptive mobile app. With a background in mental health, Matt saw that in our increasingly connected world that clients and health care providers could benefit from an application that could open up lines of communication as well as serving up modular tools that a health care provider could use to help their clients.

From a technical perspective this wasn’t a simple standalone app. It was a connected system where the patients would download it from the App store and the health care provider would pay to use a PCI and HIPAA compliant Website to manage the communication and care which we would also be building.

Mobile Project:

Knktd, the IOS app.

KnKtdOn this project, I served as both a Scrum Master for the project team and Account Manager for the client. I helped the cross-functional team which included a Front-End Developer, two back-end developers and two Quality Assurance engineers to identify and work through obstacles while staying focused on each of the sprints. I interacted with the client several times a week in addition to our backlog grooming meeting, status checkings and billing meetings.

One notable issue that almost derailed our progress was with permissions. In this app there were two big use cases. One where single medical provider would use it to communicate with their patients and one where a whole hospital could use the system we were building. We might have missed a crucial logical conflict, if our QA engineers hadn’t caught the issue in the middle of the second sprint. They found it by doing what I had charged them to do, creating a comprehensive testing plan for the system. To do that, we deep-dived every interaction the client would have with the health care provider. I had them at almost every daily standup and client status meeting with Matt.

Upon finding the issue, we methodically laid it all out and once he understood the programmatic conflict, which had to do with the primary key for the database. We were able to discuss the issue at length and offer multiple solutions.

After 14 sprints, integrated QA and user testing, the Knkt’d app was launched and was accepted by the Apple App store.

https://www.myknktd.com

7 Super Secret Plan 8Super Secret Plan

Video Production: Bay Dynamics Short Film Bay Dynamics, a digital security company, wanted a video that would introduce its new network software and to tell an engaging story that would show the anatomy of a cyber threat in today’s workplace.

Check out the full video: https://vimeo.comQuite of lot of tasks have to come together in order for a video production to be successful and there are almost always

unexpected challenges to be adapted to and overcome.

In this video project, I organized the shooting day event by working with a locations agent to select and vet possible sites; procuring specialized personnel, a professional stylist, a make-up artist, an audio engineer, and acting

talent. I worked with our team to compile an equipment list and created a logistical plan for transport and inventory control that we followed as we moved through the multiple shooting sites. I ran the primary

shooting sites, making sure the acting talent was prepared and ready for their scenes, that our production staff had the resources they needed and that everything would go smoothly. I also

allocated resources to form and lead a vanguard team at each location that flawlessly reset each space to it’s original state.

We also came up against an example that proves the rule that “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” As I arrived early to the first location, I found that

the police were in the process of roadblocking the entire area off. Our location was on a marathon route. Luckily, I had some backup plans. I used a phone

tree and a group text list to give our teams a heads up with an alternate route to get to our location, I contacted our contractors and actors

to update them on our situation. My junior project manager and I rerouted our deliveries for the day to make sure everything

would still arrive where and when we needed it to.

In the end everything came together the way we needed it to, despite the unexpected shift. Bay

Dynamics was very pleased and the video was well received at their cyber-security

conference.

The Best Laid Plans

10Super Secret Plan

Enterprise Platform:

The Solutions Directory

Starting at a new company always seems to have a degree of inheritance. Sometimes I find these legacy projects to be the most challenging (in a good way ) because they require different types of thinking (Creative,

Divergent, Convergent, Critical, Abstract, Concrete, Sequential or Holistic) to solve issues.

A few months before I came aboard to a new company, the Solutions Directory had launched in a mad sprint to meet a tight deadline. Some of the features that had been in the original scope had been backlogged in order

to meet a closer launch. Primary development of this part of the project had been accomplished a larger team of contractor developers, many of which would no longer be available by the time I took control of the project.

Since this was a Enterprise application, it was used by large groups of people. I met and started to work with over 30 stakeholders on the client’s side. The most sought after item on the backlog list was also the most problematic. The

Member Roster in its latest iteration, it was supposed to be able to let the user customize a search with checkbox style filters using hundreds of possible combinations to display thousands of results in realtime. The feature had been built

previous to my arrival. It didn’t work, and no one knew why.

There had been several attempts before to try to diagnose the broken feature, but it only led the team to stagnation on the issue. It was exceptionally difficult to diagnose because of all the possibilities. The Roster was built inside of Drupal with

javascript and it used Apache SOLR to speed the massive index along. Rewriting it from scratch wasn’t an option due to the massive amount of time and resource that had apparently already been spent on it.

I looked at the problem from the different types of thinking. It seemed like an application of Critical thinking would help us the most. If we couldn’t immediately solve the problem a good place to start would to try to isolate where the issue might be. With

this line of thinking, I pulled in a Senior SOLR developer to help the main team to methodically investigate the different parts, to eliminate possibilities. I encouraged the team to make “toys”, which were small programs to test out their assumptions.

In the end, it was a Front-End Developer that wrote the “toy” we needed. They had been up and down with the feature previously but had never tried this approach before. We promptly expanded the code to fully fix the issue and added it to the very next release.

Visit the live site: https://solutionsdirectory.intel.com

12Super Secret Plan

FAILURE

1

Unrealistic or poor resource allocation.Anytime I started to see developer or creative’s resourcing move into being sliced up into smaller and smaller chunks to accomodate new projects, I realized that it put all the projects at risk.

2

Poor requirements gathering.This often happens at the beginning of projects in the pre-season. I think sometimes it’s a side effect of the client’s excitement around getting their project kicked off. Both the client and the team haven’t thought everything through all the way. Another way it happens is people’s aversion to confronting difficult things. Sometimes websites and applications have to codify the processed of a business. Sometimes those businesses don’t have regular processes to draw from.

3

Project Estimate lacked good dataEven early on in my training as a software estimator I noticed the strange pattern of outputs when my mentor or I tried to compile an estimate without enough data. Our numbers would be wildly off. Unfortunately it’s challenging to get good data sometimes as it’s common for clients to not be able to provide all the information about their project to the estimators.

4Hope is not a PlanIt’s an easy and nice thing to hope something will work out. However, planning is the only way to ensure success in any important undertaking.

7

Client underestimation of content creation timelineOnce again, at the inception of a project it’s easy to imagine that creation of content will be easy, but many times the client is not experienced in content creation and this isn’t discovered until it’s too late.

5

Last Minute QA ProcessSadly, this is a common one. I was fortunate to learn early that the best time to start QA is at the beginning of a project or even in the pre-season. Understanding exactly what the application will do, when the project will conclude and being able to identify gaps in documentation are critical to the success of the project. Project Managers often have so many conversations with the client they themselves can be blind to the gaps that QA teams are keen to spot.

6

Gold-PlatingAnother rule of mine sits adjacent to this one, people don’t value what they don’t pay for. Gold-plating not only puts timelines at risk, but also damages the client’s ability to perceive future success.

A few years into my

career, I came acrossa thread that discussed

why some people valued ex-perienced project managers over

less experienced ones or even other members of the team. Their

position had to do with the skill at being able to identify failure conditions and risk

ahead of time. Experienced PMs can save time and resources by IDing issues in the Pre-Season.

I started my own list of things that cause proj-ects to fail. It’s a long list but here are 7

from the collection.

13 Super Secret Plan 14Super Secret Plan

Custom Website,Business Case

Analysis:FCTConline.org

The California Fire Fighters

Joint Apprenticeship Committee

is a hybrid Government/Private organization that has offices in four Californian cities. They work closely with Fire Departments all over the

state to provide cost-effective training and certification opportunities so as to provide these departments with qualified candidates. They had just purchased

FCTConline.org and wanted to migrate their existing content as well as move their growing testing products to an as yet undeveloped website.

This became a special project for me in that since CFFJAC new they needed a new website, they also weren’t sure what specifications they needed to include. To this end, I conducted a business

case analysis. This study included several weeks of interviews with key individuals in the organization as well as structured conversations with the collective stakeholders. Based on the

results of my study I created a comprehensive set of wireframes which we then used to assist the development of the new website.

I acted as both the agile project manager to our dev team and account manager with their designated product owner. We built their new site with Python/Django and

used Mezzanine as the base CMS. We built customized features on top of that like a integrated web-scheduler and a tool to track and aggregate test results. Our

process went smoothly and launched on time.

Check out their live site:

http://FCTConline.org

The third-party project is among the most complex project types in digital. In this case a digital agency was contracted by a large internet service provider to create a site that would serve as a signup page for a new program it was launching to provide internet service to low-income households. That agency in turn sub-contracted the project to my company.

This Python/Django site would have to check applicant’s data against an external database using a SOAP endpoint to query a third company’s database to see if the applicant was in good financial standing with the ISP. The site would also need to have an internationalization feature so that users could view the site in either English or Spanish.

I led this project to launch using a custom Agile framework as its Scrum master . I was responsible for leading the collaboration between our internal team and the other external personnel from the other companies. I worked with a Lead QA (from the Internet Service Provider); Two Senior Engineers (one from the ISP, and one from the Data Warehousing company); and a Project Manager (from the original digital agency).

The project moved smoothly through the sprints with the exception of the two types of 3rd party issues. Initially, we had difficult obtaining the correct specifications and permissions. I worked this through by setting up several meetings and tests with the PM from the contracting agency and got them to set the same type of meeting up with the ISP and the Data Warehousing Companies until we were able to obtain and test working development credentials. Next, we determined that the SOAP endpoint was not functioning for us. I first worked through our list of assumptions against the specification that we were given with our devs to try to make certain the issue wasn’t on our end, all the while continuing to focus the team on continuing the rest of the items in the sprint that we could complete without credentials. The best and fastest way to work through that particular type of issue is to try to get engineers from all of the companies that touch the system together to have a live step-by-step conference call. This minimizes the, “it wasn’t us” email chain response problem that can sometimes happen in third party projects. I managed to get that conversation to happen and together we discovered and fixed the permissions issue. We were able to complete the project on time and on budget for its national launch.

Internet Essentials: A Third Party Project

17 Super Secret Plan 18Super Secret Plan

Link up

with me Joe@supersecretplan.com

(503) 805-5760

www.linkedin.com