There's No Such Thing as an IT Project

There's No Such Thing as an IT Project PDF Author: Bob Lewis
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN: 1523098856
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Learn how to stop pouring vast sums of money into technology projects that don't have a lasting impact by closing the communication gap between IT and leadership. Too many businesses miss opportunity after opportunity to design, plan, and achieve intentional business change. Why? Because they charter projects focused on delivering software products: IT projects. But as this groundbreaking book points out, there's no such thing as an IT project—or at least there shouldn't be. It's always about intentional business change, or what's the point? It's time to stop providing simplistic, one-dimensional, all-you-gotta-do panaceas. When the only constant in business is change, truly useful IT has to help you change instead of build solutions that are obsolete even before they are completed. IT consultant Bob Lewis, author of the bestselling Bare Bones Project Management, has joined forces with seasoned CIO Dave Kaiser to give you the tools you need. It's a multidimensional, relentlessly practical guide. Condensed to handbook length and seasoned with Lewis's trademark sardonic humor, it's an enjoyable and digestible read as well. Lewis and Kaiser take you step by step through the process of building a collaboration between IT and the rest of the business that really works. Insisting on intentional business change takes patience, communication, and courage, but it has a huge payoff. More to the point, insist on anything else and every penny you spend will be a wasted dime and a waste of time.

There's No Such Thing as an IT Project

There's No Such Thing as an IT Project PDF Author: Bob Lewis
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN: 1523098856
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
Learn how to stop pouring vast sums of money into technology projects that don't have a lasting impact by closing the communication gap between IT and leadership. Too many businesses miss opportunity after opportunity to design, plan, and achieve intentional business change. Why? Because they charter projects focused on delivering software products: IT projects. But as this groundbreaking book points out, there's no such thing as an IT project—or at least there shouldn't be. It's always about intentional business change, or what's the point? It's time to stop providing simplistic, one-dimensional, all-you-gotta-do panaceas. When the only constant in business is change, truly useful IT has to help you change instead of build solutions that are obsolete even before they are completed. IT consultant Bob Lewis, author of the bestselling Bare Bones Project Management, has joined forces with seasoned CIO Dave Kaiser to give you the tools you need. It's a multidimensional, relentlessly practical guide. Condensed to handbook length and seasoned with Lewis's trademark sardonic humor, it's an enjoyable and digestible read as well. Lewis and Kaiser take you step by step through the process of building a collaboration between IT and the rest of the business that really works. Insisting on intentional business change takes patience, communication, and courage, but it has a huge payoff. More to the point, insist on anything else and every penny you spend will be a wasted dime and a waste of time.

There's No Such Thing as Bad Weather

There's No Such Thing as Bad Weather PDF Author: Linda Åkeson McGurk
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501143646
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Bringing Up Bébé meets Last Child in the Woods in this “fascinating exploration of the importance of the outdoors to childhood development” (Kirkus Reviews) from a Swedish-American mother who sets out to discover if the nature-centric parenting philosophy of her native Scandinavia holds the key to healthier, happier lives for her American children. Could the Scandinavian philosophy of “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes” hold the key to happier, healthier lives for American children? When Swedish-born Linda Åkeson McGurk moved to Indiana, she quickly learned that the nature-centric parenting philosophies of her native Scandinavia were not the norm. In Sweden, children play outdoors year-round, regardless of the weather, and letting babies nap outside in freezing temperatures is common and recommended by physicians. Preschoolers spend their days climbing trees, catching frogs, and learning to compost, and environmental education is a key part of the public-school curriculum. In the US, McGurk found the playgrounds deserted, and preschoolers were getting drilled on academics with little time for free play in nature. And when a swimming outing at a nearby creek ended with a fine from a park officer, McGurk realized that the parenting philosophies of her native country and her adopted homeland were worlds apart. Struggling to decide what was best for her family, McGurk embarked on a six-month journey to Sweden with her two daughters to see how their lives would change in a place where spending time in nature is considered essential to a good childhood. Insightful and lively, There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather is a fascinating personal narrative that illustrates how Scandinavian culture could hold the key to raising healthy, resilient, and confident children in America.

There's No Such Thing As Free Speech

There's No Such Thing As Free Speech PDF Author: Stanley Fish
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198024193
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
In an era when much of what passes for debate is merely moral posturing--traditional family values versus the cultural elite, free speech versus censorship--or reflexive name-calling--the terms "liberal" and "politically correct," are used with as much dismissive scorn by the right as "reactionary" and "fascist" are by the left--Stanley Fish would seem an unlikely lightning rod for controversy. A renowned scholar of Milton, head of the English Department of Duke University, Fish has emerged as a brilliantly original critic of the culture at large, praised and pilloried as a vigorous debunker of the pieties of both the left and right. His mission is not to win the cultural wars that preoccupy the nation's attention, but rather to redefine the terms of battle. In There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, Fish takes aim at the ideological gridlock paralyzing academic and political exchange in the nineties. In his witty, accessible dissections of the swirling controversies over multiculturalism, affirmative action, canon revision, hate speech, and legal reform, he neatly eviscerates both the conservatives' claim to possession of timeless, transcendent values (the timeless transcendence of which they themselves have conveniently identified), and the intellectual left's icons of equality, tolerance, and non-discrimination. He argues that while conservative ideologues and liberal stalwarts might disagree vehemently on what is essential to a culture, or to a curriculum, both mistakenly believe that what is essential can be identified apart from the accidental circumstances (of time and history) to which the essential is ritually opposed. In the book's first section, which includes the five essays written for Fish's celebrated debates with Dinesh D'Souza (the author and former Reagan White House policy analyst), Fish turns his attention to the neoconservative backlash. In his introduction, Fish writes, "Terms that come to us wearing the label 'apolitical'--'common values', 'fairness', 'merit', 'color blind', 'free speech', 'reason'--are in fact the ideologically charged constructions of a decidedly political agenda. I make the point not in order to level an accusation, but to remove the sting of accusation from the world 'politics' and redefine it as a synonym for what everyone inevitably does." Fish maintains that the debate over political correctness is an artificial one, because it is simply not possible for any party or individual to occupy a position above or beyond politics. Regarding the controversy over the revision of the college curriculum, Fish argues that the point is not to try to insist that inclusion of ethnic and gender studies is not a political decision, but "to point out that any alternative curriculum--say a diet of exclusively Western or European texts--would be no less politically invested." In Part Two, Fish follows the implications of his arguments to a surprising rejection of the optimistic claims of the intellectual left that awareness of the historical roots of our beliefs and biases can allow us, as individuals or as a society, to escape or transcend them. Specifically, he turns to the movement for reform of legal studies, and insists that a dream of a legal culture in which no one's values are slighted or declared peripheral can no more be realized than the dream of a concept of fairness that answers to everyone's notions of equality and jsutice, or a yardstick of merit that is true to everyone's notions of worth and substance. Similarly, he argues that attempts to politicize the study of literature are ultimately misguided, because recharacterizations of literary works have absolutely no impact on the mainstream of political life. He concludes his critique of the academy with "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos," an extraordinary look at some of the more puzzing, if not out-and-out masochistic, characteristics of a life in academia. Penetrating, fearless, and brilliantly argued, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech captures the essential Fish. It is must reading for anyone who cares about the outcome of America's cultural wars.

InfoWorld

InfoWorld PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 56

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Book Description
InfoWorld is targeted to Senior IT professionals. Content is segmented into Channels and Topic Centers. InfoWorld also celebrates people, companies, and projects.

There's No Such Thing as "The Economy"

There's No Such Thing as Author: Samuel A. Chambers
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1947447890
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Every Economics textbook today teaches that questions of values and morality lie outside of, are in fact excluded from, the field of Economics and its proper domain of study, "the economy." Yet the dominant cultural and media narrative in response to major economic crisis is almost always one of moral outrage. How do we reconcile this tension or explain this paradox by which Economics seems to have both everything and nothing to do with values? The discipline of modern economics hypostatizes and continually reifies a domain it calls "the economy"; only this epistemic practice makes it possible to falsely separate the question of value from the broader inquiry into the economic. And only if we have first eliminated value from the domain of economics can we then transform stories of financial crisis or massive corporate corruption into simple tales of ethics. But if economic forces establish, transform, and maintain relations of value then it proves impossible to separate economics from questions of value, because value relations only come to be in the world by way of economic logics. This means that the "positive economics" spoken of so fondly in the textbooks is nothing more than a contradiction in terms, and as this book demonstrates, there's no such thing as "the economy." To grasp the basic logic of capital is to bring into view the unbreakable link between economics and value.

Applied Software Project Management

Applied Software Project Management PDF Author: Andrew Stellman
Publisher: "O'Reilly Media, Inc."
ISBN: 059655382X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
"If you're looking for solid, easy-to-follow advice on estimation, requirements gathering, managing change, and more, you can stop now: this is the book for you."--Scott Berkun, Author of The Art of Project Management What makes software projects succeed? It takes more than a good idea and a team of talented programmers. A project manager needs to know how to guide the team through the entire software project. There are common pitfalls that plague all software projects and rookie mistakes that are made repeatedly--sometimes by the same people! Avoiding these pitfalls is not hard, but it is not necessarily intuitive. Luckily, there are tried and true techniques that can help any project manager. In Applied Software Project Management, Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene provide you with tools, techniques, and practices that you can use on your own projects right away. This book supplies you with the information you need to diagnose your team's situation and presents practical advice to help you achieve your goal of building better software. Topics include: Planning a software project Helping a team estimate its workload Building a schedule Gathering software requirements and creating use cases Improving programming with refactoring, unit testing, and version control Managing an outsourced project Testing software Jennifer Greene and Andrew Stellman have been building software together since 1998. Andrew comes from a programming background and has managed teams of requirements analysts, designers, and developers. Jennifer has a testing background and has managed teams of architects, developers, and testers. She has led multiple large-scale outsourced projects. Between the two of them, they have managed every aspect of software development. They have worked in a wide range of industries, including finance, telecommunications, media, nonprofit, entertainment, natural-language processing, science, and academia. For more information about them and this book, visit stellman-greene.com

Great Lessons in Project Management

Great Lessons in Project Management PDF Author: David Pratt
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN: 1523097167
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 105

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Book Description
Learn from Other Projects to Avoid Pitfalls on Your Projects! Projects fail at an alarming rate, whether they are information technology, training, construction, or policy development projects. No matter the focus, each year we experience an abundance of challenged projects that either require super-human effort to resuscitate or die an untimely death. Great Lessons in Project Management is a treasure trove of lessons learned from troubled projects—and from projects that went well. This collection of stories describes the events surrounding a particular challenge a project manager faced or a tool that another used effectively. Project managers of all types of projects can draw on these stories to validate their own good practices and to avoid the pitfalls so many have encountered on their projects.

No Such Thing as a Bad Day

No Such Thing as a Bad Day PDF Author: Hamilton Jordan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743419200
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Former White House chief of staff recounts his bouts with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, melanoma, and prostate cancer.

CSO

CSO PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 68

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Book Description
The business to business trade publication for information and physical Security professionals.

There's No Such Thing as Closure

There's No Such Thing as Closure PDF Author: Scarlett Doyle
Publisher: Scarlett Doyle
ISBN: 9780595428878
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
In the middle of the night, Mayor Jordanna Gray receives an alarming call from the police. Flames have suddenly engulfed a section of Amber Rose, a small community in California. Nearly a hundred people are dead. The obvious cause is the huge explosion of a natural gas pipeline owned by the AmSac Pipeline Company. Headed by Dr. John Foster, an AmSac investigative team arrives to find out why the pipes ruptured. A prominent California Senator broadcasts his criticism of AmSac to the nation, seeking federal review of the company's maintenance records. The political fallout causes problems for John. He discovers that the pipeline maintenance hasn't been conducted for years and that prior inspection reports show that the pipe was most likely corroded. This knowledge makes him a dangerous and unpredictable source of trouble for the company. The complex scientific investigation takes on unexpected dimensions when John and Jordanna are almost murdered. Suspicions abound as to why someone wants them dead. Is it that John and Jordanna know too much? Their lives suddenly depend on finding out who is responsible for a decades-long conspiracy-even if it brings down one of the most influential and powerful elements in the nation.