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Shame on Edward Tufte's Website Staff

Let me start by saying I own just about all the books the man has written. Brilliant stuff on simplifying the design and presentation of information.

I subscribed to the sites RSS feed and got one that there was a new comment in the thread concerning the "PowerPoint Engineering" concerns at NASA after the shuttle crash. For those that do not know Mr. Tufte has made lots of noise about the evils of PowerPoint. The title of this concerned me and I posted a post to the effect that I disagreed with the idea that PowerPoint was in any way to blame for the things that went wrong at NASA. I also suggested that bad presentations (a point that Tufte's site makes over and over) are not the fault of the software you choose to present them with. Bad engineers and bad presenters create bad output regardless of the tool they use. Lastly I suggested that blaming PowerPoint for bad presentations or bad engineering was a bit like a consumer buying a new hammer for building a house and then becoming angry when it did not do a good job of driving nails when he held it by the metal head and hit the nails with the wooden part.

My post was on the site for a short time. I went back today to see if there were any replies and it was gone. Then I started looking  around at the site. There are lots and lots of posts agreeing with Tufte's ideas. I had a hard time finding any dissenting opinions.

While this is a great way to provide the illusion of consensus it is a poor way to actually work toward a better solution.

Shame on the team responsible for removing posts.

It Might be Better Than You Think...

Recently I was working with a customer that was going to deploy Project Server as one part of a larger effort to improve their organizational project management practices and processes. Through our initial conversations I was struck by the negative way they viewed not only how they did things currently (hence the desire to change) but also about their readiness and even ability to undertake these changes. However, despite these negative feelings they were much farther along then they thought.

As the cliche goes the first step in getting better is realizing you have a problem. I have worked with many (MANY) companies that did not think they had a problem. They just wanted software to compliment their existing processes. A few of them were  right, they did do things well but most were not seeing the bigger picture.

The customer I'm thinking of not only knew that they had an issue with things but also had decided on change and had put together a team that had the authority to make the changes needed. They had thought long and hard about what had to change and had even laid out some possible changes for me to look at and talk about with them. All they needed help with was on the specifics of how to go about making the changes. One of these was to put some software in place to give better visibility to those that needed it.

They thought they were miles away from being ready when in reality they were so close they could not see it!

If you are asking the question then you are more ready than you think!

Not Dead...

...at least not totally!

Just very busy. I will try to get back in the swing of posting this coming week.

:-)