Personal update
So lots has been happening in my humble life, blogging not one of them. Although I’ve also putting most of my random thoughts of onto Twitter.
On a professional front, my role at ninemsn has expanded to become a Senior Program Manager which entails a more business less technical role. With recent changes again to the organisation my portfolio now includes network home, news, sport, finance, current affairs and other key entry points.
ninemsn portfolio
- ninemsn (portal home)
- Nine News
- Wide World of Sport (WWOS.com.au)
- Money
- A Current Affair
- Today Show
- Sixty Minutes
- Weather
On a personal front I have moved house and instead of making my 10 minute door-to-door commute, I now travel 2 hours each way to work! I’ve moved down to the beautiful Southern Highlands to a town called Mittagong. Country living is fantastic and the commute is bearable…just.
The other major news is that my family has expanded to join the wife, son Jackson, two dogs and a cat with a new baby girl. Madeline Lucy Keen was born on 28th March 2009 and the whole house is smitten.
From an article in the Daily Telegraph
New portfolio at ninemsn
Another year and another restructure at ninemsn. I loose Sport from my portfolio but pick up Entertainment along with a whole new team (3 Developers).
Here are the list of the sites under my portfolio.
News and Current Affair
Entertainment
It’s a lot of work for a team of four but it’s going to be a fun challenge.
Scrum and TFS
So I’ve finally moved on from my beloved whiteboard and now all my Scrum activity is sitting pretty in TFS.
TFS installation is painful and happily passed to our Enterprise Architect but from a user (client aka me!) perspective I installed the following.
- Visual Studio 2008 Team System
- Team Foundation Components
- Task Board for Team System
We work on a 90 day planning cycle across the business and whilst always iterating I do my planning, executing and evaluating using the following tools.
Planning
No matter how much I try and do away with it, Microsoft Project is an excellent planning tool, it just gets nasty maintaining the damn thing.
I take the Scrum template from the Team Project toolbar, do my normal waterfall planning and then publish it back into TFS. Each task item is then created as a Product Backlog Item
Executing
I execute (or maintain) my Backlog Items in Visual Studio and Task Board. VS is great for flushing out my details of my use cases or stories as well as creating the iterations needed.
On a day to day basis I use Task Board (currently in beta) to create Sprint Backlog items and move them from left to right (not started, in progress, ready for test, done). I generally get Developers to move them after our Daily Scrum.
Bugs (non active PBI) can also be created here or via the TFS website.
Evaluating
Of course we don’t need to review anything because everything is going so smoothly! However on that odd occasion you need an overall view, reporting is well integrated with Sprint Burndowns, Bug reporting etc.
On a side note, the whole company is now using Scrum. Always have a little smile when I hear Journos and Producers trying to work out what Product Backlog Item needs to go into which Sprint.
ninemsn Beijing Olympics
Today we’ve launched our new Olympics section. Like all other non-rights media we’ll be covering the Olympics extensively 
showing latest news, results and medal tally’s along with videos of the important events during the games.
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/olympics
Not sure if we’ll win the ratings race but we hope you enjoy the experience.
Birthday present
Well I hit another birthday milestone today. The wife asked me what I wanted and I replied a motorbike. Whilst the wife didn’t deliver, my team did.
7 ways to vaccinate yourself against boring thinking
As part of our internal UX series, Dr Amather Imber gave a hugely entertaining hour on 7 science-based ways to boost your own individual creativity.
The seven rules are:
#1 Warm up your brain beforehand
#2 Warm-coloured environments increases creativity
#3 Shifting increases the diversity and number of ideas generated
#4 Constraints increases creativity
#5 Exposure to a wide amount of information increases creativity
#6 Recognition (not reward) increases creativity
#7 Deviance boost creativity
All these points were explained and based around science and academic studies. Some of the experiments we did in the meeting really came as a surprise.
Next week Hyro are coming in to re-present their Remix presentation.
More details on Amantha and Inventium.
Dr Amantha Imber is the Head Inventiologist at Inventium, a company dedicated to helping people think more creatively. Amantha has that rare talent of taking learnings from science and academia and applying them to practical, real-world situations. Indeed, all the tools and techniques that Inventium teaches have a scientific basis. So they actually work. Inventium has clients across Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Europe, including Deloitte, Fosters, BP, Australia Post, AMP, Qantas, and Clemenger BBDO.
ninemsn unveils iPhone-friendly site
Back from hols and all the talk is the iPhone launch on the 11th July.
So with just two days to go before the most anticipated launch in ‘techy’ mobile history, ninemsn unveils its ninemsn homepage created especially for the iPhone.
ninemsn for iPhone offers a selection of its content optimised for mobile internet browsing.
ninemsn for iPhone is a one-stop hub where people can be informed, educated and entertained while accessing all the information, entertainment and lifestyle sites ninemsn has to offer.
From ninemsn home on the iPhone, people will be able to browse ninemsn’s made-for-mobile products such as National Nine News, Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger, Live Search, RALPH, Cleo, CelebrityFIX , the great yourtime guides and more.
Go to ninemsn.com.au from an iPhone to find iPhone style icons, images, and touch screen navigation.
Going to Southampton
I’m off on holiday back to my home town Southampton, England (home of the Saints, Matt Le Tissier and Benny Hill) for a friends wedding.
It’s only been my second visit in eight years and last time I only spent a few days at home so it will be great to see the New Forest again and revisit my old pubs.
See you in two weeks!
Twitter me softly
…with his words…
I know, I know a late coming and just when everyone is leaving for FriendFeed, but follow me if you will.
Oh, and FriendFeed http://friendfeed.com/keen for those who really like lots of noise.
Notetaking: my tips
I only run a small team of 3 direct reports but under my News portfolio I daily work with 25 Journos along with 30 Program Managers and Developers. With lost of requests coming from all sorts of directions (sound familiar), structured note taking is important to stop getting into a mess. Well, this is what I do…
I split my note taking into two categories, and I’m never without one of them.
Notepad
I use my notepad in very much the same way as Matt Cutts, the guru from Google. In my ubiquitous Moleskine (I choose the plain A5 version) I put in tasks or actions only.
I add tasks and tick them off one by one and when all tasks are completed (or the task is too old) I rip out the page. I try to ensure I don’t have more than a couple of pages with writing, if it becomes more then I create a new succinct list and rip out the old.
Tablet PC
For everything that needs to be kept permanently, I use my Tablet PC and OneNote. To be honest, it’s not that often I need to write down a lot of notes and generally you’re aware of those meetings such as brainstorming sessions to meetings with clients. If am caught without my tablet, I write it down in my notepad and transfer it to my tablet afterwards.
OneNote is great tool, being able to search your text, handwriting and even your cut and pasted images! It’s the perfect way to keep my notes organised and easy to find, there too many features to write here but do a Live Search (still not really a verb!). It’s also much safer to keep your perma-notes on your PC as my machine is backup by our network and I also backup to the cloud using Mozy.
