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One of the principles of Prince 2 is that it’s product-based – the approach is about the project resulting in the delivery of discrete products. As such, the product breakdown structure breaks the ultimate end goal of the project into constituent sub-products that can help clarify and identify all the necessary work that will be required.

One of problems with the approach is that although it sounds simple, decomposing a product into a logical hierarchy is actually surprisingly difficult in practice. It just seems to be one of those things that the human mind isn’t really wired up for – so the more practice that you get at it, ultimately the better you should be.

Even though it’s not something you’ll end up doing as part of a project every day, a very similar process lies at the heart of the Getting Things Done approach to time and task management. Rather than product breakdown, GTD refers to the ‘next action’ – that’s the absolute next physical thing that you need to do on the way to an ultimate goal. Much of the time, the items on lists of things that we need to do are actually composites – in order to get an item ticked off the list, there are several discrete actions that are needed.

GTD’s philosophy is that unless you’re clear on exactly what it is you need to do next, you’re less likely to be able to achieve it. A lot of effort in the GTD process goes into making sure that what you’re capturing as things to do are actually individual things and not composites. And there are various techniques that exist to help with this – cascading actions, ensuring that the to-do item includes a verb, or focussing on the next physical action required.

So what’s the connection with Prince? Simply that if you’re using a technique such as GTD which focusses on the next-action concept – quite apart from the benefits of being more organised and in control of your day-to-day activities – you’re going to find it easier when your project next comes around to defining the product breakdown structure.

I’ve mentioned Tiddlywiki in the past – put (not so) simply, it’s a self-contained wiki that doesn’t need any server or database backend. Which is a complicated way of saying that you can create a Tiddlywiki and send it via email as an attachment, so that the recipient can read it without needing to connect to an internet-based server.

It’s a fiendishly clever use of HTML and Javascript – and it’s got one of the slickest interfaces I’ve seen in a wiki (not things of beauty, generally). And now there’s a server-based version – which although it loses the portability aspects, does mean that now the beauty of the interface is available as on a full-blown wiki.

Ever played email tag with a group of people while you’re trying to arrange a meeting? Ever fixed a date and time only to find it’s no good because the most important participant forgot to update their Outlook schedule for that day?

Play tag no more, because a wiki might be the answer. Here’s what we do.

Let’s say we’re trying to arrange a meeting between 10 people from different organisations. We’ll simply create a page on our wiki titled ‘Potential meeting dates for meeting X’ and send out an email with the link. The page has a list of everyone’s name and a list of the potential dates – so individuals can visit the page and delete the days they’re not available. Not only that, but they can see at a glance what other people are doing – so if it’s going to be one of those situations where not everyone can make every day, you’ve got a chance for the optimum combination of date and participants to emerge.

If the wiki page has an RSS webfeed, it’s trivial to subscribe to it so that you’re alerted as soon as someone has added or changed their availability – no need to have to remember to check back. And you can also use the same page to publish and agree on the agenda.

One of the key roles in a brainstorming session is the person who’s in charge of writing down the ideas. The central premise of brainstorming is that every idea is captured, no matter how ridiculous it seems at the time – and this normally means someone standing at a whiteboard scribbling furiously.

Which is all very well if everyone is in the same room – but how do you capture the ideas if you want to brainstorm with people on the other side of the world?

The answer – use a wiki.

You’ll still need someone to fill the role of scribe, but instead of choosing someone who can scribble fast but legibly, now you’re looking for someone who can type fast but accurately. Instead of writing the ideas up on a whiteboard, the scribe types them into a wiki page – which can be accessed from anywhere with a network connection, and instantly refreshed to see the ideas as they go up.

The wiki then becomes a permanent record of the ideas that were generated (saving someone a job of typing up the whiteboard) – and because all the best ideas happen in the shower, it’s there in the future for ideas to be recorded once they’ve happened.

I can’t help but feel that there’s something of an oxymoron about a step-by-step guide to brainstorming (and I like the word oxymoron) – but that’s not stopped the brains at jbp.com from being stormed.

Brainstorming can be an effective way to generate lots of ideas and then determine which idea(s) best solves the problem. Brainstorming is most effective with larger groups of people and should be performed in a relaxed environment. If participants feel free to be silly, they’ll stretch their minds more and therefore produce more creative ideas.

They’ve also got a online product called Sylvia – which appears to be no more complicated than a webpage which lists the idea as they happen, but could help if you’re running brainstorming sessions with remote participants.

Ok, we’re quite very pleased with this – we think it’s a cool use of blogs, webfeeds, podcasting and an iPod Shuffle in a real live business scenario. We’d be interested to know what people think – comments welcome.

The scenario:

Our client is the classic Type-A personality, time-poor, stressed executive with too much to do and too little time to do it – he spends most of his life on planes in transit between meetings. He needs to keep up with the key developments in competitor intelligence, but gets very little opportunity to sit in front of a screen to browse through reports. Neither does he want to drag a large pile of paper around with him.

The solution:
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Passwords (and the problems therein) have been mentioned here before – sadly it doesn’t look like Paris Hilton took much notice of our advice. The talentless bimbo hotel heiress is the proud owner of a Swarovski-encrusted T-Mobile Sidekick, the contents of which have been posted on the net (link NSFW) – topless pics, celebrity phone numbers and all. There’s even a celebratory tshirt…

T-Mobile would presumably like us to believe that it’s a one-off problem, so they’re playing down the possibility that someone with an unhealthy interest in Ms Hilton hacked her account. Instead the finger is being pointed at someone guessing her password.

The solution, it seems, is more prosaic than that. According to a posting on the O’Reilly Network, the problem lay in the answer to the ’secret question’ – which in Paris’ case was her dog’s name. Given that her dog is almost as prominent a ‘celebrity’ as her owner (insert your own comment about the downfall of civilisation here), this turned out to be not such a secret after all.

T-Mobile are partly to blame here – their choice of questions are limited, and asking a leading question like that will result in obvious passwords. But there is a workaround – use the ‘nursery rhyme’ hack for the answer to the secret question as well. In fact it’ll be slightly easier to remember even a complicated password, because you’ll be getting a ‘cue’ from the system as it asks you for your response. And if you’ve got the option to set your own ’secret question’, you can add a discrete reminder that the answer is scrambled – “what’s the FULL name of my dog?” or something along those lines.

And all of this makes a wider point about the safety and security of your data. Paris Hilton would have had a smaller risk of embarrassing revelations if the information had been on the Sidekick itself – you’d have needed physical access to the device to do anything nefarious. The risk would therefore be a function of her negligence if she were to leave it in the back of a taxi, for example. But Sidekick data sits on a T-Mobile server, so you’re reliant on them to maintain the integrity of their systems – and the larger the organisations and more complex the systems, the more difficult this becomes. Complex passwords and best intentions are useless if the attack is from the inside.

The Parents Television Council is a peculiarly American creature that we Europeans can’t really understand, Europe being home to Italian TV and all.

I’m sure that the Worst TV Clips Of The Week section of their website was intended as a sober warning of all things shocking (at least to easily-offended American eyes), but the net effect is something completely different.

To start with, each programme listed comes with a detailed explanation of why it’s one of the worst – “gratuitious sexual innuendo”, “gratutious teen sex”, “necrophilia” – ok, you get the idea.

Then they’ve handily provided clips of all the “worst” bits, to save you the trouble of downloading a bittorrent and hitting the fast-forward button.

And in case you really didn’t get the message, each clip appears in a pop-up window emblazoned with a warning:

WARNING: Graphic Content!!!
Do NOT push play if you don’t want to see the explicit video!!!

So rather than being the Worst TV Clips Of The Week, the site is actually a handy a guide to all that’s worth watching if you’re in the market for a bit of morally reprehensible low-level titillation.

Seems like the law of unintended consequences in action…

Here’s the clearest (graphical) explanation I’ve yet to find of folksonomies (broad and narrow), power laws and the ‘long tail’ – all in a single post.

Worth a look if you’re interested in any of the above.

The title sort of suggested itself…

(via 37 Signals)