Nuffing.com

Businesses should always be looking for ways to implement new processes that create a standard operating procedure. Alternatively, they should be trying to optimize the procedures they have to make them more efficient. Unfortunately, change management can be a beast. Moreover, many organizations don’t know how to start making a procedural shift. Kanban provides answers to this dilemma.

Kanban is a process that development teams can use to continuously put out new data at an efficient-yet-sustainable rate. This gives their companies the best possible returns. Here’s how to implement Kanban in your company.

RELATED ARTICLE: BENEFITS OF USING CLOUD MANAGEMENT SUITE FOR IT MANAGEMENT

Understanding Kanban

Kanban is a project management process targeted at developers. However, the philosophy can be applied to any business that requires project management protocols. The key philosophies can be summed up as visualization, limitation, and enhancement.

First, you must visualize the current workflow. Look to see how the various steps and components relate contextually to one another. What makes sense? What doesn’t?

Next, put limitations in place surrounding the work in progress (also known as “WIP”). Your aim should be to find a balanced workload that produces continuous work without becoming overbearing.

Finally, incorporate enhancements by implementing strict policies and procedures. Additionally, optimize to create a streamlined workflow, making changes as needed. Also, use kanban metrics and analytics to assess the effectiveness of the process. This will help you to make strategic decisions and alterations.

Take Baby Steps

The best way to fail at implementing Kanban is to try to make all of the related changes at once. This massive shift in procedures can be extremely stressful for all involved. Moreover, it will result in poor quality work and turnover, stalling production.

Instead, your goal when implementing Kanban should be to shift your business to work with the new protocol. This means that Kanban must meet the business where it currently is. This will make for an smoother transition.

To take baby steps in implementing Kanban, consider what aspects of the philosophies and transition you’d like to start. At the same time, educate your people about the upcoming change.

Take a positive angle and tell people how it will help them. This will make the transition easier for them to accept and even welcome. For example, you could select a few small projects to start implementing Kanban. Thereafter, slowly transition projects as they arise, leaving legacy projects as they are.

Complicate the Visual Process

The idea of complicating anything sounds counterintuitive. However, in a Kanban transition, it makes sense. Being able to visualize and assess a workflow is essential for helping a team learn the new way things are being done. As a result, it’s important not to overly compress and streamline the project management or Kanban board.

For example, a project management board on Trello might have three columns: to-do, in progress, and complete. This is a clean way to keep track of things. However, it doesn’t show all of the work that went on behind the scenes to move an item from one column to the next.

With the Kanban process, you need to see all of those steps broken out and visualized. When you do, every team member knows what their peers are working on. This improves efficiency. Also, it helps bolster team collaboration.

Stress the Importance of WIP Limits

WIP limitations are put in place for a reason. The philosophy behind this is that your team should only take on as much as they can do well. In other words, they should stop before they reach the threshold of diminishing returns.

A comparable analogy would be competitive weightlifting. It doesn’t matter how much weight you can put on your back if your form is unacceptable and you can’t complete the lift. Teach your team to respect the WIP limits from day one. In this way, you’ll set them up for long-term success.

Always
Be Optimizing

Kanban isn’t a one-and-done implementation process. You should always be using the tools available to you to read the metrics and analytics. As you do, you will be able to make strategic adjustments to your workflow.

Therefore, treat every adjustment like a science experiment. What do you think will happen if you adjust this part of the process? Are there variables that could affect your success? What effect did the shift have?

Stress the importance of limitations and relying on your data. Then you’ll be able to change the face of your business through the implementation of Kanban.

The post Make Your Company More Efficient by Implementing Kanban appeared first on Business Opportunities.

via Business Opportunities Weblog
Make Your Company More Efficient by Implementing Kanban

Link

TheRankings presents an eye-opening time-based graphic which charts the top valued global brands over the last 18 years, as calculated by Interbrand. Most notable is Apple’s meteoric rise since the launch of the iPhone, though Google isn’t too shabby either.

via The Awesomer
Brand Rankings 2000-2018

Opinion

USA – -(Ammoland.com)- How often have we seen Hollywood celebrities praised as courageous for “coming out” and admitting they’re gay? Isn’t it far more courageous for people to profess their Christian faith?

Hollywood is not a tolerant city. Dominated by activist leftists, it is a culture hostile to dissenting views. We see it in its work product. Most movies and television shows are laced with political messages and politically correct symbolism. The heroes almost always are liberal and promote “progressive” values and causes, and conservatives are depicted as morally degenerate hayseeds or villains.

Christians are especially singled out as backward, close-minded crackpots. Sure, there are notable exceptions, such as the TV series “Blue Bloods,” which involves a traditional Catholic family of cops that meets weekly for dinner with prayer and conversation that promotes biblical virtues.

It’s doubtful that there’s much of a stigma attached to people who come out as being gay in the Hollywood culture, given the extent to which it showcases and celebrates the gay lifestyle. It seems you can’t watch any TV show these days without an actual or suggested gay sex scene — as if the show’s writers and producers are on a mission to portray homosexuality as more prominent than heterosexuality.

This is certainly their prerogative, of course, as it is mine to notice they are proselytizing and sermonizing the way they do on so many other social and political issues, from the glories of abortion rights to the evils of all things Trump to the intolerance and hatefulness of Christianity.

Chris Pratt

This is why it is refreshing when an actor in this environment, such as Chris Pratt, publicly identifies himself as a Christian — the modern equivalent of branding oneself with Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter. It is almost guaranteed to bring one into disrepute and ridicule, not to mention that it opens the door to being blacklisted by today’s leftist McCarthyites.

Last year, Pratt committed secular heresy with his remarks when receiving the Generation Award at the MTV Movie & TV Awards. “God is real. God loves you. God wants the best for you. Believe that. I do.” Once he opened up about his faith, the left began to sling its arrows. On Christmas Day, TV Guide published an article on the popular actor, titled “How to Love Chris Pratt Without Hating Yourself.”

After listing some of Pratt’s many professional accomplishments and acknowledging his meteoric ascent, the author lamented, “And yet: despite all this, Pratt remains the most complicated and divisive of the (many famous young actors named Chris). When you take a deeper look at Pratt the man and not necessarily Pratt the actor, some of the shine wears off. Although he can be as funny offscreen as he is on … it’s impossible to ignore some problematic aspects of his life offscreen.” Though the writer didn’t directly attack Pratt’s Christianity, she ticked off a series of silly non-sins for which he should be shamed, such as his hunting habits, an allegedly insensitive Instagram post about raising lambs to eat them, giving away the family’s cat before having children, and another Instagram post that supposedly offended the hearing-impaired community because he told his followers to “turn up the volume” and not just “read the subtitles.”

Many readers viewed this as an obvious anti-Christian hit piece, and it probably was. But one thing it was for sure –

– a display of liberal intolerance and sanctimonious political correctness. Apart from the sniping criticisms of Pratt, the suggestion that you can’t love Pratt without hating yourself is far more revealing about the writer and the leftist mindset than it is about Pratt.

Actress Ellen Page, an outspoken Christian critic, laid into Pratt on Twitter for saying that he’d taken part in a fast with his church and discussing his spiritual side during his appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” Page tweeted, “Oh. K. Um. But his church is infamously anti lgbtq so maybe address that too?”

Pratt quickly responded on Instagram, “It has recently been suggested that i belong to a church which ‘hates a certain group of people’ and is ‘infamously anti-LGBTQ’. Nothing could be further from the truth.” He said his church opens its “doors to absolutely everyone.”

Twitter trolls also attacked Pratt for praying (and asking his followers to pray) for comedian Kevin Smith after he had a massive heart attack. One attacker tweeted, “Doctors and nurses save lives not prayer.” Another said, “Great now I won’t enjoy your films as much knowing you’re a Jesus nut.” These are the “loving” types who savage Christianity for not being loving.

The Washington Post’s Drew Goins vilified Pratt in an op-ed for attending his church. Goins didn’t seriously dispute Pratt’s assertion that his church welcomes all people but faulted him and the church because they don’t affirmatively reject traditional Christian orthodoxy by declaring that homosexual behavior is not sinful.

Under cover of false tolerance, leftist activists will eventually ensure that certain biblical passages are deemed hate speech and that affirming one’s belief in the inspiration of Scripture is an admission of hatefulness.

Attacks on Christianity and Christians have grown exponentially since I wrote my book “Persecution,” which documented this phenomenon 15 years ago. It is laughable to deny that it is going on, and it is sad that more people don’t stand up against it.

Kudos to actors such as Chris Pratt, who are courageous enough and true enough to their faith to refuse to deny Christ, choosing instead to openly profess their belief in him despite the professional risk to their careers.

---

About David Limbaugh

David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His latest book is “The True Jesus: Uncovering the Divinity of Christ in the Gospels.” Follow him on Twitter @davidlimbaugh and his website at www.davidlimbaugh.com

The post Kudos to Chris Pratt, For Coming Out appeared first on AmmoLand.com.

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Kudos to Chris Pratt, For Coming Out

Every couple of months, I talk to an entrepreneur who is interested in building a marketplace for buying and selling app businesses (i.e. the actual IP and ownership of an app or other piece of software). These markets always seem to suffer from a lack of liquidity, and one reason why is that it’s really hard to know how much technical debt is latent in a codebase.

First, the developer behind the codebase may not even be aware of the technical debt they have piled on. Second, until a software engineer really understands a codebase, they are almost certainly not in a position to answer a question on technical debt authoritatively. That makes it hard to get third-party opinions on anything but the most simple codebases.

This opaqueness isn’t unique to software though. We lack tools for understanding the maintenance quality of assets — physical or digital — across our economy. Even when we do perform maintenance or hire someone to do it for us, it can be hard to verify that the work was performed well. How long does it take for an auto mechanic to truly evaluate the maintenance of a used car?

I was thinking about this challenge of evaluating maintenance when I read this deep dive into the economics of old housing by Akron’s head of planning Jason Segedy:

It has been suggested to me, on more than one occasion, that indebted, college-educated Millennials could be lured back to the city by selling them these old, poorly-maintained houses for $1.00, and having them “fix up the house.”

People who say this do not have a realistic idea of what “fixing up” an old house entails—neither in terms of the scope of the rehabilitation work that would be required, nor in terms of the level of skill, time, and/or money needed to do the work.

Even in a low cost-of-living market like ours, $40,000 houses are generally not a “good deal.” They are almost always a liability. They are a ticking time bomb of deferred maintenance. They are an albatross.

In his own case:

All told, I have spent $93,400 on improvements to this house over the past 15 years. This works out to an additional $502 per month, above what I was paying in mortgage, taxes, and insurance. When you add all of that together, the total monthly cost works out to $1,439.

[…]

The total monthly cost for the brand-new house? $1,444. Which comes out to exactly $5.00 per month more than my 72-year-old house.

Maintenance is the secret challenge of any asset, physical or digital. We have been talking about the Tappan Zee bridge here a bit this week, and maintenance played an outsized role in forcing New York to spend even more money on a new bridge. From Phil Plotch’s book Politics across the Hudson:

However, he also recognized that the Authority probably put less money into the bridge after it decided to replace it. “When maintenance folks know that a capital project is under design and will soon deal with the problems they have been battling for years,” he said. “They often back down a bit and turn their attention and resources to other areas.”

That didn’t work out so well:

One of the reasons the Thruway Authority wanted to build a new bridge in the late 1990s was to avoid replacing the bridge’s deck. However, the environmental review process took so long that the authority had to spend $300 million dollars to do exactly that anyway — after five-foot-wide holes started opening up along the length of the bridge.

Back in the software world, we have gotten much better about quantifying test coverage over the years, but we still seem to lack any means by which to evaluate technical debt. And yet, technical debt from my limited experience is hugely determinative on how fast product features can be launched.

It would be hugely helpful to have some sort of reasonably accurate grading system that said “this codebase is really up-to-date and clean” versus “this codebase is radioactive and run away from it.” Right now, so much of product engineering seems to be making decisions in the dark and discovering software quagmires. There has to be a better way?

Why we can’t build anything? (Part 5?)

Written by Arman Tabatabai

We’ve been obsessed with the infrastructure crisis in the U.S. lately and the question of “Why can’t we build anything?”. In case you thought the California HSR shitshow was an isolated incident, think again.

Construction Dive provided some more details around the DOJ’s subpoena of the Honolulu High-Speed Rail Project (Honolulu Rail Transit) last week, which ordered the project leads to open up their books. Just like in California, after decades of debate, Hawaii’s project has been plagued by delays and cost overruns. Today, the project holds an estimated cost of around $9-10 billion, compared to initial estimates of $3-4 billion, and some academics and industry specialists are even saying that number is more like $13 billion-plus. The court order came just after a state-led audit found that much of the cost overruns could be tied to poor contracting, planning, and management practices — just as in California.

Given the similarities here, it’s possible we could see the federal government try and pull back the $1.6 billion it had earmarked for the project if it doesn’t like what it sees. Despite calls for infrastructure improvement, the feds seem to be taking a tougher stance on the use of fed funds for these projects.

Construction Dive also highlighted that the $650 million renovation of Denver International Airport’s Jeppesen Terminal was delayed indefinitely after operators found structural deficiencies in the concrete. Sound familiar? Maybe it’s because in just the last year we’ve seen “structural deficiencies” mar SF’s Transbay Terminal project and DC’s Metrorail extension. Denver’s reclamation project is expected to cost $1.8 billion in its entirety and is a year behind schedule after breaking ground less than nine months ago.

India’s general election might also determine Facebook’s future in the region

Written by Arman Tabatabai

India’s Parliamentary Committee on Information Technology announced it would be meeting with Facebook in early-March to discuss “safeguarding citizens’ rights on social or online news media platforms.” The government has approached social media with a cautious eye ahead of the country’s huge upcoming elections, as concern over the use and misuse of social and messaging platforms in global elections becomes a hot-button issue.

The topic came up in our recent conversation with The Billionaire Raj author James Crabtree. He believes the election will be a hugely important period for social platforms in India. Having experienced a number of major historical scandals, India’s citizenry has a fairly harsh — albeit somewhat selective — view on corruption, and Crabtree believes that if Facebook or others were to face blame for any alleged misconduct, the potential fallout from a political, regulatory, and public opinion standpoint could be devastating.

The prospect of such an outcome becomes even more alarming for foreign social companies as India has ticked up focus on data localization and movements towards a “national champion” policy that will increasingly favor domestic firms over external players.

I love triangulation negotiation

The trade kerfuffle between China and the U.S. is sort of just continuing at a glacial pace. Literally glaciers, because Greenland got involved over the past few months. Greenland power politics is very far afield of TC, but I wanted to point out one little nuance that offers a worthwhile lesson.

Greenland has wanted to upgrade its airports for some time (there are no roads between major cities in the sparsely-populated but huge country). But Denmark, which Greenland is a constituent country, has rebuffed those requests, that is, until the Chinese got involved. From a WSJ article:

After Kalaallit Airports short-listed a Chinese construction firm to build the new airports, Denmark conveyed its alarm to the Pentagon. After Mr. Mattis got involved, Denmark’s government asked a consortium led by Danske Bank to help assemble an alternative financing package.

Officials in Greenland were pleasantly surprised by the terms. “Even Chinese funding is not as cheap as this,” Mr. Hansen said.

Plus this quote:

“He was not into it at all—until the Chinese showed interest,” said Aleqa Hammon, Greenland’s former prime minister, speaking of [Danish Prime Minister] Rasmussen.

This is how you negotiate! Get two larger adversaries lined up on either side of the line, and just start going back and forth between them. This works with Google and Facebook, Sequoia and Benchmark, or any other competitors. At some point, the game isn’t just a deal, it’s also the face-saving that comes from not losing to the competition.

Japan joining the trend of looser fundraising rules for growing companies

Written by Arman Tabatabai

Earlier this week, we talked about how security exchanges around the world were looking to loosen fundraising rules for young companies. The softening of these rules might be indicative of a wider trend, with Japan now proposing revised rules to make it easier for startups to fundraise through traditional brokerages and trade shares of listed companies. While the motivation here may not be to attract IPO deals like it seems to be in the U.S. and China, with the creation of more funding alternatives and with companies opting to stay out of the public markets for longer, national securities industries seem to be trying to brand themselves as the best venue for young companies to grow.

Obsessions

• More discussion of megaprojects, infrastructure, and “why can’t we build things”
• We are going to be talking India here, focused around the book “Billonnaire Raj” by James Crabtree, who we just interviewed and will share more soon
• We have a lot to catch up on in the China world when the EC launch craziness dies down. Plus, we are covering The Next Factory of the World by Irene Yuan Sun.
• Societal resilience and geoengineering are still top-of-mind
• Some more on metrics design and quantification

Thanks

To every member of Extra Crunch: thank you. You allow us to get off the ad-laden media churn conveyor belt and spend quality time on amazing ideas, people, and companies. If I can ever be of assistance, hit reply, or send an email to danny@techcrunch.com.

This newsletter is written with the assistance of Arman Tabatabai from New York

via TechCrunch
Can we ever evaluate technical debt?

A new take on the age-old question: Should you rewrite your application from scratch, or is that "the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make"? Turns out there are more than two options for dealing with a mature codebase. Herb Caudill: Almost two decades ago, Joel Spolsky excoriated Netscape for rewriting their codebase in his landmark essay Things You Should Never Do . He concluded that a functioning application should never, ever be rewritten from the ground up. His argument turned on two points: The crufty-looking parts of the application’s codebase often embed hard-earned knowledge about corner cases and weird bugs. A rewrite is a lengthy undertaking that keeps you from improving on your existing product, during which time the competition is gaining on you. For many, Joel’s conclusion became an article of faith; I know it had a big effect on my thinking at the time. In the following years, I read a few contrarian takes arguing that, under certain circumstances, it made a lot of sense to rewrite from scratch. For example:
Sometimes the legacy codebase really is messed up beyond repair, such that even simple changes require a cascade of changes to other parts of the code. The original technology choices might be preventing you from making necessary improvements. Or, the original technology might be obsolete, making it hard (or expensive) to recruit quality developers. The correct answer, of course, is that it depends a lot on the circumstances. Yes, sometimes it makes more sense to gradually refactor your legacy code. And yes, sometimes it makes sense to throw it all out and start over. But those aren’t the only choices. Let’s take a quick look at six stories, and see what lessons we can draw.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

via Slashdot
Lessons From Six Software Rewrite Stories

Bob Irwin highlights the latest self-defense and other shootings of the week. Read them and see what went wrong, what went right and what we can learn from self-defense with a gun.

USA –-(Ammoland.com)- KOCO TV-5 (ABC) reported back in 2012 a young Oklahoma mother shot and killed an intruder to protect her 3-month-old baby on New Year’s Eve, less than a week after the baby’s father died of cancer.

The young mother said a week earlier a 24-year-old male subject dropped by on the day of her husband’s funeral, claiming that he was a neighbor who wanted to say hello. The 18-year-old mother did not let him into her home.

On New Year’s Eve he returned with a second man and this time was armed with a 12-inch hunting knife.

As one of the men was going from door to door outside her home trying to gain entry. The woman called 911 and grabbed her 12-gauge shotgun.

She told ABC News Oklahoma City affiliate KOCO that she quickly got her 12 gauge, went into her bedroom and got a pistol, put a bottle in the baby’s mouth and called 911.

The young mother asked the 911 dispatcher “I’ve got two guns in my hand, is it okay to shoot him if he comes in this door?”

The 911 dispatcher confirmed with the mom that the doors to her home were locked as she asked again if it was okay to shoot the intruder if he were to come through her door.

“I can’t tell you that you can do that but you do what you have to do to protect your baby,” the dispatcher told her. The woman was on the phone with 911 for a total of 21 minutes.

When the first male kicked in the door and came after her with the knife, the teen mom shot and killed the 24-year-old. Police are calling the shooting justified.

“You’re allowed to shoot an unauthorized person that is in your home. The law provides you the remedy, and sanctions the use of deadly force,” Detective Dan Huff of the Blanchard Police said.

The second home invader turned himself in to police shortly thereafter.

“I wouldn’t have done it, but it was my son,” the woman told media. “It’s not an easy decision to make, but it was either going to be him or my son. And it wasn’t going to be my son. There’s nothing more dangerous than a woman with a child.”

Comments:

Fine job, a perfect use of a self-defense firearm. One can only imagine the horrible outcome had this young mother not been armed.

It is not unusual for victims to ask the 911 operator for permission to shoot. We have to encourage self-defense gun owners to get some training and practice, practice, practice.

And while we are here, don’t give interviews to any media ever!

Bob Irwin, Las Vegas

About Bob Irwin

Bob is retired after 30 years of ownership of The Gun Store & Indoor Range in Las Vegas. He continues his 2A issues show “Fired Up with Bob Irwin” on YouTube and on KLEY 1230 AM, The Nevada Talk Network on Saturdays.

As a firearm instructor of Concealed Firearm Applicants, Armed Security Officer and Law Enforcement Academies over his career, Bob appears frequently as an expert witness for firearm & use of force cases in Federal, State, and local courts.

The post Woman Shoots, Kills Intruder: 911 Operators Say It’s OK to Shoot appeared first on AmmoLand.com.

via AmmoLand.com
Woman Shoots, Kills Intruder: 911 Operators Say It’s OK to Shoot

Over a hundred museums and libraries around the world make coloring books based on their collections for the Color Our Collections program, led by the New York Academy of Medicine. Along with three previous annual collections, there are now 396 PDF coloring books you can print out. Here are some of our favorites.

Read more…

via Lifehacker
Download Coloring Pages From Over 100 Museums

Programming interview questions can feel unnecessarily difficult. Sometimes they actually are, a new study has found. And this isn’t just because they make interviews excessively stressful. The study shows that harder programming questions actually do a worse job of predicting final outcomes than easier ones. From the study: Programming under time pressure is difficult. This is especially true during interviews. A coding exercise that would seem simple under normal circumstances somehow becomes a formidable challenge under the bright lights of an interview room. Stress hormones cloud your thinking during interviews (even though, sadly, neither fight nor flight is an effective response to a menacing programming problem). And it can almost feel like the questions are designed to be perversely difficult. I actually think this is more than just a feeling. Interview questions are designed to be hard. Because the cost of hiring a bad engineer is so much higher than the cost of rejecting a good engineer, companies are incentivized to set a high bar. And for most companies that means asking hard questions. Intuitively this makes sense because harder questions seem like they should result in a more rigorous screening process. But intuition turns out to be a poor guide here. Our data shows that harder questions are actually less predictive than relatively easy ones. Further reading: Programmers Are Confessing Their Coding Sins To Protest a Broken Job Interview Process.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

via Slashdot
Programming Interview Questions Are Too Hard and Too Short

Nothing drives me nuts like wasted product. When I finish a bag of potato chips, I up-end the bag and pour the powder at the bottom into my mouth. I "marry" my shampoo bottles. Back when I was cooking for myself, if I fried up a steak, the pan and the leftover juices were set aside to fry up the next morning’s eggs.

But I can’t get the last drop of toothpaste out of a tube.

Mechanical engineer Stephen Galante invented the following tool, which you’ve undoubtedly seen some earlier variant of, for the dental industry. Not for toothpaste, but for the tubes that tooth-bonding composites come in. It’s as precious to the dentists as expensive paint is to poor artists. And what makes Galante’s invention different from others is the gear-like wringers:

The Big Squeeze, as it’s called, is now available to consumers and runs $40 a pop. If that sounds like a lot, I can almost guarantee I’ve thrown away at least that much toothpaste by not being able to extract it. For artists, chefs and mechanics working with more expensive tube-dispensed products, this thing is a no-brainer.

via Core77
A Dental Industry Tool for Getting the Last Drop of Product Out of a Squeeze Tube

Ohio State’s next major initiative will come on west campus, where the school wants to create a wide-ranging research and innovation district where students, faculty and local startups can be centrally located.

via Columbus Business News – Local Columbus News | Business First of Columbus
Ohio State’s next big thing: West campus targeted for massive innovation district with millions of square feet in new construction