PXA310

KEY APPLICATIONS
Targeted devices include:
• 3G imaging, video, and multimedia phones with digital TV.
• Wireless enterprise devices with built-in Wi-Fi, WiBro, and WiMAX.
• Embedded solutions including video telephony, video/voice over IP (VVoIP), and GPS.

Excerpts from The Deadline

by Tom DeMarco

Four Essentials of Good Management: (p.28)
· Get the right people.
· Match them to the right jobs.
· Keep them motivated
· Help their teams to jell and stay jelled
(All the rest is Administrivia)

Safety and Change (p.35)
· People can’t embrace change unless they feel safe.
· Change is essential to all success in project work (and in most other worthwhile endeavors).
· A lack of safety makes people risk-averse.
· Avoiding risk is fatal, since it causes you to miss out on the associated benefit as well.
· People can be made to feel unsafe by direct threats, but also by the sense that power may be used against them abusively.

Risk Management (p.83)
· Manage projects by managing their risks.
· Create and maintain a census of risks for each project.
· Track the causal risks, not just the ultimate undesirable outcomes.
· Assess each risk for probability and likely cost.
· Predict, for each risk, the earliest symptom that might indicate materialization.
· Appoint a risk officer, one person who is not expected to maintain a Can-Do attitude.
· Establish easy (perhaps anonymous) channels for bad news to be communicated up the hierarchy.

Playing Defense (p.93-94)
· Cut your losses.
· You can improve overall performance more by containing your failures than by optimizing your successes.
· Be aggressive about canceling failed efforts early.
· Don’t take chances on team jell if you don’t have to. Seek out and use preformed teams.
· Keep good teams together (when they’re willing) to help your successors avoid problems of slow-jelling or non-jelling teams.
· Think of a jellied team – ready and willing to take on a new effort – as one of the project deliverables.
· A day lost at the beginning of project hurts just as much as a day lost at the end.
· There are infinitely many ways to lose a day . . . but not even one way to get one back.

Ambigous Specification (p. 216)
· Ambiguity in a specification is a sign of unresolved conflict among various system stakeholders.
· A specification that doesn’t contain a complete census of inputs and outputs is a nonstarter. It simply doesn’t begin to specify.
· Nobody will tell you if a specification is lousy. People are inclined to blame themselves rather than it.


Conflict (p. 225)
· Whenever there are multiple parties to a development effort, there are bound to be conflicting interests.
· The business of building and installing systems is particularly conflict-prone.
· Most system development organizations have poor conflict-resolution skills.
· Conflict deserves respect. Conflict is not a sign an unprofessional behavior.
· Declare up front that everybody’s win conditions will be respected. Make sure that win conditions are elicited at all levels.
· Negotiation is hard; meditation is easy.
· Arrange up front that when win conditions are mutually exclusive or partly so, the parties will be expected to move into mediation to resolve conflict.
· Remember: We are both on the same side; it is the problem that’s on the other side.

Project Sociology (p. 275)
· Keep meetings small by making it safe for unessential people not to attend. A published agenda, rigorously followed, is the easiest way to make nonattendance safe.
· Projects have need of ceremony.
· Use ceremony to focus attention on project goals and ideals: small meetings, zero-defect work, etc.
· Take steps to protect people from abusive anger.
· Remember: Anger = Fear: Managers who inflict abusive, angry behavior on their subordinates are almost always doing it because they’re afraid.
· Observation: If everybody understands that Anger = Fear, anger will be a transparent signal that the angry person is afraid; since there is an inclination not to reveal fear, he or she won’t be able to vent the anger anymore. (This doesn’t solve the angry person'’ problem, but it sure can make it easier on everyone else.)