Swanage Jazz Festival 2012. Excelsior Vintage Jazz Band. (c) Rob Schofield. (CC-A/ND) http://www.flickr.com/people/robschofield/

Making Learning Computer Programming Accessible For Normal Students

Forrest Christian Computers/IT, Learning, Reviews - Articles Leave a Comment

Mahmoud et al. say that introductory programming courses have unacceptable failure rates, with “reported withdrawal, failure and D-grade rates approaching 50%”. In an interesting take on the problem, they decided to change they way they teach instead of complaining that the students had to change.

Leaving Yongsan Station. (c) Danleo (CC BY 2.5). Via Wikimedia Commons.

De-escalation of Commitment to Projects

Forrest Christian Organizations, Project Management, Reviews - Articles, Risk Management Leave a Comment

There is a large body of work dealing with the escalation of commitment in IT projects, how managers continue to throw good money after bad, increasing their commitment to a project that has little chance of succeeding. For example, Gustavo Dimello has an interesting summary (“To Pull or Not To Pull the Plug: When Managers Commit Themselves to Failure”) of …

Analog Computing Machine in Fuel Systems Building Lewis Flight Propulsion Lab-NASA

Latest issue of COMPUTER actually useful

Forrest Christian Computers/IT, Organizations, Reviews - Articles Leave a Comment

Wouldn’t you know it? The last issue that I have coming to me before I was going to end my IEEE Computer Society membership and it had to be interesting. I’ve been reading Computer for several years now and I’ve gotten to the point where I just pass it on to some other IT schmuck without actually opening it. I …

Trusted Advisor and Technical Consulting

Forrest Christian Reviews - Articles 1 Comment

The managers from a consulting firm I work with are sold on the “trusted advisor” idea. This comes from The Trusted Advisor by Charles Green, David Maister and Rob Galford (Free Press, 2000). They bantered this around in my friend’s performance review. I actually believe that trusted advisor ideas and “techniques” are solid, money-making and morally good. Unfortunately, I’m not …