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Affichage des articles du 2009

Six ways to make people like you

Become genuinely interested in other people. Smile. Remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. Talk in terms of the other person's interests. Make the other person feel important ... and do it sincerely. Quoted from "How to win friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie.

How to keep a disagreement from becoming an argument

Welcome the disagreement. Remember the slogan, "When two partners always agree, one of them is not necessary". If there is some point you haven't thought about, be thankful if it is brought to your attention. Perhaps, this disagreement is your opportunity to be corrected before you make a serious mistake. Distrust your first instinctive impression. Our first natural reaction in a disagreeable situation is to be defensive. Be careful. Keep calm and watch out for your first reaction. It may be you at your worst, not your best. Control your temper . Remember, you can measure the size of a person by what makes him or her angry. Listen first. Give your opponent a chance to talk. Let them finish. Do not resist, defend or debate. This only raises barriers. Try to build bridges of understanding. Look for areas of agreement. When you have heard your opponents out, dwell first on the points and areas on which you agree. Be honest. Look for areas where you can admit error and say so

Retour Model Driven Day 2009

Le 26 novembre 2009 avait lieu la journée du Model Driven organisé notamment par Objet Direct qui m'avait invité. Je n'ai malheureusement pu assister à toutes les présentations mais le bilan fut plutôt positif et m'a permis de me remettre au gout du jour sur MDA. Je vais présenter rapidement les présentations qui ont retenu mon attention mais vous pouvez voir les présentations 2009 sur www.mdday.fr dans la rubrique téléchargement. 1ere présentation générale sur le Model Driven Engineering par Jean Bézivin. Présentation de l’écosysteme « Model Driven » de la génération de code à l'interopérabilité des modèles en passant par la découverte de modèle (e.g. a partir du code). Pour rappel, Le MDA est basé sur un modèle, un méta modele et des transformations. Dans un cadre encore plus général et haut niveau, on a un système qui est représenté par un modèle lui même conforme à un méta modèle (lui même conforme à un méta méta modèle...). Le mieux est d'aller voir la présent

Behaviour Driven Development at Zenika

I have assisted to the Zenika's conference about Behaviour Driven Development given by Mauro Talevi from Agilesque. The presentation was mainly decomposed in 3 parts : Introduction to BDD, Presentation of JBehave (the API used to do BDD in java) and return on experience about a real project. Introduction to BDD. BDD brings together Test Driven Development and Domain Driven Design by - describing behaviour is a better form of testing - describing needs from from point of view of it's stakeholder BDD relies on the use of a specific language to help communication between the business, developers, testers, analysts and managers. It improves presentation. Behaviours are described by scenarios with a why ? the value, a who ? the actor and the what ? the feature. BDD introduce a grammar of steps GIVEN a context, WHEN there is an event, THEN produce an outcome AND do other steps. BDD offers step parametrisation, aliases for changing language or tabularisation for changing parameters fo

My last books from PMBA

I have read four books from PMBA recently. The power of less from Leo Babauta and The power of full engagement from Jim loehr and Tony Schwartz, two books about Productivity & Effectiveness. The first one presents how to : break any goal down into manageable tasks focus only on a few task at a time create new and productive habits increase our efficiency. The second presents that energy, not time, is our most precious resource, how to mobilize our four source of energy (physical, emmotional, mental and spiritual) and the necessity to balance stress with recovery. I have also read the Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz but i am actually not convinced and it is very complicated to explain it shortly. However you can find an excellent presentation here and here . Finally I have read Brain rules. This one is really a fantastic book. John Medina, a developmental molecular biologist, presents how brain works in twelve chapters. Each chapter presents one important fact about

Reporting Tool

Reporting time used in project is a boring task that most of us must do to please our manager, especially in big firm. Why is it boring ? Because it has no interest for the worker ? And why tell what we are doing if the work is done ? Because we must do it multiple times ? One for the accounting departement, one for the project manager and one during team meeting ? Because the tool are frequently slow and horrible to use ? I think we can find many reasons to hate reporting our work time. However It's an important thing to keep track of what are you doing for your managers but also your coworker and even for you. So why not try to change a boring into something usefull ? I have some ideas and I want to try to present something. To help me, I have recently discover Grails . Yet Another new java framework ? oh yes but this one is really cool. It takes the main idea of Ruby on rails with all java environnement. The most impressive advantage of Grails is that you can have your next Web

Machiavel et le management

Après avoir lu l'Art de la Guerre par Sun Tzu , je viens de finir le Prince de Machiavel . Le premier est un excellent livre mais il reste un ouvrage dont les principes sont très rattachés à la stratégie militaire. A mon avis, il est difficile de les juxtaposer dans d'autres domaines de nos sociétés occidentales. Le deuxième, cependant, mérite complètement sa lecture. Principalement car il présente des principes fondamentaux dans la politique surtout dans son contexte de lutte de pouvoir. Et la politique et les luttes de pouvoir sont présentes dans beaucoup de domaines. On peut ainsi facilement retrouver des conseils applicables dans de grands groupes. Mais, particularité intéressante, j'y ai trouvé une relation entre ces principes et le management de projet. Pour ca, il faut voir les qualités d'un Prince que présente Machiavel : - les scrupules dans la préparation (bonne spécification ? test driven development ?) - l'énergie dans la conquête (conquête rapide et i

Sondage sur le reporting de vos projets !

Utilisez-vous des outils pour reporter votre temps passé ainsi que votre avancement sur les taches sur lesquelles vous travaillez ? Quel genre d'outil ? Feuilles Excel partagées ? Application web développée en interne ? Outil externe ? Trouver vous ces outils pratiques à utiliser ? Comment voudriez-vous les utiliser de façon plus rapide/pratique ? En plus de ce reporting, avez d'autres actions à effectuer pour remonter l'information vers vos managers (réunion, mails...) ? Merci ! Vous pouvez aussi faire le sondage en ligne ici : http://www.misterpoll.com/polls/440001

Business challenge and PMBA

First, for my personnal MBA, i have now finished three more books : Making thing happen, explaining all project management. Cuting to the chase, 100 usefull tips to be more effective in jobs. Crucial Conversation, very interesting book explaining how to handle difficult problem with dialogue. For my eBusiness and testing blog www.goth-corsets.com , I'm adding slowly more content. I am also tweaking wordpress plugins and Meta description to have a clean content analysis by Google bot. By mystic of SEO, my page rank is getting worse in Yahoo and a lot better for Google. I'm also reading a 31 day challenge about blogs from probloggers.com and doing some articles for quittersonjob.fr

Spring has come back

Since, last post one month has passed, again too fast. Lot's of work in my current job and a lot of desillusion. However I have found some time to continue my business challenge. I have open www.goth-corsets.com website with a wordpress blog. I have begin to add some contents. I have also done a lot of rework to correct the content, suppress duplicate content from other webiste, correct url or have correct categories. All of this was mainly done for search engine optimization and I am very disappointed of the results. After having a good classement for "goth corsets" keyword, I have almost now referencing on Google. I have to understand ... On the other side, Yahoo is helping me with 4th page for "goth corsets" and "goth corset" results. In parallel, I am doing some articles for a friend website called www.quittersonjob.fr

Business challenge

For some times now, i'm reading about web marketing and business thanks to book like the four hour workweek or the site the thirty day challenge . I'm doing this test with a friend who has launched his own web site : http://romanticguidetoparis.com/ The main idea is to test the interest of the public to a product before really creating it. The first step was to search a niche domain where i can create a product. For that, I have used google adword, SEO tools and a very usefull application named Market Samurai. The niche product is, at this time, only a set of keywords with enough searchs by day, the less possible number of sites already associated to them and site with a weak page rank (the score that google affect to the site to sort the search results). And i have found : gothic corset. I have found a avaliable domain name : www.goth-corsets.com . The next step is to create the site with wordpress and begin to make it known.

Two months ...

Difficult to maintain a blog when you have so many occupation :) What's happen during this two months ? Some trips in les Alpes (skiing) and in London (this city is fanstatic ... if you are rich). I have finished some books of my personnal mba : - the unwritten laws of business - the design of every day things (I am a big fan of it). - the four hour workweek I'm reading Making Things happen about project management which is also excelent. I'm very happy to have discovered personnal MBA and the recommended reading list. So far they are very good and i'm learning a lot. I have also read a french book named "Back-offices et marchés financier". The first part explains what is a back office and the second part explains the interest, problems and risks of back-office. This second part is mainly based on the exemple of Baring's case who was sunk by one trader. Written in 1997, he explains the importance of back offices to avoid financial crisis .... yes like the