For ease of use, it helps to be able to treat a SharePoint document library as a file folder on your laptop, and from a team productivity perspective, it’s very valuable to have these documents stored there instead of on your local hard disk:

1. SharePoint provides versioning and check-in/check-out capability
2. It’s accessible from other locations than your machine
3. Your fellow team members can see your work in progress if they need to.
4. SharePoint is backed up, so you won’t lose anything if your PC gets run over or dies.

To start this process, the simplest thing to do is to browse to the document library (in this case the BLASS shared documents);

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I’ve been working with Office and Project for a while now, and one of the things I love about the new 2010 version is that you can save as PDf from almost any application.

So today I was saving a Project plan as a PDF, and noticed it was breaking across pages in weird ways. Since I’ve done something similar with Visio a LOT, I figured the control for page size would be in the page setup, but I couldn’t find any mention of page setup in the menus or ribbon bar …

So hunting a bit, I figured that it might be on the print preview, which I found on the “File” tab:

And that’s when I got stymied for a bit: the controls for page setup were all greyed out:

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I updated to OS X Lion a couple of days ago, and for the most part it was a smooth transition.

This is the first upgrade where Apple is using their App Store concept to distribute the OS, so it was a bit scary to hit “Purchase” and watch nothing happen for half an hour while Mac OS X 10.7 downloaded in the background.

There’s no real indication of anything going on unless you happen upon the “Purchase” tab in the App Store App (seems a bit redundant, doesn’t it?):

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One of the key success factors for any project is the “vision statement“, which is the Executive Sponsor‘s opportunity to excite the team, stakeholders, and customers with their vision of where we are going and how the product of the project will improve things.

When well done, the charter can be condensed into an elevator pitch for the project, and provide a clear vision to guide the project team to a common goal.

Vision: the capacity to see into the future. It’s setting a vision that people can see where their place in that vision is, and then coming across as deeply empathetic, human and intimate. The vision has to be a generous vision, such that people not only see their path in it but is excited about it. It is not just a plan, it is an enlistment. Great leaders have to be genuine and intimate: You have to feel like they touch you, and there is empathy or humanity there.

– Keith Ferrazi

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Tonight’s the night we make history …

Image via Wikipedia

This last weekend, a group of us from the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of PMI were set to attend the PMI – 2011 Region 7 Leadership Summit in Reno.  We made it to Reno and back in record time (although not in the direction one usually associates with breaking records).

It was a classic example of project management at it’s finest: we made plans, with allowances for expected risks, and the world accommodated our plans by giving us additional challenges along the way.

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