Business Change Management as a glance

Change, as we know it, is something happening in our daily life while everybody needs to adapt to it. But a change in the business process or workflow would not only affect one, but also a team of people around you. What are you going to deal with the change as a process owner? And what do you expect the team to do in coping with the change? These are serious questions as they end up affecting the business ultimately. People are serious when talking about Business anyway.

Warm-up questions before you think in depth about a big business change:

What's Change Management?
Have you heard about ADKAR?
How would you incorporate Change Management in ITS Development Life Cycle?

Business Change Management focuses on how people deal with a change. It's more than a single event or activity. BCM is the actual process to anticipate and analyze those impacts of a project from the USER's perspective. It guides and informs project activities and planning to help manage user's EXPECTATIONs, RESISTANCE and buy-in. The projects are more likely to success with a clearly defined Change Management TEAM and APPROACH.

Change Management Team provides:

• Readiness assessments
• Communications
• Training
• Support planning after the change
• Stakeholder review through post-deployment

In a sense of ITIL service management, CM can be interpreted in a way of Continuous Service Improvement (CSI).

Around a change, there are 3 key aspects to be involved:

• People: Stakeholders, business owner, service owner, operational team
• Process: Business processes involved in the change
• Tools: Knowledge and technology

The flow of CSI Model in change management could be like this:

1. Evaluate
2. Assess
3. Design
4. Implement
5. Manage Change (When finished, the cycle will loop to the phase 1 - Evaluate again.)

Apart from that, there are researches out there studying about the implications of the flow of CM.

One of the famous methodologies is ADKAR Model (founded by Prosci Research). Using ADKAR Model, BCM Team can MANAGE and MONITOR fundamental elements of a change caused by a new system and project.

The ADKAR Model involves the 5 phases:

1. Awareness: Understand NEEDS & NATURES of the change
2. Desire: SUPPORT the change by participation and engagement activities
3. Knowledge: LEARN how to change and new skills & behaviours
4. Ability: IMPLEMENT the change and DEMONSTRATE performance
5. Reinforcement: SUSTAIN the change & BUILD a CULTURE around the change

A bit of Agile Software Development

As the developers are always asked which methodology would be adopted in their software development life cycle. Most of the time they would say, "In a Agile way!" So, how actually should Agile development look like in real life?

Consider doing software development in Agile way, there are 12 principles which I can easily forget.

Now, let's forget them one-by-one:

The Agile Manifesto is based on 12 principles:

1. Customer satisfaction - Make it QUICK and CLEAN in terms of software delivery.
2. Welcome changing requirements - Be YES-MAN to your client, as always.
3. Frequent software delivery - Release it by weeks/days, of course, with QA tests done.
4. Close, daily cooperation - Love your business and talk to the client everyday.
5. Projects built around motivated & trusted individuals - Yes, we trust them so we work with them.
6. Face-to-face conversation - It means you should be there in front of your parties for TALKING
7. Principal measure of progress - It basically means NO Progress if software is NOT YET WORKING. So try your best.
8. Sustainable development - Keep your dev work RUNNING in constant pace.
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design - We loves good things like STATE-OF-THE-ART/BLEEDING-EDGE technology.
10. Simplicity - LEAVE traces to ongoing work as much as you can, i.e., We don't have time for sure. Just keep it simple & get the work done.
11. Self-organizing teams - CONTROL YOURSELF.
12. Regular adaptation to changing circumstances - BE ALERT to the changes around you, and the project.

The A Team for Web Portal Consultancy

Can you imagine how difficult for you to convince the client that you have got the strong team to support their big tasks in constructing a web portal?

Here comes the list of roles to be involved in Web Portal Consultancy team:

Digital Strategist:

Digital strategy was the discipline of working with teams inside the agency and/or directly with the brand to solve complex business and marketing problems.
Digital strategists are the people that lead the problem solving charge and help connect the dots between business, brand, and marketing goals and the channels, tactics and technologies that’ll make it all come together to provide actionable results. Competent digital strategists work in a highly focused manner with the client and/or agency business unit to get a clear and detailed understanding of what the challenges are from a business point-of-view [like a business analyst would]. Of course, at any given time during the engagement, you can swap out “business” with “creative”, “technology”, etc. Same strategic approach, different lens.

Web Technical Architect:

The Technical Architect is responsible for the overall technical design and build of the custom elements of the solution. The Technical Architect works as a team member along with the Engagement Manager, Developer and Solutions Architect to deliver the complete solution for the customer. This role must be organized and analytical, adept at working in a team environment, able to design and implement a project schedule, and able to handle multiple priorities.

Web Information Architect:

Information architects organize the content of web sites, intranets and online communities in a user-friendly way that allows visitors to quickly find what they're searching for. They then create interfaces to support that organization. Information architects begin by analyzing the target audience and level of interactivity, and technology required, in addition to the data presented through the site. They then develop a plan that will balance efficiency with ease-of-use. Information architects work with graphic and web designers, database engineers and coders to implement their plans.

Web Business Analyst:

Web Business Analyst will act as primary, working with clients and agency partners in helping plan, document and consult on new projects. In addition, the Web Business Analyst will act as a technical resource assisting the client team with presales and estimates, along with serving as the gateway to the development team; interfacing with production, operations and Sr. Management.

Web Designer:

Web designers plan, create and code web pages, using both non-technical and technical skills to produce websites that fit the customer's requirements. They are involved in the technical and graphical aspects of pages, producing not just the look of the website but determining how it works as well. Web designers might also be responsible for the maintenance of an existing site.

Web Developer:

Similar to Web designer, Web developer is a more specialist role, focusing on the back-end development of a website and will incorporate, among other things, the creation of highly complex search functions.

Web Tester:

Web Tester help testing web application user interface and mobile applications. User Interface testing includes verification against Visual Design specifications and the usability assessment. The tester has to assure that the web application UI conforms to the requirements, and report a defect when it doesn't.

Web Design Quality Assurance:

Web Design Quality Assurance ensure the website adheres to the Web Design Guidelines like HTML standards, CSS standards, W3C standards, Accessibility standards, Performance and Cross Browser Compatability.

Web Development Quality Assurance:

Web Development and QA Specialist ensures the web assets are operationally sound and perform in accordance with the organization’s technical standards, including reviewing and analyzing the site, and all the systems that provide a public interface, for issues of quality and infrastructure performance. They are responsible for the design, development and implementation of new system functionality for the website as required and the design of quality assurance procedures for all stages of the system process change, and coordinating a change control process for implementing technical and other updates in a timely and non-disruptive manner.

Web Portal vs Web Site

One day the management were discussing about setting up new features to the business website in order to allow more collaborations among the staff, it reminded me the theory that I've learnt the old days about the difference between a website and a web portal.

To sum it up, the following table is extracted:

Agenda of Phase 2 clinical trial of experimental Ebola vaccines

Just heard from the news that two American nurses have been declared cured of Ebola.

Two candidate vaccines have been elected for phase 1 clinical trials.

• One (cAd3-ZEBOV) has been developed by GlaxoSmithKline in collaboration with the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It uses a chimpanzee-derived adenovirus vector with an Ebola virus gene inserted.
• The second (rVSV-ZEBOV) was developed by the Public Health Agency of Canada in Winnipeg. The license for commercialization of the Canadian vaccine is held by an American company, the NewLink Genetics company, located in Ames, Iowa. The vaccine uses an attenuated or weakened vesicular stomatitis virus, a pathogen found in livestock; one of its genes has been replaced by an Ebola virus gene.

The efficacy of those drugs are not completely understood. Gender and race difference may contribute a factor to the drug effect.

WHO has set the key milestones on the agenda in a short time frame:

October 2014:
Mechanisms for evaluating and sharing data in real time must be prepared and agreed upon and the remainder of the phase 1 trials must be started

October–November 2014:
Agreed common protocols (including for phase 2 studies) across different sites must be developed

October–November 2014:
Preparation of sites in affected countries for phase 2 b should start as soon as possible

November–December 2014:
Initial safety data from phase 1 trials will be available

January 2015:
GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices) grade vaccine doses will be available for phase 2 as soon as possible

January–February 2015:
Phase 2 studies to be approved and initiated in affected and non-affected countries (as appropriate)

As soon as possible after data on efficacy become available:
Planning for large-scale vaccination, including systems for vaccine financing, allocation, and use.

As of 25 October 2014, the number of confirmed cases reaches over 10,000 across the countries.

Ref: http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/137185/1/roadmapupdate25Oct14_eng.pdf?ua=1

The effect of outbreak control still remains unknown in the world unless a new vaccine is invented and proven to be effective to all races.

Kylin - Next Gen Open Source OLAP Engine for Big Data

Just come across the news that eBay has released to the open-source community their distributed analytics engine: Kylin (http://kylin.io). It doesn't just make it open for the core code base, but also Shell Client, RPC Server, Jobs Scheduler and relevant tools. What it means is that a whole set of tools for SQL interface and multi-dimensional analysis (OLAP) is available for free on Hadoop to support extremely large datasets.

Regarding query latency, Kylin has claimed to reduce it on Hadoop for 10+ billion rows of data down to sub-second level (better than Hive queries for the same dataset). As compared with Kylin, mainstream OSDDMS like Cassandra (SEDA-based architecture) has to let a request to hop between multiple threadpools during processing, increasing latency. Nonetheless, it can still be fixed by including lightweight threads like Kilim, a more-efficient executor service, or a new approach entirely.

For standard compatibility, Kylin supports most ANSI SQL query functions in its ANSI SQL on Hadoop interface.

Kylin also has the seamless integration with BI Tools like Tableau and other third-party applications.

With nice feature like MOLAP cube query, Kylin let users define a data model and then pre-build within itself to support more than 10+ billions of raw data records.

Apart from MOLAP, the next generation of Kylin will provide hybrid OLAP (HOLAP) to combine real-time/near-real-time and historical results for business decisions by offering a single entry point for front-end queries.

Furthermore, Kylin provides compression and encoding to reduce storage.

The business units in eBay have been putting Kylin in production for some time. They have carried out the analysis of 12+ billion source records generating 14+ TB cubes. Its 90% query latency is less than 5 seconds, without using Hive query or Shell command.

Slideshow: http://slidesha.re/1wilDxC

News release: http://www.ebaytechblog.com/2014/10/20/announcing-kylin-extreme-olap-engine-for-big-data/#.VEnOb4uUcQ7

Installing Composer on OS X Mavericks with XAMPP for Mac installed

Composer is a popular tool for the dependency management in PHP. It lets you declare dependent libraries for each particular project.

Let's have a quick look on what have installed so far on the development machine:

OS X Mavericks
XAMPP for Mac installed and configured properly (A running instance)
Hombrew installed and configured (Try brew doctor to tackle any problem before you start)

Steps as follows:

Assuming default installation path of XAMPP for Mac package installed as usual, please change into the directory where PHP executable resides:

$ cd /Applications/XAMPP/bin/

Check the version of PHP:

$ php --version
PHP 5.4.30 (cli) (built: Jul 29 2014 23:43:29) 
Copyright (c) 1997-2014 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.4.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2014 Zend Technologies

Now we know PHP version is 5.4. Let's remember this for use in next couple of steps.

If you try to install Composer with brew command now, you may end up with an error like this:

composer: Missing PHP53, PHP54, PHP55 or PHP56 from homebrew-php. Please install one of them before continuing

Error: An unsatisfied requirement failed this build.

The likely cause is that we are using PHP within XAMPP package whereas brew cannot detect its presence without installing its own PHP engine.

Supposing XAMPP package is installed properly, we can simply add the path /Applications/XAMPP/bin/ to $PATH environment variable to the end of the file ~/.bash_profile . If it doesn't work then another to get around this would be installing a new version of PHP package using brew command.

[OPTIONAL] So which version of brew's PHP engine to install? It's better match the version of PHP within XAMPP, i.e., 5.5.

[OPTIONAL] Let's install PHP54 package by using brew command:

$ brew install php55

Once finished, start installing Composer with brew commands like these:

$brew update;brew tap homebrew/dupes;brew tap homebrew/php;brew install composer

It includes the actions of updating and tapping the right repository for downloading Composer's source.

When brew's package for Composer is installed successfully, we can carry out next step to create composer.phar file within XAMPP's bin directory.

$ sudo php -r "eval('?>'.file_get_contents('https://getcomposer.org/installer'));"

We must execute the command as root privilege to avoid permission denied error.

When done, we can try composer command within /Applications/XAMPP/bin/ directory.

$ php composer.phar
   ______
  / ____/___  ____ ___  ____  ____  ________  _____
 / /   / __ \/ __ `__ \/ __ \/ __ \/ ___/ _ \/ ___/
/ /___/ /_/ / / / / / / /_/ / /_/ (__  )  __/ /
\____/\____/_/ /_/ /_/ .___/\____/____/\___/_/
                    /_/
Composer version 1e4229e22aefe50582734964d027fc1bfec16b1d 2014-10-02 11:34:17

Usage:
  [options] command [arguments]...

Then it should be ready for us to checkout new dependent packages within a new or existing PHP project directory.