Hello everybody, I'm Fernando and this is Thursday - Community Wins.
Today featuring System Center 2012 Operations Manager Survival Guide created by Goose - MSFT (nice Walking Dead avatar!) with over more 5,000 page views.
The guide has over 21 edits,
The guide is full with wiki articles and Technet Library,
Big hugs everybody, and don't forget to follow
Fernando Lugão Veltem
blog: http://flugaoveltem.blogspot.com
twitter: @flugaoveltem
Welcome everybody to our Wednesday - Wiki Life post.
Are you currently writing your first TechNet Wiki article? Or do you want to start writing, but have no idea about what to write and how to write? If so I would like to give you a little help on your way to a good one.
For me the way to a good article contains three steps: Preparation, writing, and follow-up.
Step 1: Preparation
What is a good topic for your first article? Is it worth it to write an article for the TechNet Wiki?
Let us start with the last question. Ed has written a good article about the Top 6 Fears of TechNet Wiki. So the simple answer: Absolutely! So, what is a good topic? Normally you choose a topic which you are already familiar. If you don't have an idea yet or not enough content for a whole article, I would recommend that you start with adding valuable content to existing articles. With the time you will earn experience and with that increasing the value of your future articles.
Step 2: Writing
How do you start writing?
If you have a topic and good content start with structuring your content into subtopics/headings. With the headings you should add a table of content and return-to-top links. Do your articles contain tables? Ed and Rich have written blog posts how you can handle them. After finishing your article Tord has 5 Tips to make your Wiki article look better.
Step 3: Follow-up
Ok, your article is online, but what now?
A goal of writing an article should always be to improve it over time. So, look at your article and the revisions of others and improve your article everytime you think you have something to add. And if you have another idea: Write a new article!
Hope this will help you a little bit. So, go out and share your knowledge!
I’ve been known to participate in Microsoft forums for years now. Ed Price was the first one who suggested to me that writing Wikis can be rewarding too, so I gave it a shot. At first, editing and writing Wikis felt totally alien to me, but after trying it, reading more Wikis and following TechNet Wiki Ninjas, I think I have found my groove. I very much like the fact that you can start a Wiki, work on it a little bit, and later come back to make further additions and changes to it. It gives me the chance to correct mistakes, introduce new information, or add new insights. If I’m lucky, somebody else found the topic interesting too and also made contributions.
My favorite technique is when I find a useful discussion in the TechNet forums that I think is too interesting to ignore and promote it to a TechNet Wiki article. I thought that it might be interesting to share my little twelve step algorithm for doing this. I can tell you though, that during the process of repeatedly following this algorithm, I did find there is real synergy to be found in social computing when you start combining forums, blogs, and Wikis.
So, here’s what I do:
Did you have a childhood hero when you grew up? Most people do. The hero often is an athlete, soccer player, ballerina, pop star, president or movie star. For girls, the idol can be Madonna, Lady Gaga, Sissi/Romy Schneider, or Meryl Streep. For boys, the idol can be Tarzan, Bruce Lee, Lionel Messi, or Al Pacino. Me? I had a rather unusual childhood hero: Sigmund Freud. I surely would have become a psychologist, if I hadn’t fallen in love with programming so much. I rarely mention the fact that I’m interested in social science, as it is seldom relevant. But today, it is. You’ll see why in a little while, but if you’re suspecting it has something to do with Wikis you’d be right. For now, we’ll let that rest…
A little while ago, somebody in the SharePoint forums wanted to know how people go about estimating the size of SharePoint projects. Basically, I believe there are three ways of estimating IT projects:
Let’s elaborate on these forms a little more.
Yes, you won’t find that one in the study books. This one is quite easy to understand, and instead of providing a definition, I’ll provide some anecdotes to explain its meaning. I do this, not because it’s absolutely necessary, but because I find it’s more fun that way.
Anecdote 1. On my first job, I was sitting close to one of our account managers (let’s say his name was Fred). He was talking to a customer, discussing a new project. Fred said that the project would cost approx. 20,000 euro. The customer replied that that was okay, because they had a budget of 40,000 euro. Fred said that that was a good thing, because naturally, the 20,000 euro excluded project management, testing, communication, and documentation. So, in the end, 40,000 euro would just cut it, luckily. That was the fastest 20,000 euro loss/gain (depending on your perspective) I’ve witnessed.
Anecdote 2. On another job, the company I worked for was trying to win a new, pretty big project. People at my company did a careful estimation, let other people take a look at it, and did a re-estimation. Finally, they came to the conclusion that the entire project would cost 600,000 euro and that that was a fair price. They didn’t win the job, because of the following reason: the potential customer had a budget of 600,000 euro and used a rule that, internally, they doubled the offer made by any company, and would assume that that figure would be the real cost of the project. It turned out that another company (let’s call ‘em compA) offered to do it for 300,000 euro.The customer doubled that number, and saw that 600,000 euro was just within the limits of their budget. The offer by my company was 600,000 euro. After you double it, that becomes 1,2 million, which didn’t fit in the budget. At that point, it didn’t matter anymore that the estimation by CompA may have been far from the truth. They won the job and must have thought: “Well, there’s always budget for bug fixing, we’ll see what happens later”.
By now, you should have a firm grasp of the meaning of Machiavellian count. If you want to learn more about Machiavellian count, don’t ask me, as I’m far too nice a person to be good at it!
In the companies I’ve seen (and I’ve seen a lot of them) some sort of expert count is used regularly. Expert count is the scenario where you have one expert (or more) estimate how long it will take to complete a project. Depending on the quality of the expert(s) and his/her team members, this can be a fine approach. Over the years, I’ve been getting quite good at it, and I’m seldom mistaken by far. The obvious drawback is that it’s subjective by definition. So, the fact that it’s working for me, won’t mean much to anybody else.
A more formalized way to go about estimating IT projects is to use a standard (and rather objective) methodology for establishing the functional size of a, in my case, SharePoint project and express it in function points. Every function point is associated to a certain cost (in hours). The total project size consists of the total number of function points multiplied by the cost. There are several methodologies out there, such as COSMIC Full Function Points or FPA.
The main advantage of function point count is that using this methodology, it becomes quite possible to compare projects to each other, determine how well a certain project team or member is doing, and, if you have enough empirical data, you’ll find a more objective way to do estimations. A drawback is that gaining enough empirical data in the fast and ever changing .NET world can be truly hard to do. Also, doing a Function Point Count simply takes more time.
We’re coming to a full circle now, because it turns out that social science, Wikis, and project size estimations are totally related. Social science succeeds in finding patterns/laws in human behavior. One example of such a social scientific law is that a group of people tends to be very good in doing estimations (especially compared to individual guesses). To verify this, as a party trick, you can let your guests guess the amount of beads in a jar. Please note: I’m not actually suggesting you should do this, as I want you to have fun on a party, I’m just saying it’s one of the things you can do.
In a project size estimation world, since we already have a more or less objective way to establish the amount of function points, we need a way to guess the cost of a function point. Social science teaches us that a group of people is good at that, but now we have to find a way to assemble a group of people that are willing and able to do the guessing in a joint effort. That’s where Wiki enters the picture. Wikis may just be the very best way to assemble experts on a given topic (divided across companies around the world) and may just be your very best bet on getting a grip on project size estimation. For me, my main focus lies on SharePoint technology, so I had to try and see if some accomplishments could be made in this area. Here’s (as is always the case with Wiki) the result so far: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/10590.sharepoint-2010-best-practices-to-estimating-and-benchmarking-project-efforts.aspx
Welcome to our Saturday blog post, Top 10 Wiki Ninjas of the week!
Fernando and I have already been featured, so today we're featuring Richard Mueller. Here's Richard's Avatar/Cat:
His biography: "I worked for an electric utility where I was responsible for IT services at 10 power plants and 3 office locations. I do consulting and work with a partner on an application that tracks school lunches."
Richard is a Directory Services Development MVP. Richard's MVP Profile. With 38,000+ Recognition Points, he's also very well known in forums like Directory Services, PowerShell, scripting, Windows Server, and Forum Issues.
For some reason, I'm only seeing this MVP profile image when I refresh the page (leave a comment below to let me know what your experience is, whether you see it or have to refresh the page to see it):
On TNWiki, this week Richard has been helping us clean up and maintain the forums with spam and with tags to help track international articles and languages.
Thank you for your help, Richard!
And thank you also to Fernando, Margriet, Tim, Yottun, Yagmoth, Heslacher, Patris, and Luigi! Congratulations to you all!
Come on in! The Wiki is warm!
- Ninja Ed