Chalup PM Book in Progress

Over the past 6 years I've taught literally hundreds of sysadmins, network admins, and other IT professionals the fundamentals of a streamlined project management process that I call "Practical Project Management". For the past 3 years, I've also taught "Project Troubleshooting". All this time, the folks in the classes have said, "This is really great. You should put all this into a book!" I'm very pleased to announce that, in partnership with the excellent folks at NoStarch Press, that's exactly what is happening. We'll be substantially expanding the material I've been teaching, as well as adding material on enhancements such as web-based PM tools, so-called "agile" and "lean" methodologies-- which, oddly enough, bear a strong resemblance to what we already do! We'll also be incorporating some of the great feedback I've gotten from my tutorial students over the years. I'll be putting out a call to senior colleagues early in the coming year for peer review of some of the chapters and topics. If you're interested, please drop me a note. [Please include a brief CV or resume, if we're not already well-acquainted.] In the meantime, you can pick up a copy of TPOSANA for light reading over the holiday break! The Practice of System and Network Administration, 2nd Edition (Limoncelli, Hogan, Chalup)

Liveblogging LISA'07

So here I am in Dallas TX, at the annual LISA conference for systems administrators. It's been a great conference so far, even though I haven't gotten out of the hotel since I arrived on Sunday evening. Heck, I haven't gotten off the lobby/2nd/3rd floor zone! I love it when I can do all my teaching early in a conference and then just relax and enjoy myself. I did two half-day sessions on Monday, and both went really well-- interested and involved participants, and compliments afterwards. I started off with my tried and true favorite Practical Project Management, that I 've been teaching and refining for several years now. I estimate that I've trained over 200 IS professionals in project management at this point, with typical class sizes of 45 - 50, and in one case, 89 or 90 attendees. This year we didn't do the advanced class, Project Troubleshooting, although we had a great session of that in June at the Usenix Annual Technical Conference. The afternoon tutorial was a fairly new class that I developed in 2005, Problem-Solving for IT Professionals. We had a really spirited class discussion, and I was pointed to a great resource after class, a book (and Wikipedia entry about the book) called How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method, by Gregor Polya. It has a set of rules for generalizing problems, and looks useful in building more problem-solving processes. In the class I teach generalized processes, which I hesitate to call "patterns" as they're not sufficiently rigorously expressed yet, such as server-client interactions, and introduce modified process taskflow diagrams that aid in debugging. It's possible to debug applications that you have never seen before if you have a strong understanding of fundamental patterns of design and interaction in computer applications and systems.

Both books are now shipping!

It's been a long year, but the fruits of various labors are now available for harvest! I co-authored one book and contributed a chapter to another: The Practice of System and Network Administration, 2nd Edition (Limoncelli, Hogan, Chalup)

Handbook of Network and System Administration