Ross Hawkins - Project Management

Project Management

There are 3 entries for the tag Project Management

Are fixed price contracts for suckers?

NZ readers will probably have heard of Novopay, and the issues it’s had that have made the media. For non-NZ readers, it’s basically a new payment system that went bad and messed up a load of people’s salary and wages payments. This story, Ministers knew of 147 defects with Novopay, highlights the fact that the software team involved had entered into the project as a fixed price deal, and the article makes it sound like things went sour pretty quickly. I don’t have any insight or knowledge into how the Novopay project was run, but after reading the story...

posted @ Friday, February 01, 2013 4:57 PM | Feedback (0)

The use of Probabilistic Risk Assessment in software development risk registers

Last week I was writing some documentation that required a risk register table (a.k.a a risk log). The risks for this change were very low probability but would have a very high impact, and it struck me at the time that without being able to calculate the probability with some greater level of accuracy then the value of the entire table was somewhat diminished. Fast forward a couple of days and I was listening to Risky Business #191 -- Nuclear weapons security and infosec where that exact topic was covered from 2 alternate angles – information security and nuclear...

posted @ Tuesday, April 19, 2011 9:32 PM | Feedback (0)

On methodology, hiring, waterfalls, and sandcastles

One of the things I’m struggling with right now is to express a few thoughts which have been milling around in my head regarding lightweight and effective strategies and approaches for small business / projects. When I say “small business” what I really mean is the New Zealand version of small business – REALLY small business. The following links are all related to this thinking – thinking which will hopefully surface eventually in some meaningful way (when actual work isn’t quite as hectic). Case Study: Rapid iteration with hardware – the whole site is an interesting read, however...

posted @ Tuesday, October 19, 2010 11:14 PM | Feedback (2)

About me

My name is Ross Hawkins and I'm a developer, consultant, business owner and writer based in Auckland, New Zealand (pictured below!). My current work revolves around ASP.NET, C#, jQuery, Ajax, SQL Server, and a mix of other Microsoft development technologies.

I also have about 15 years of experience with IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and associated technologies. While Notes/Domino is no longer my primary focus I still like to dabble and keep my skills up to date.

I own and run 2 businesses - Hawkins Consulting Services, and Ignition Development.

Follow @rosshawkins

Bethells Beach, located in sunny West Auckland, New Zealand

Search

Popular Content

Troubleshooting WebResource.axd

The .NET 2.0 framework changed the way clientside JavaScript is delivered to the browser. Previously, ASP.NET 1.1 used the aspnet_client directory whereas now 2.0 uses WebResource.axd.

Published on October 8, 2006

jQuery Wildcard Selectors - some simple examples

I wrote about jQuery wildcard selector syntax briefly back in 2009, and since then that post has received a lot of views â€“ way more than a post that brief should ever have seen..

Published on October 14, 2011

Microsoft AJAX Extensions: Sys.Debug is null or not an object

One of the breaking changes which was made with the 1.0 release of the Microsoft Ajax Extensions was the renaming of the 'Debug' class to 'Sys.Debug' for reasons of compatiability with other frameworks. Breaking changes like this can often be a source of frustration..

Published on May 22, 2007

Simple ASP.NET Character Counter

A textbox character counter is a pretty simple piece of functionality, and there's a lot of different ways to apply one to your application. The following method is nice and simple, and can be done using only clientside JavaScript if required, or combined with server side code in order to create a more dynamic effect

Published on December 4, 2006