To error is to be an executive

We have heard plenty lately about the bad judgment of a recently departed head honcho of David Jones. While it's easy to file as 'bad judgment' or 'ill advised' the unwanted advances of a CEO to a junior executive at a company function, it is much trickier to separate the 'wheat from the chaff' when it comes to executive strategic decision making.

In a recent McKinsey Quarterly survey of 2,207 executives, only 28 percent said that the quality of strategic decisions in their companies was generally good, 60 percent thought that bad decisions were about as frequent as good ones, and the remaining 12 percent thought good decisions were altogether infrequent.

In a March 2010 McKinsey Quarterly entitled, 'The case for behavioral strategy', the authors, Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony, assert that '...cognitive biases affect the most important strategic decisions made by the smartest managers in the best companies. Mergers routinely fail to deliver the expected synergies. Strategic plans often ignore competitive responses. And large investment projects are over budget and over time—over and over again.'

The authors' advocated remedy for the problem of 'biased' management decision making is for organisations to adopt processes that 'debias' strategic decisions.

It just so happens that UniPhi is an enterprise process that debiases strategic decisions. Once deployed and used by key stakeholders across the enterprise, executives can easily track, manage and report on the progress of key organisational initiatives. Accurate, real-time project and portfolio data is at the executive's fingertips.

UniPhi provides a more objective road map for an executive's strategic decisions, ensuring they are guided by objectively-tested facts and figures, instead of 'gut feels' and 'intuition'. In my view, UniPhi represents an invaluable tool for debiasing executive decisions and making sure strategy development is informed by reality, not 'hisimagination'. Of course, I may just be biased, but use UniPhi and then prove me wrong.

UniPhi 5.0 to be released

After 9 months of intensive development, we are about to release our biggest launch of UniPhi yet. UniPhi 5.0 is a major step forward for mbh and for the product itself. After significant and greatly appreciated feedback from our thousand strong user base, we have been able to enhance many existing features and bring in new ones. The contracts management functionality was completely overhauled with significant productivity improvements to the creation of the full suite of contract admin components (variations, progress claims, EOTs, RFIs etc. This new contract management also has the capability to manage your fee with the client as well as all other contracts on the project. Adding this to our new fee management system and existing lifecycle feature and we can now tell you how many jobs you're winning and how many you're losing; in what sector your winning and what one's you're not.With transparent real time internal KPI performance management, I can see already that many potential clients are going to be threatened by how visible their performance is.

This release would not have been possible without the dedication of our software development team. This cosmopolitan group of guys who all reside in Australia but hail from all over the world makes our Sydney office a vibrant and buzzing place to be. Although the hours are insane and juggling the business with running my kids to school, soccer practice, ballet and the like is not easy, it's great to never wake up in the morning with the words "oh no, it's only Wednesday". Thanks guys for making each day an enjoyable event!

We have scheduled a series of breakfast seminars along with our monthly webinar to present this new release across Australia and will follow it up with a roadshow across the middle east in September.

You can read more about this release and the roadshow at our website. Please come to the breakfasts if you can, we'd love to see you there.

UniPhi expands to the middle east

8 months ago I caught up with a colleague from school days. We had met a few times post school through a mutual friend of ours. On this occasion (as usual when catching up with old acquaintances) we started updating each other on events since the last few years. Francis, my school colleague, had been living in the UK for 8 years, had gotten married and had had his first child about 6 months before we met. He was back in Australia, sadly, due to an illness of a relative. Yet through every sad event, a silver lining can be found.

Francis had recently moved from the UK to Dubai. Having tested the market there briefly before his Australia visit, his business radar piqued when he heard about UniPhi. The next day Francis came to our office in Sydney and had a look at what we'd developed. Another 24 hours later and he had put together a proposal to distribute our software in the middle east. He has worked tirelessly since and this climaxed with us exhibiting at the Cityscape conference in Abu Dhabi in April. Unfortunately, due to other commitments I was unable to attend but thanks to the project management efforts of Katja Abramova (mbh project manager) and the tireless Sarah Quinton (mbh director) who flew over to support Francis in showing off UniPhi to the world all went well.

Below is an image of our stand and feedback from the show has been exceptional. I am very excited about becoming an Australian exporter and international markets will now become crucial components in what we hope will be the rapid commercialisation of what I believe is the best portfolio and project management application on the market.

The exhibition was a great success for us. It has led to four very strong proposals being sent to potential clients and over 160 business cards being collected at the booth.

Thanks Francis, Sarah and Katja for all your efforts!

UniPhi deployment

It’s exciting working on a UniPhi deployment. The moving of the UniPhi software from an application to a real life working environment is a beneficial experience . The developing and integration of the clients fundamental business requirements to the UniPhi software is integral to a deployment.

Each organisation or business area is unique, as has its own wants and needs that are required to be met. The changing working environments and the people I work with both internally and externally on each deployment are the most rewarding aspects of working with UniPhi.

Trials and tribulations of windows authentication

Windows authentication can be both a blessing and a curse when it comes to developing an intranet based application. From the users perspective, they can use their standard PC login to access the application - functionality which is seamless when using internet explorer. From a developers perspective, you can rely on the network to provide authentication to the various systems that you are integrating, such as databases, reporting services, etc.

Unfortunately, often times passing windows credentials around breaks down, specifically when you begin to grant access to your application outside of the intranet via SSL or perhaps port your application over to using forms authentication, such as we have done recently.

The specific problem I needed to address today was with UniPhi's automated .pdf generation when emailing a document. Windows authentication credentials were not being passed through to the page that renders the pdf attachment when the end user was accessing the application via SSL. The possible solutions provided by a google search were many and varied, several stating that passing through the credentials was unsupported. In the end the solution to the problem was simple - don't pass credentials at all, move the pdf generation to a library rather than calling the asp.net page directly.

It usually pays to sleep on a problem such as this, let the solution come to you.

Reset locked remote desktop

To connect to a server on which "terminal server has exceeded maximum number of allowed connections", run the following command to remotely connect then reset the non active connections:
start | run - mstsc -v:0.0.0.0 /f -console

Restoring databases to Server 2005

Whilst attempting to restore a database backup to SQL Server 2005, I encountered a "restore failed" error due to "the file or filegroup cannot be selected for this operation". After some trawling of the Net, I found the solution.

There is an option in the Restore window to copy the script generated to the clipboard. Cancel out and paste the script into a New Query. Delete the two "FILE = " options from the line then execute the script. Bingo, you have a newly restored database.

Coming up for air, UniPhi 3.0 released

It has been a while between UniPhi blog posts, however the 3.0 release of UniPhi is now complete and deployed with existing clients, so far the feedback has been very positive.

Some of the key new features include:

• Exporting UniPhi documents to pdf
• Cost Management
• Procurement Management
• Improved rich text editor

Of the four major additions and improvements, the pdf rendering of UniPhi documents is the most interesting from a technical perspective. We are utilising XSL Formal Objects as a means of converting the XHTML output from the UniPhi document management system into a format which can then be passed through a processor to generate almost any format desired, PDF was obviously the first one we looked at, utilising third party library from Altsoft.

Writing the XSL transformations was completely new to me from a personal perspective, a new challenge is always a welcome addition to any software project and we are very pleased with the results.

Upgrading MS Project 2002 Standard to MS Project 2003

A new issue has arisen in the integration of MS Project into UniPhi. Extra information is stored in MS Project 2003 Standard and Professional. This extra information requires changes to the database structure. This was not a problem initially as the original version of MS Project 2003 updated the table structure upon saving the first 2003 version into the database. However, this application is already onto its second service pack and in these patches is the elimination of this update functionality. Microsoft now supplies a SQL patch to update the database with the new fields and the one new table required for the application to run in 2003. Versions older than 2003 still function in the updated database structure and hence, we have included this new database design in the standard UniPhi 2.4 deployment.

Service pack 2 for MS Project 2003 (which includes the bug fixes of service pack 1) can be found here.

The SQL Script that updates the database can be downloaded here

Floating point error in SQL Server 2000 service pack 3a for MS Project 2000

After significant testing I have come up with the following information relating to the floating point error we have been receiving.

The error is created when data in the timephased data table is extended to many decimal places. However, it is not an error that will occur for all timephased records that have large numbers of decimal places.
The error is created when using MS Project 2000 (either original or SP1 versions) and the data is saved to SQL Server 2000 service pack 3a or before.
The error is corrected if opened by MS Project 2002 and saved BEFORE being corrupted (i.e. before saving it in MS Project 2000).
The error does not occur if the file is not corrupted and is being saved by MS Project 2000 into SQL Server 2000 service pack 4.
When the error occurs, MS Project does a partial write of the MS Project file and will start to save ok, appearing to be ok to the end user. However, data will have been lost in the execution and hence the recommendations below should be followed.
I believe that once all new files are created on the SQL Server 2000 service pack 4 database, the error will no longer occur. However, any files that have transitioned across from service pack 3a to service pack 4 have the potential for the error to occur.

For systems transitioning from Service Pack 3a to 4 I would recommend the following risk mitigation:

Open up all the project plans using a version greater than MS Project 2000 (i.e. MS Project 2002 or MS Project 2003).
Save the files
Re-map the files to their appropriate projects in UniPhi

If the error occurs after this, follow the steps below:

Delete the file in the live UniPhi database
Restore the UniPhi database as a new "temp" database.
Open up the offending file in a version greater than MS Project 2000 (i.e. MS Project 2002 or MS Project 2003)
Save the file
Save the file into the live UniPhi database
Remove the temp database.