PRINCE2 and Project Management, Presentations, Politics, and Gaming

[tcpip]

No less than three days this week will spent on PRINCE2, sponsored by the company as part of the glacial moves towards project orientation. Hopefully it will go better than my recent Project Management results which were, surprisingly, somewhat below what I received for Advanced Project Management. Out of the two main project management methodologies I have come to be more supportive of PMBOK over PRINCE2, although they are not entirely incompatible. Whilist latter is very precise on procedures that should be followed, it provides a set solution, rather than an adaptable toolkit, which is what PMBOK gives. I would certainly recommend PRINCE2 for smaller organisations and smaller projects, just in the same way I would recommend Gannt charts. However for large and complex projects I would increasingly lean towards the systems engineering approach used by PMBOK and PERT charts.

Have given two presentations in recent days. The first was at Linux Users of Victoria on Multicore Computing and Linux (plus notes). Newcomer to the LUV committee, Les Kitchen followed up with an excellent discussion on the early days of Linux. The second presentation was at the Unitarian Philosophy Forum on Ex nihilo, nihil fit, the debate on why existence exists in the first place; one could suggest a pretty important cosmological issue.

It's been a pretty busy time politically as well. I've submitted an urgency motion to the upcoming Victorian Labor State conference, calling for a declassification of Federal government documents from Timor-Leste in the 1970s, which is currently being blocked. Saturday week I have organised a meeting of the Isocracy Network, exploring the concept of the Responsibility to Protect, with a speaker from the United Nations Association of Victoria.

My usual past-time has had some enjoyable moments of late. Visited ser_pounce and hathalla yesterday and played In The Year of the Dragon. We are currently working our way through the Monty Python cheese sketch, although some might be difficult. On Thursday finished the first scenario of the quite trippy Tournament of Dreams for Pendragon.

Comments

[fluffyblanket.livejournal.com]

I don't want to appear an Australiaphobic racist but how typical is your personal highly intellectual lifestyle ? It seem that some of Australia resembles Periclean Athens at its Zenith , while this is the Barry McKenziish impression we in the East(?) have of some of it -
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/101east/2012/04/20124307543489111.html
Since only the coastal strip is heavily populated , the proportion of revolutionary academics must be incredibly high ...
: D

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Typical? Not really by any stretch of the imagination. We're nowhere near a Periclean Athens. Despite a gradual increase in the proportion of people in the country with tertiary qualifications, the respect for public intellectuals etc. is still very low.

One only has to look at the massive influence of tabloid newspapers and trash magazines as sad evidence.

[fluffyblanket.livejournal.com]

Re your final paragraph - at least the even the British Tories have given the Murdochs their comeuppances !

[fluffyblanket.livejournal.com]

I've just discovered this -
http://www.lust-for-life.org/Lust-For-Life/LeftWingFascismASenileDisorder/LeftWingFascismASenileDisorder.htm
Brilliant !

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Well, if it adds to a few more hundred people a month reading that article, I really can't complain :)

[fluffyblanket.livejournal.com]

i expect you know the etymological derivation of the word "fascism" . "Fasces" in Latin referred to the bundle of rods carried before an ancient Roman magistrate as a symbol of his authority .

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Yes, it the bundle represented the strength of the collective. But as we see, who wields the collective force of the State?