Blog

Google Classroom is a great way for teachers to organise, track and mark assignments. It’s free to use - either for personal use outside of school or, if you’re a teacher, in school (or HE). Anyone who wants to use it at work needs to get their school to sign up. Again, it costs nothing so it shouldn’t be too difficult to persuade your school to let you try it out, even as a pilot.

This is one way you can use the cumulative sales total measure I described in the previous post. I’ve used a bar chart visual to show how the total value of course enquiries, enrolments and lost opportunities change over time.

This is the DAX for the course enquiries version of the measure and my breakdown of how it works is here:

This is a nice example of how to create a measure in Power BI to calculate running or cumulative totals. It’s a refinement of a post I did on the SkillsLogic blog about using calculated columns to calculate running totals. In this example I’ve gone a step further used a measure - so the running totals change when the user applies filters to the report.

Generating leads is the hardest thing you’ve got to do when you run a software business - harder than writing software, managing tricky clients or even making the sale.

The good news is that there are some specific things you can that actually do work.

Waterfall and agile are two different ways organising and managing software development projects. They tend to be presented as opposites - you either choose one or the other - but in reality it usually makes sense not to be too purist and instead go for a hybrid approach that takes the best from each.

What are the differences between the two approaches? In waterfall:

• A lot of planning, requirements capture and solution design happens up front.

Software as a Service has become the standard way to deliver business software to end users - solutions that are usually externally hosted, web based and sold on a subscription basis.

The appeal of SaaS to the software developer is that you don’t have to worry about installing software at a client’s site. And even better, you might not have to visit the client to make the sale. Most SaaS solutions are also multi-tenancy, so you only have to support one installed application.

What are the most common mistakes that new project managers make? Here are some that we come across when we’re asked to help out on projects that have got into difficulty.

You should start every project with a project kick off meeting. Get the team in a room and walk them through the project. The meeting’s important - maybe the most important you’ll do on the project - because it sets the tone, it gives you opportunity to really explain the business case and you can walk people through the plan. You want the whole team onboard and that first meeting is where you tell people how they fit into the big picture.

Do you want to develop and sell software? We suggest you think about how you’ll market and sell your application before you start to write any code. Don’t fall into the “build it and they’ll come” trap and don’t underestimate how difficult it is to take your product to market.

Projects with external partner organisations are a feature of some sectors. In the charity world for example, it’s not uncommon for organisation to get together and bid for new project funding.

Projects with external partners can be challenging because each organisation has its own agenda, priorities and business processes. Senior staff in each organisation know the background to the project and understand the business case but the operational staff who you’ll need to work with the deliver the project can be more preoccupied with their day to day work. It can be difficult to get people to engage with the project, particularly when deadlines are slipping and an extra push is required to get things over the line.