Excel Project Tracker with Task Weighting

Have you ever tried to use Excel to track the progress of a project? How did you do it? Did it work out OK? Or was it a huge mess, one that barely succeeded in reporting the status of the project?

Often, before people start using Excel, they imagine a piece of paper that might represent what they want to accomplish. Then, they set about to create that piece of paper using Excel. But this approach takes no advantage of Excel’s power to automate, simplify, and beautify.  They end up with something too labor-intensive, error-prone and ineffective.

I’d like to show you why Excel is truly outstanding for tracking projects. It’s also completely fantastic at creating dashboards, doing analysis, and at communicating complex concepts to non-technical audiences. But you have to know how to use it properly. I know you can do this.  Follow along with me to learn what you need to know about Excel.

This is the second article in my “Excel BTS Project Tracker” series.  In this series, I’m creating a completely functional project tracker using Microsoft Excel.  With each new article in the series, I enhance the previous version of the Tracker and teach you a couple of new Excel techniques at the same time. Continue reading “Excel Project Tracker with Task Weighting”

Excel Project Tracker (with the Coolest Excel Function Ever!)

One of the most common projects in Mobile Telecoms is to complete a checklist of tasks for each BTS in a group.  In this series of blog posts, I’ll show you how to create an effective Tracker for this type of project using Excel.  If you work with Excel, and especially if you are a Technical Manager, this series is written for you.

You’ll not only get a reusable project Tracker, but also some new Excel skills to save your time, reduce your workload, and maybe even get recognized for the quality of your work.  You’ll use these techniques again and again.

With this first post, I’ll create a complete project tracker.   I want to show you how easy it is to do using Excel.  This will be a fully functional project Tracker, which you can use immediately. Continue reading “Excel Project Tracker (with the Coolest Excel Function Ever!)”

A Technologist Tackles Digital Marketing

I want to describe my experience trying to learn Digital Marketing, also known as Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, Email Marketing.  These terms are not 100% interchangeable. But I hope by listing them all it puts us, you and me, on the same page for this article.  Fundamentally, it’s about finding an audience and offering them things of value.

monthly_traffic_reportAs a Technologist, I’ve always thought I ought to be able to make money on the Internet.  After all, I understand and actually use many of the technologies underpinning the Internet and World Wide Web.  So making money should be a breeze, right?  But I was wrong!

I first tried making Internet millions when I set up a blog in 2007.  I’ve maintained that blog off and on over the years, and this, Bangkok Beach Telecom, is the latest incarnation.  On several occasions over the years, I actively tried to monetize the blog with ads.  But I never made more than a few dollars in a month.  Mostly, that was because I never achieved any significant volume of traffic.  Not many people visited my blog. Continue reading “A Technologist Tackles Digital Marketing”

July 2017 – Writing Roundup

I spent much of July doing software development.  Mostly, I worked on the LinkedIn Tip of the Day application, and also my book.

Both these efforts cut down on the time I had for writing articles.   I plan to publish more articles this month.  As always, if there is a particular topic you would like write about, let me know in the comments or visit my survey on Google docs,

What would you like me to write about?

Thanks for reading! Continue reading “July 2017 – Writing Roundup”

Web Development Tools for the Well-Rounded Technologist

I’m a big fan of the Perl programming language.  A very long time ago, before computers became ubiquitous, I had a technical job which depended on computers.  Back then, computers typically were housed on a raised floor behind glass walls, and only the anointed elite actually worked ON the computers. But in my job, we had access to an AT&T 3B20 computer running UNIX. Our System Administrator was a pretty switched on guy and when I ask him to help me learn UNIX he was excited to have a pupil. I was totally jazzed to have a teacher.

The work environment was a Network Operations Center (NOC) for the telephone company. We monitoring telephone switches, which allowed us to experiment and play around to automate small tasks.  Our NOC monitored dozens of telephone switches, all of them writing their log messages into the 3B20.  Parsing those log files and creating reports was how I first learned to program using the Bourne Shell, sh. Continue reading “Web Development Tools for the Well-Rounded Technologist”