The Integrated Forest Fire Management Project is a technical cooperation project under a bilateral agreement between the Governments of Indonesia and Germany. It is the responsibility of the Ministry of Forestry , implemented by Kanwil Kehutanan and Dinas Kehutanan forest agencies together with the German Agency for Technical Cooperation.
The project began in 1994 and is scheduled to last until the year 2003. With phase II (1997-2000), IFFM is a cooperation project with the German Development Bank.The IFFM research and development concept is supported by the Fire Ecology Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, and Global Fire Monitoring Center (GFMC)
c/o Freiburg University, Germany at http://www.ruf.uni-freiburg.de/fireglobe/
The Lemur Toolkit for Language Modeling and Information Retrieval
Sponsored by the Advanced Research and Development Activity in Information Technology (ARDA) under its Statistical Language Modeling for Information Retrieval Research Program, the Lemur Project has announced the availability of the Lemur Toolkit for Language Modeling and Information Retrieval, version 1.0.
The Lemur Toolkit is designed to help carry out research in areas such as ad hoc and distributed retrieval, cross-language IR, summarization, filtering, and classification. The toolkit supports indexing of large-scale text databases, the construction of simple language models for documents, queries, and more.
The Lemur Project is a collaboration between the Computer Science Department at the University of Massachusetts and the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
The Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Project is a new landmark building in the heart of Norwich, United Kingdom. The Norfold Trust, made up of leading figures from local business, higher education and local government, was formed for this single project. Major contractors included R.G. Carter, May Gurney and Event Communications Ltd. Some facts about the Project:
For more about the Norfolk and Norwich Millenium Project go to:
http://www.theforumnorfolk.com
or email info@theforumnorfolk.com
Some of the most important functions carried out by the1400-person IT team
at a large American energy supply company are run on an application managed
by Timothy Bolwerk and his team of 15 developers. The software runs the IT
department's call center computers and is used to manage the department's
assets, including the annual purchase of more than 9,000 PCs. Since he began
using Mindjet's MindManager project-mapping software, Mr. Bolwerk has seen
marked improvements in his ability to quickly take and distribute meeting
notes, brainstorm project ideas, then put into work breakdown structures,
keep track of multiple project detail and communicate with teams and senior
management.
"My business need is to service my 'customers' within my company's IT department,"
Mr. Bolwerk says. "What I deliver is IT capability. The quality of what I
am able to deliver to my IT customers has gone up with MindManager. I can
spend more time on IT projects, and less on administrative tasks like transcribing
meeting notes, managing project details, and creating reports to send to my
supervisors." [
more ]
Hobart Swan, External Affairs Manager of Mindjet LLC -Visual Thinking writes to the PMFORUM...
I do think you (and any writer) will find our software extremely helpful. It’s a great way to create outlines for writing projects, for example. Most outlining tools are linear> I don’t know about you, but I have no idea at first how something I’m writing will flow. I only know what elements I want in the story. So I use the software to get all my ideas down, then go back later and rearrange and/or add to them to make a coherent structure. You can also use it to create an overview of all the projects you are working on. You can create, for example, a parent map that has links to other maps, each of which has more detailed info on particular projects. If you are trying to figure out where you put something, you search the parent map, and it searches all the linked maps. It’s a good—and very intuitive!!—way to organize tons of data.
Give MindManager a shot when you have a chance! You’ll be surprised how much it can help you think and get organized (I’m not, of course, suggesting that you aren’t. But we can all improve! :>)
Best regards,
Hobart Swan
External Affairs Manager
Mindjet LLC - Visual Thinking
hobart.swan@mindjet.com
Tel. (415) 925-3120 ext. 134
Fax. (415) 925-3110Communicate the way you think ... visually - www.mindjet.com
The mission of the Pew Internet & American Life Project is to be an authoritative source of information of the Web impact on society..
The site's front page features the Project's latest reports. The most recent Project report is how citizens use the Web sites of government agencies and what happens as users gain experience online. The page also features News, a Query of the Moment, and an opportunity to receive their report bulletins. There is a link to a Research Engine which has a drop-down menu of Research/Advocacy and Government information sources. The "Internet Data Dump" contains links to sites with Internet statistics.
Ed Barnicott, PMP
President e3Project Management
What did we really learn from the failure of the Mars Climate Orbiter?
NASA maintains the worlds most aggressive and successful programs for advanced project management (Academy for Program and Project Leadership). As NASA faced increasing costs, budget cuts and reduced public attention following the success of the lunar landing missions, it had to find ways to do more with less. This resulted in an emphasis within APPL known as "Faster, Better, Cheaper".
Project managers recognize immediately the triangle of schedule, quality and cost in the "Faster, Better, Cheaper" emphasis, and NASA's project managers were no different. As project managers everywhere have experienced, there was tremendous pressure on the "Better " side of the triangle. Mission quality suffered as a result of efforts to deliver on-time and within budget, finally resulting in the loss of a $125 million space craft and its promised science benefits.
The panel appointed to study the failure of the Mars Climate Orbiter delivered their findings in March 2000. At the core of the panel’s findings was the following:
"The Board found that the Mars Surveyor Program, agreed to significant cuts in monetary and personnel resources available to support the Mars Climate Orbiter mission, as compared to previous projects. More importantly, the project failed to introduce sufficient discipline in the process used to develop, validate and operate the spacecraft; nor did it adequately instill a mission success culture that would shore up the risk introduced by these cuts. These process and project leadership deficiencies introduced sufficient risk to compromise mission success to the point of mission failure."
The key recommendation of this elite panel was elegant in its simplicity:
"Building upon the lessons learned from the Mars Climate Orbiter and a review of seven other failure investigation board results, this second report puts forth a new vision for NASA programs and projects - one that will improve mission success within the context of the "Faster, Better, Cheaper" paradigm. This vision, Mission Success First, entails a new NASA culture and new methods of managing projects. To proceed with this culture shift, mission success must become the highest priority at all levels of the program/project and the institutional organization. All individuals should feel ownership and accountability, not only for their own work, but for the success of the entire mission."
The point? Nothing succeeds like success. Nothing succeeds but success. With all the pressure that we receive to deliver projects on-time and within budget, we can never forget that the thing we are charged to deliver is success. All of the tools and skills that we can bring to bear to define, plan, execute and manage projects have one fundamental goal: to increase the likelihood that the projects we manage will succeed. Success in project management must ultimately be measured by how well the projects we manage fulfill the expectations and business requirements of our stakeholders and business sponsors.
Ed Barnicott, PMP
President e3
Project Management
103 Chipping Way, Suite 8
Louisville, Kentucky 40222
(502) 551-2669
ebarnicott@insightbb.com
Editors Note:
Want to read more? A number of reports are available from the NASA APPL web on the matter of Lessons Learned. These Reports are in PDF format and can be dowloaded directly from the NASA web.
Go to the APPL web for a full text copy of the "Mars Program Independent Assessment Team's Summary Report at http://www.nasaappl.com/