It was 2 weeks ago when I decided to create this blog.  I’ve thought about getting some of my ideas and practices out there for a while, but I never felt like writing a book, though I was urged by a good friend of mine, and the idea of submitting articles to magazines never appealed to me.

The motivation came a little over 2 weeks ago when I was researching information on project management on the web.  The department I’m currently working in has been holding meetings on things we can do to improve the practices in the department.  While I have ideas, I thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to take a look at what others are doing. 

That’s when I stumbled upon an article on a blog authored by Scott Sehlhorst.  The article is titled “Project Dashboard Icons.”   I liked it; it described an interesting metaphor for representing project status, and I like the idea of providing 2 indicators: one for current conditions and the other for future conditions.  As it peeked my interest, I began to read more articles, and posted a comment to one.

Scott replied back, and we had a short email conversation.  I told Scott about how his site inspired me to begin creating my own blog as I found his work interesting and insightful, and he gave me all sorts of helpful hints for creating this blog that I’m sure saved me a great deal of time and aggravation.   The one key recommendation he gave me was to create my own domain as soon as possible and to begin blogging from there, so that’s what I did. 

Thank you Scott.  I recommend you give Scott a visit at his blog.  It can be found at http://tynerblain.com/blog/  He’s a nice guy, and he has some good interesting and helpful perspectives on software project management.

I’ve been working mostly on setting up the site: creating a domain, setting up with a hosting service, and installing and configuring wordpress.  It’s really incredible how easy everything is to get started on this project.   I’m looking to customize the theme to give the site a unique look, and I continue to research plugins to go live with the right set of features.

When I thought I should begin blogging on software management, I was of the mind that I would find it easy to bloviate on this topic as I have a lot of opinions on the subject, but for some reason I was having trouble identifying a good first topic to expound upon.   It’s not that I had a loss for topics, I just wasn’t finding that right first idea to right about. 

Well, as often is the case, it happened today.  While riding into work this morning on the train, I had one of those days where the ideas were popping into my head from out of the blue.  As I was sitting reading a Barron’s article, the idea just hit me, and new ones were firing one after the other all day long.  I think I have about 3 months of material to write about.

I decided the first topic I will write about is Quality.  I’m passionate about it, and the software industry has a great deal of opportunity to grow in this area.  I hope to publish it this Monday.