By Tom Kellen

Happy 2010 to one and all!  Since this year’s focus for the PDUs2Go “Special Editions” is “INNOVATION to IMPLEMENTATION” I thought I would mention a couple of web sites I look to for information on Innovation.

As you can probably tell, I am a total geek, and as such I love my techie toys.  One site that I keep an eye on to see what new things are coming down the technology pipeline is Engadget.  Here you will find the latest scoop on everything from cell phones & laptops to high definition TV.  While you may or may not find something directly on this site that will help you with managing your projects, I do believe that checking in sometimes and looking at how others are innovating can spark ideas for you.
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By Tom Kellen

One important aspect of project management is meetings and appointments.  As I usually have several projects going at once, I need all the help I can get with remembering where and when I’m supposed to be somewhere.

One of the best tools I found to help with this problem is Google Calendars (GC).  Google Calendars has several different ways to remind you, all of which I find useful.

When you create an event in GC you can edit the event details and there you will find the reminder section.  The first way that GC can remind you is by sending you an e-mail message.  I typically have it send me an e-mail 2 hours before an appointment.
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By Tom Kellen

As Project Managers, we often have to access many different computer and on-line systems every day, and most of those probably have passwords.  As I’m sure you’ve been told by many different IT people, it is important to have a strong password and not to use the same password on all systems.  Since it can be frustrating to try to come up with passwords you can remember but are also tough to hack, I thought I would pass on a couple of hints to make this a bit easier.

To make a password harder to guess, it should contain both upper and lower case letters and numbers and symbols if possible.  One of the easiest tricks is to substitute some characters with numbers or symbols.  Some of the most common are changing any “o” characters with the zero numeral, and L or I with the numeral one.  You can also substitute the /, slash symbol for L’s and combine the forward and backward slashes, /\, to replace an A.  Just these few changes would allow the football fan to use F00tb/\// as a fairly secure password. Other common substitutions are 5 for S and 3 for E (yes, it’s kind of a backwards E).
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